Big Bird's Adventures

As I begin to add some hiking miles to my legs for my upcoming High Uintas Wilderness backpacking trip, my trusty hiking friend Jed proposed a loop in Minnewaska State Park. For those in ignorance this is a beautiful NY State Park just west of New Paltz, and is home to “The Gunks” aka The Shawangunk Mountains. An incredible natural beauty rich in Geology, and fortunately protected many moons in the past by the Mohonk Preserve and the Mohonk Mountain House. What keeps the park going, financially, is that it is very difficult to avoid a paid parking spot as most of the access is paid, and the street parking has been eliminated. There is something for everyone here. If easy is what you want, then the miles of Carriage Trails are for you. In the Summer months they’re also pretty sunny, but in the Winter months they’re groomed for some of the best cross-country skiing on the East Coast. In addition the Carriage Trails are open to cyclists, where a gravel bike works best, and a road bike with at least 28’s would work, and finally is easy for a Mountain Bike, but whatever your choice of transport is, miles and miles of Carriage Trails provide for a great day in the saddle. Scattered around are the various “Footpaths” that allow for and produce a much different hiking experience.

Jed laid out this hike as a mostly footpath experience because 1) we like fewer people on the trail with us, and 2) we like even fewer bikes on the trail with us. Ha! Out of the parking area he started on Mossy Glen Footpath which is a 1.7 mile path that parallels the lower carriage trail but is filled with wonderful eye candy along Peter’s Kill as the next image displays in a multi-shot composite panorama.

Along the entire trail you are either on slabs of smooth rock or back in the pines and rhodo where the “Moss” and mainly the “Roots” lie. It may be the rootiest (new word) 1 mile I have ever hiked. We weren’t long in one of these root sections when we came across a 4 foot black snake crossing the trail.

I was a little too slow to catch it across the entire trail, and only have it here slithering off the trail. If anything, I had thought we might run into at least one rattle snake up in the rocks, but that never came to pass, or perhaps it is safer to say, that we never got close enough to one, for it to alert us of its presence. Perhaps another time.

Fungus. There was a lot of moss and fungus throughout the entire hike, however Mossy Glen probably gave us the greatest variety considering so much of it was prime fungus habitat. I haven’t a clue what mushrooms are edible and which ones are not, so I simply treat them all as if they are not, and I simply love them for their form and texture in the woods and stop to grab shots of them that make them larger than they are.

One highlight of the hike was Rainbow Falls (1st image on this page). First highlight is it was flowing, and not just a trickle either. It wasn’t a Spring thaw flow, but recent rains were working their way down the watershed, and that produced images worth visiting. The hike took us right past it, so it was hit or miss if there would be water, but since we came upon it from up high, we could already hear it before we climbed down to bear witness. We actually had the falls to ourselves for quite a while until a group of 13 Estrogen-Based life forms hiked in from the carriage trail access. While I took my own “drone” shots of them, I took possession of two of their iPhone cameras to capture images of them at the falls. Happy they were, and we left.

While we had the falls to ourselves I snapped a 19 image composite to assemble later, as well as a few “live” iphone images taken in a way such that I would be able to turn each of them into a “Long Exposure” thus turning the still water into flow images. Then later at home I would attempt to stitch those together into a vertical panorama showing the flow rather than still water. That experiment was actually successful, and is the image at the top of the page.

From Rainbow we continued on the SRT (Shawangunk Ridge Trail) which took us further South and East to overlooks of Lake Awosting. What seemed like a nice lunch spot was left to others while we made our way to Castle Point where Jed promised me a beautiful view, and a challenging wall to climb. “If we’re lucky there will be some people lunching there as well, and when our heads appear from the edge of the cliff, they will be surprised wondering “Where in the heck did you come from?” It played out exactly like that, but not before Jed got his little bit of hiking humor drama to play out at my expense. There was a section of the SRT where Jed said “It’s your turn to lead” which I knew meant something, I just wasn’t quite sure what. I have been to the Gunks before and I know that there are some real challenging sections where the trail disappears into the rocks, and that is exactly what Jed was leading me, or letting me lead myself, into. To be honest it was so dark, a head lamp would have been useful, but after Jed had his laugh, I let him lead through, and I followed by the light on my phone. Not a great light. The hole got very tight, and I almost took of my daypack, but I was able to kneel enough and squeeze through, however I was stymied for a bit by a 3 foot wall that took some time to find the right foot and hand holds to get myself over it. Once up, we emerged out the other end. From there it was a lot of climbing to Castle Point, which may be the highest point in that section of Minnewaska.

After lunch it was back onto the SRT, also known in that section as Blueberry Run, which we followed for an hour as it wound it’s way basically down in elevation and North in direction back towards the car park. We eventually hooked up with Mossy Glen Trail again, and hiked out the same path we hiked in on.

Back at the car, we both looked at each other with weary faces uttering that we were both tired. That was not an easy hike on top of a nearly 2 hour drive to get there, which of course meant 2 hours or more to get home. All worth it as both of us need some rigor in our legs as we will be flying to Utah in 2 weeks to spend 8 days in the High Uintas Wilderness.

Relive ‘Minnewaska 2023’

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Just a note. Look at the top image and see if you see a profile that I don’t like seeing.

Tagged: Hiking, I Love NY, Minnewaska