Big Bird's Adventures

I would like to add a new additional definition for the word “Knucklehead”:
knucklehead /ˈnʌkəlˌhɛd/ noun
Any person (usually male) who, without any real knowledge of the actual route, thinks they can bushwhack from Cornell to Friday in the Catskills with a full backpack.

First let me say that I am glad it was just Jed and me. There are actually multiple reasons for this gladness, but the main one, is that at just the two of us, we could agree easily and though there was a lot of “suck” to embrace, the rewards were enough for us to walk away saying, “Though we failed in our plan, we still had a good time!”.

Now, let me say this. It is probably easier to follow where people have trod before when there is snow on the ground, because people do do this, and in the colder months too, but at least you can tell where they walked, assuming it didn’t just snow 12 fresh inches of snow. Jed and I saw that last March when we did Peekamoose and Table, finding the “offshoot” trail between Table and Peekamoose, and it looked to have been covered by many a person. In the last week of May with all the snow gone, there was no clear entry point. I had a marker that was fairly close to a nice vista just shy of the Cornell summit, and when I looked it wasn’t inviting. Jed had a mark further along, and then at the top of Cornell, we mistook a side trail for another vista as the offshoot, but even though there were some tendrils that went out that started with promise, they all petered out and it was that tightly knit conifer wall again.

If we had had the two ladies who initially showed an interest in joining us along, I would have felt really bad for having encouraged them to come along on a first adventure with us, without really knowing what the fuck we were doing. Sure, it sounds easy. “You can see on the map that if you stay on the ridge, then each saddle is maybe 300′ so as long as you walk in the right direction, which isn’t a problem with GPS enabled devices, it can be done”. Places where the wind blows, its hard for trees to get tall. They fall over, opening the canopy for a lot of little trees to fill the void. So nothing gets very tall, and the smaller the trees are, the more of them that can fit in a confined space. It’s not like lower down where the pines get to be really tall and there is a large open and protected area below them. That is what Friday is like, and since it was the first of the 4 bushwhack peaks, we wasted 30-45 minutes just trying to get started, and the last thing we wanted was to get stuck in there.

The other “I am glad” reason is that the 3 others that were going to join were going to drive up late Friday and hike in before the sun set. While as a plan, that sounded fine, and to be honest, the fact that the tallest mountain in the Catskills stood between the parking area and our campsite, the descent off Slide was really quite treacherous, and if they arrived late, I wouldn’t want to think about people coming down Slide by headlamp. The approach up Slide from the West was really very nice and extremely forgiving, but the East side descent had long steep ladders, and at least 3 walls, one of which required a traverse to get down. No. I am glad not to have that on my conscious.

This all began in March this year when Jed, Mike and I drove up to the Peekamoose Trailhead and spent the day knocking out Peekamoose and Table. While Paul was invited, he had done Breakneck Ridge the day prior with another group, one of whom announced that she was doing Peekamoose the next day. Paul told Denise and us that we would both be on the mountains together, but we each took the mountain on our own schedule, and we did eventually meet up between the two summits. Of course, Paul had told me Denise’s name was Linda (or something like that) and that she wore big Purple sunglasses, so when we came across a person with giant Pink sunglasses, I knew it was her, and her name was Denise. We crossed paths again later because Denise is young and fast and we were old and slow.

Also along the way we ran into a day hiker who was knocking out 7 of the 3500+ peaks, and he had come in from the 4 peaks that needed a bushwhack, so when we got to that point along the trail where the bushwhack went into the woods, there it was, pretty well trodden and easy to follow. So, upon our return, I thought maybe it might be a nice idea to try and knock out the 9 peaks, Slide, Cornell, Wittenberg, Friday, Balsam, Lone, Rocky, Peekamoose, and Table in one 19 mile loop day hike. We could hike in from the Denning Trailhead to the large group of campsites down along the Neversink at the base of Table, and then the idea would have been to just get up and go. A dawn start, and eat along the way, and knock them all out. I sent out an invite to all my hiking friends. No, you didn’t have to do the loop. You could just have a usual lazy morning, and then hike up Table and meet us at Peekamoose late in the afternoon and then we all finish up by hiking back down to the camp and then out on Sunday. Great idea!

I think it was Paul who said “Maybe we could do it as a 3 day backpacking trip”. Then no day would be particularly hard/long, I mean, we are talking 19 miles for a bunch of people where the average age is 63, and though we are all reasonable fit individuals, none of us can easily knock out a 19 mile day with that kind of elevation. When all my Virginia friends bowed out of the idea, then I re-formulated it into a 3 day backpacking trip with the first night in a set of sites just up the saddle between Slide and Cornell. Day 2 would still be a hard day, but with Slide out of the way, the thought was to get to the Table Mountain shelter for the second night and hopefully a clear sunset. Ambitious folks could arise before dawn and hike back to Peekamoose for the Sunrise before we eventually descended off Table and finished back at Denning Trailhead.

