Mountains Under Foot

From Hazard’s notes:
Day 76: July 24, 2009
Travel:
From: NY 17A (and the Mayor’s place), NY
To: West Mountain Shelter, NY
Beginning: 8:30am
Ending: 9:15pm
Number of miles hiked:
a) Trail – 24.8
b) other – .6 to shelter
c) AT Mile Marker – 1386.7 cumulative
Weather:
AM: Sunny and nice all day
PM: Clouds rolled in and brought a really nasty thunderstorm after 9pm.
People: Said goodbye to Dick and crew, saw Lion King, trail magic sponsored by Campmor. I talked to Cat!
Animals: Big rattlesnake.
Money: $0, $1318 cumulative.
Notes of the day:
AM: Another early morning with a great breakfast. We got ourselves prepared for our ride back to the trail and then jumped on the computer to check out hostels in NYC. Crocstar sadly didn’t have any interest in going into the city. We had a short delay due to Spoon temporarily misplacing his cash & cards. When we hit the trail Spoon also was feeling pain in his ankle, so we took things slow and easy. He started to feel a lot better and got ahead of me so it was a good time to give Cat a call. We talked for about an hour up and over some mountains and I found a rattlesnake which I had to be told not play with it. I got off the phone just before Highway 17 and where we were told some trail magic would be going down provided by Campmor.

PM: As I strolled down the road looking for everyone, a cacophony of human-made bird sounds warned me to walk down the gravel road to the party. I was greeted by Lion King, Butch, and crew and was handed a cold soda, candy, an apple, and a new pair of Darn Tough socks by the guy from Campmor. We all joked around and had a good time…for a long time. Spoon and I didn’t leave until around 3pm and Crocstar had left about an hour before that. The next section of trail took us up and over a ton of ridges as we headed east against the grain of the mountains. There was one section called the Lemon Squeezer where we dropped down in between two tightly spaced rocks and had to shimmy our way past them and then climb on top of a rock ledge afterwards. This ledge required us to toss our poles up and over the rock and climb up hand-over-hand. I ended up learning that Crocstar had tossed his whole pack over to get across the obstacle. So we mini-rollercoastered all afternoon and into the evening. West Mountain Shelter is listed as having no water, so to be safe I filled my Nalgene and Spoon pumped water for our reservoirs two miles from the shelter at a good source. Then we proceeded to hit water source after source all the way to the shelter up until about .2 miles from the shelter. That last section was not easy and I had to do it with almost 4 liters of water in my pack. But when we got to the shelter there was only Croc sitting outside taking a smoke so it felt good to not have to fight for a spot. Shortly afterwards, Stewball came in looking for space inside the shelter because it sounded like a storm was coming. Now the unique thing about this shelter is it’s unobstructed view of the Hudson river and on clear days NYC. That storm did come and we watched lightning strike the cities in front of us for a long while. We joked that when we got to NYC that it would just be smoldering ash.