Road Trips and Hike Reports

 Brian was away visiting family in Vermont and I wanted to find some time consuming physical activity I could do to stay busy and out of trouble.  I had a Rock City hike on my Alltrails list for a while but hadn't made it to it yet.  I guess there is Rock City state forest and Little Rock City park nearby but I'll blur the two together here because they are nearby and similar.  For what it's worth, I was definitely in Rock City State Forest.  It was a long but enjoyable back roads drive from home but a gate prevented me from driving the last uphill half a mile before the trailhead I linked to above.  I parked at the gate and started hoofing it up the small hill towards the trailhead.  Between the long very lightly traveled dirt road I had already been on and now an even less used road behind a gate, this was more remote than I was really hoping for a solo hike and 5 miles was plenty long for a solo hike, adding another mile walking to and from the tra...

 Today was a gorgeous day. Temps hit the 70's and it was bright but a little overcast.  The forecast for tonight and tomorrow is rain and storms and then after a possible break Saturday, more rain Sunday.  I also have a few hours of work I have to do Sunday afternoon so I asked if I could take off for a few hours mid day today.  I drove I-90 East to get there as quickly as I could and I started my walk very close to noon.  I don't know if I wasn't paying attention to the directions or if there was something weird with the starting point Alltrails sent to Google maps but I ended up parking just on the south side of the river before a 1 lane wooden bridge because I thought that was where the trails started.  Actually it was half a mile or so past the bridge where the road actually ends (or really its blocked by a gate) at a parking lot.  So I added about 1 mile on by doing that.  The Alltrails map I downloaded had some 9 mile loop marked out.  ...

 Neither of were exactly eager to go hike Sunday but the weather was beautiful and well into the 60’s so we couldn’t not go.  I had been wanting to try this system of trails which was written about in the Finger Lakes trail conference magazine I receive.  The brief description only promised plenty of elevation gain and said that the Junebug trail (one of the 3 that made up the 3 sided U of trail that along with a road walk could form a loop) was originally an Eagle Scout project and mentioned the Curtiss air museum being very nearby.  So off we headed to the museum to find the trail head. The Junebug trail started off going through the town’s compost drop-off site and then headed steeply uphill.  The trail crossed the old dirt road several times in rapid succession which Brian thought was dumb since you could sometimes see the next blaze up the road yet the trail routed you on gentler little switchbacks on both sides of the road.  That part soon gave way to...

 Just a quick leg stretcher.  The trails near home were still uncleared and I think it was going to rain that day so I decided to head to a trail I’d done one more time that I knew was pretty well traveled so might be easier walking that those nearer to our house.  The trail was very icy and treacherous in spots but there weren’t many people around and the trail is interesting since it goes through an area that was mined for clay in the late 1800’s.  The spots where they took a lot of clay out have become ponds and the trail is on the site of a very very old narrow gauge railroad from the same era as the clay operations used to make bricks which the trail is named for.  We also walked around the park across the street to beef up the miles a bit.

 This was a beautiful sunny Saturday.  We just needed a quick walk and as I recall the weather was better the further North we could go so we headed up to this park on the shores of Lake Ontario for a quick but snowy walk.

It is and has been snowy around Poughkeepsie.  This was going to be a challenging hike since it was long and has sizable elevation gain.  It ended up being one of the most challenging hikes we've ever done. I chose this trail because it was a bit closer than my original plan, Minnewaska State park which we visited once before.  Also, somebody had commented on Alltrails that this hike was fine in the snow 'if you followed somebody else's tracks'.  We had a bagel at Bagel World then continued down US-9 South to the park. Even the entry trail was tough..  The snow had apparently thawed and frozen so there were deep foot prints that bottomed out in solid ice and then little tall islands of very hard crusty snow. During the entry trail it was totally possible to step on even the smallest tall snowy spots because they were rock hard.  Once we branched off onto the first 'real' trail, it had been traveled somewhat so there were areas with a narrow compacted snow ...