With my daughter’s wedding in early/mid May, I threw out some possible dates to do this in April while there was still snow on the ground, because I felt that it would be easier to follow the unmarked trail with the snow, and snow covers a lot of hidden unevenness, and is actually pretty nice to walk on if you aren’t post-holing. The plan was to agree on those two weekends, and then if the weather looked promising on Monday, then initiate the partial commit, and if the weather held by Thursday, then make the go/no-go call Thursday night. The second of those two initial weekends was the weekend prior to my departure for Spain.

The first weekend chosen came with promise, but deteriorated throughout the week as the date approached and we cancelled. I think at that point it was Jed, Me, Paul, and I was keeping Denise in the loop. As the second weekend approached, I realized that it probably wasn’t wise for me to take in such an adventure the weekend before leaving the country, as 1) I had a lot to do still, and 2) I had a lot to do. So, I went back to my group and looked at the first weekend in June, and proposed that, because who wants to be up on the roads during Memorial Day weekend? Not me. However Paul asked to move it up a weekend because he wanted to go, and he and his wife were scheduled for their own Spain trip that first weekend of the June. Also by this time Paul and Denise got me added to a WhatsApp hiking group and I put an invitation out there for my trip, and there was a nibble from two members. So, before I left for Spain, we decided that Memorial Day weekend was it and I decided that it was a Friday in, Sunday out trip, and that meant that if you didn’t take the full day off Friday, then even if you worked a half day, and drove up you would have to be on the trail by 4-4:30 latest to make it into camp before dark.

My France and Spain trip came and went, and the earliest weather predictions for Memorial Day weekend starting Friday were fantastic. By this time my two nibbles from the hiking group decided that they would do the Devil’s Path with an effort being led by another member of that group, and Paul decided that for the same reason I didn’t go the week prior to my Spanish trip, he wasn’t going to go either, leaving just Jed and myself. As forecasted, the weather was playing out beautifully, and on Friday morning at 8am I picked up Jed for a fairly straight forward drive to Denning Trailhead where we found plenty of open parking. It was a pleasant upper 70’s low 80’s day with the sun shining and we hit the trail around 11:30 in the am. The elevation profile says this is the easier/easiest approach to Slide, and that was correct. It was long, at 4+ miles but is was very gradual indeed. The trail register showed one group from Denning that was in the day prior for 3-4 days, but everyone else were day hikers, so when we got to the top of Slide and found 3 young men with backpacks, lounging in the Sun, Jed got an itch in his pants to get off Slide and be the first to claim a decent camp site, so we didn’t stop to lounge ourselves, and down slide we went.

That was when we came across the features on Slide that reminded me of some of the hard features on The Devil’s Path, and I was then very glad, that no one in my group was coming in later as I just didn’t think this was a good low light descent option. Anyway, we passed the marked Spring, because again, we wanted to get a campsite first, and though the young lads were following us down, they did stop for water, and so we reached the campsites first, and basically just took the first one we found as it was sufficient for us. We set up our tents, and got everything laid out when the 3 young men walked in. I hadn’t explored further, but I offered up anywhere they could pitch their tent if they wanted to hang with us. They decided to look for their own site and were in fact rewarded with a very nice site of their own.

We needed water, so we hiked back to bottom of the saddle, and then started to bushwhack down to the upper reaches of the Neversink. After dropping a couple hundred feet, we could see water, and another 100 feet there were pools large enough to draw water from. I looked further down, but that high up the water disappears underground, and reappears further downhill, and we both thought we had descended far enough, so we gathered all the water we would need for dinner and breakfast, as well as to provision ourselves for the next day’s hike, and we hiked back to camp. Having skipped lunch, we were both famished, so we sat down to boil up the necessary water for our meals. Jed was having Lasagna, while I was trying the Noman Hungarian Goulash. I was also trying something for the first time. Single serving dinner. I had always eaten double serving dinners in the past as a single meal, and last Summer I felt like I was just forcing myself to finish them, so this time I was going try single serving. If it works, then I can halve the weight for that portion of my food.

We hadn’t started a fire, and the bugs were pretty bad. I sprayed some deet on my hat, and shirt, and some parts of my exposed skin, but they still fly around, and with no deet in my eyes, and ears, that is where they went. We had a nice fire ring, but I just wasn’t up for gathering wood. Until I walked over to see how the young fellas were doing. They had just gotten their fire started, and so I sat down the chat and while I was sitting there I realized, that the bugs weren’t bugging me any longer. I stayed awhile longer and then retreated back to my own site, where I got out my fire starter and started my own fire. There was actually a lot of wood lying around, and we had just gotten the fire going when Ashley walked into camp in the dying light. All she needed was two trees, as she was a hammock camper this trip, and though we chatted a little bit, she found her corner and we had our fire going and this cleared the bugs, and allowed us to hang out well into the evening. I had my Bourbon, Jed hiked in 2 cans of beer, and we discussed our plan for the next day and how well it was going so far, and how we were glad that no one was following us in late.

