Thursday February 18th - Day 5 of travels - Hubbard Lodge trail system, East Mountain and Round Hill Loops - 7.5 miles, about 1374 foot elevation gain

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 path but it was uneven and crusty.  

 As we went farther and farther in, the number of people who had walked on the paths went down and the snow became less crusty so our feet sometimes went through, up past our ankles.  Finally, at about 3.5 miles there was a decaying house and a trail junction.  Our selected route took us uphill steeply on a path that clearly had been walked on by 1 or 2 people at most and it seemed like they went the opposite direction we were going.  Their foot holes were widely spaced and not from today so they were crusty also. We certainly thought about turning around at that point but we'd already covered so much difficult ground it wasn't very appealing to retrace our steps.  The next 2 miles were steep, uphill, in deep nearly unbroken snow and very slow going and exhausting.  It got a little better after those 2 miles with less propensity to crunch through to the deep snow but the trail continued making multiple ascents of little hills and nobs and sporadically being deep and soft again.  The downhill sections were no picnic either.  The crunch hard snow was slippery and not forgiving plus we were increasingly tired.  Still, it was better than the first 2 miles after the house junction.

We somewhat rallied during the last miles, making better time on the less hilly final miles.  It took us 4 hours 40 minutes to cover 7.5 miles, a distance we would normally do in 3 hours 15 minutes.  I'm very thankful we got our safely and that we have mostly appropriate gear for these winter adventures.

We were treated to a miraculous speedy trip back to the hotel despite the increasingly slippery winter conditions.  There were very very few people on the road which was wonderful because I was so tired I really appreciated having 1 part of our day being easy.