I slept fairly well all night even though I did get up four times to relieve myself. Soon it was 5 am and I thought I would get up for good and read a little bit and have breakfast, but Jed heard me up, and got up himself, so we breakfasted, and broke down camp and got an early start to the day. Upon leaving we saw that Ashley was up and wished her well, and then as we passed the young men’s camp, there was nothing stirring there. The hike up Cornell wasn’t all that bad. There were some walls to climb, a section with wooden planks, but for the most part it was very traversable. We reached the vista on the side of Cornell that offered up a tremendous view to the North, and then we started looking for the entry point for the bushwhack because at first I was thinking we would hang our food and packs and just take a water bottle over to Wittenberg and back, but we had some discrepancies in just where the entry point was going to be. I felt we had passed it already, though the NYNJTC map said it was ahead, and the trees were thick, and there was no place to throw a rope over a branch. Eventually we confused a vista trail with the trail we were looking for and dropped our extra water, and then carried our packs over to Wittenberg. The only real challenge in that was something called The Cornell Crack. It looked pretty challenging to go down and while Jed proceeded that way, I saw an indication that there was another way down to the left and gave that a go. Eventually I reached a wall with strong root holds, and I used them to go down, not really sure I could go back up that, and then found my way back over to where Jed was still coming down. He did remove his pack to descend. There was another wall but not as bad, and the reward for that work was a tremendous open vista off Wittenberg. A very nice place where Ashley walked in while I was taking my composite shots. This was her breakfast goal, and we chatted a bit more before we turned around to head back to Cornell.

The Cornell Crack was waiting for us, and we both went up the way Jed had come down. It was a remove the pack climb in the end for both of us, but as we were putting ourselves back together, Ashley came up, with a father/son behind her, the son being around 10 or 11. The young lad went up the crack like it was just a normal trail. Of course he didn’t have 20-30 pounds on his back, but he still made it look easy. Ashley made it up as well, telling us that she only planned on going as far as Wittenberg because that is view worth hiking for, and she liked the trail behind her more than the loop around over to Giant Ledge, and if she hurried, she could make a BBQ by 2.

That was when our day changed. Our plans. Shot. We retrieved our water, and then followed the nice trail in, saying things like “Why don’t they just marked this trail?” when we came to a small vista and the trail ended. Suddenly it wasn’t so obvious where to go. The compass told us where Friday was, and there was just a wall of trees, while there was something that headed down and to the left which I investigated, but that seemed to want to descend more in the wrong direction than what our route said we should be following. So we went back up and just decided to find a break in the wall and push forward in the direction of Friday, and see if something opened up. As we angled, we were actually paralleling the trail we hiked up Cornell on, just about 30 yards in, and the thought was we would intersect where Jed thought the entry point would have been. Along the way both of the pieces of clothing I had secured to the outside of my pack had gotten pulled out, and my tent bag was taking a beating. I pushed the clothes inside may pack and eventually we retreated back to the trail where we hiked down to where Jed thought we should go in, and we pushed in again. Without a machete to clear a path, the dead lower limbs of the conifers were tearing us up, and it didn’t seem like it was getting better. That was when we both decided that we had bitten off more than we could chew, and without someone who had done this before, to go on would be a mistake, and so we decided to hike back to the main trail, and back track into the saddle between Slide and Cornell and bushwhack down the Neversink. This is where we got our water the previous night, and Jed kept saying how he recalled that he and Mireille had hiked down this a number of years prior and it seemed a lot easier then. In fact that was how he and Mireille had tackled Friday. So down we went, and though it started out as a mostly Fern covered deciduous walk the further down we hiked the denser the foliage became and it shifted from deciduous to coniferous as we moved from Cornell domain into the Friday domain. The upper reaches of the Neversink were clear and there was flowing water now, so the push was forward and down. The footing wasn’t really all that easy, as it was moss covered uneven rocks, so I am glad I had my trekking poles, as I needed them for stability. As we got further down, I felt like the Neversink had opened enough, that maybe we should just walk down that and see how that played out. It seemed like a good idea until we got down into the places where the water was flowing more, and the blowdowns blocked the path. With a blowdown, it was usually impossible to go over or under and so you had to go around, which meant climbing out of the river bed, up the hill. Once the blowdowns started, they kept coming, and though we were making progress down the Neversink, we felt at some point we should ascend the Friday side and see if the going was better up there. Our blue dot representing us on our digital maps was moving down the Neversink, but we were still far from what was indicated as the end of the unmarked trail that led up the Neversink from below.

Eventually we moved out from the shadow of Friday and into Balsam’s domain and with that more channels of water flowed down off the mountains the Neversink grew. We eventually dropped back into it and managed to get down to the point where the unmarked trail was supposed to exists, even finding some very old fire rings. The rusted can in one, I think dated this one at least 30 years. If there was trail, and I am not saying there was, Jed was saying it was on the S side of the Neversink, while my NYNJTC map seemed to indicate it was on the N side at that point, thought to be honest it seemed like the dashed line crisscrossed the river frequently. We found sections of the river to be passable, and we found sections on each side of the river to be passable and eventually something that could be called a crude trail emerged.

We hit the first holiday campers not long afterwards, they having hiked up a significant portion of the trail because one of the members “knew” there was a nice site way up the trail, and they knew they’d have privacy. One of the dudes thought he met me last year at Huckleberry, but I assured him it was just one of my many kilt wearing doppelgangers. We bade them fair thee well, and from there on down there were many branches of the unmarked trail, but as long as you kept the main channel of the Neversink within earshot, you were going the right direction.

At some point I started to think “Maybe we should start looking for a site”, and on one of those occasions, I stopped to look across the Neversink at a spot that looked very flat, and very accommodating. As I looked, suddenly I heard something from over there and a tattooed young male came into the clearing to shout a greeting across the creek. No he didn’t not shout “Keep moving this is mine!”, rather he was curious where we had come from, and wished us well for the weekend. While we continued on, I never mentioned to Jed that I was keeping an eye open for a spot, and he never said anything to me. Maybe that is why we make such a good team :P. We were anchored now for sure on the S side of the Neversink, and we were about a mile from the main trail when we walked into a clearing and Jed stopped, and looked around and when his gaze brushed past me, I saw the look in his eye that said “I could camp right here!” and I said to him “This looks like a nice place.” and that was that.

There were two ideal tent spots, and what looked like a broken fire ring, and while the main channel of the Neversink was maybe 150 yards to our North, we had passed a Beaver dam up stream of that, and Jed wasn’t keen on taking that water for our needs, but we had a channel only 15 feet away that was flowing and very tannin colored so that was where we got our water, though we had to be careful not to stir up too much from the bottom. We both use the Katadyn Be Free system, and so whether we stirred up the bottom of not, that system easily gave us the safe water we needed.

We were both very tired and sore, and scraped up, and so we decided that we would do a fire, but first we would eat, tolerate the bugs, and then we would set out to the task of building the fire ring back up, and finding enough small tinder to have a manageable fire. When I say “Manageable” I am not referring to the kinds of fires I have with my Virginia crowd, which are usually big campfires. No this was small, never a big log on it, but just enough coals to keep it going, and what was really important, just enough to disperse the bugs. As soon as we lit that fire, and it got a little headway, the bugs were gone. Look, I hate bugs just as much as the next person, and yes they are annoying as fuck. I think we were lucky in that it wasn’t really Mosquito weather/conditions yet, so it was mainly annoying gnats, and some horse flies, maybe even a few black flies. The whole experience has to be taken as a whole, and as a whole the annoyance of the flied were far outdone by the beauty of the forest and our surroundings. With the fire, and now the bugs gone, we could sit and enjoy the rest of the evening until it was time to retire, and we did.

The night went by quickly it seemed, which means that I actually slept in between nature breaks, which there were only 2. Jed was up first in the am, and I joined him, and we set about lazily enjoying our morning, eventually getting camp broken down, and assuring ourselves that we were leaving nothing behind. We set off, and at this point the drainage of the Neversink was quite wide, and you could see the many paths where high water finds its way down the mountain. More campsites presented themselves, some of those with still sleeping campers, until we reached one site which said to me “If I could only get the Virginia crew up here, THIS is a perfect base camp for a weekend of day hiking.” I took a panorama which is geotagged, and I am going to propose just that scenario.

We reached the main trail, turned right, crossed two bridged channels of the Neversink, and soon we were gaining elevation until we intersected the trail we had hiked in from Denning, and out to Denning we went. The lot was full when we got there, a lot of overnight and day hikers in the woods behind us, some of them just starting out. We were out, I checked out, and I had Jed home by Noon.

Yes, Friday kicked me in the groin again, but the weekend was not a failure. How can a weekend in the woods be a failure, hiking with a friend, and basically you just enjoy being in the woods? Nothing like that is ever a failure. Until next time …

Strava
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Tagged: Backpacking, camping friends, Catskill Mountains, Hiking, Travel, Wilderness Camping