Recent Walks

On July 31st, I walked the usual 5.4 mile loop: Washburn (white) up and over Bull Hill, to Notch (blue) to Brook (red) and Cornish (blue again - apparently they have a limited palette).  Conditions were pretty much ideal.  I saw two instances of a really cool black mushroom of some kind; it looked like embossed leather.

nifty black fungus

they've gotten SERIOUS about people not missing this little detour on the Notch trail

on the subway platform

I was toying with doing another solo walk on Wednesday, the predicted most clement day of my week off, but instead decided to (gasp) be social.  This meant going for a celebratory hot chocolate with friends Wednesday and then walking with a friend on Friday (I hadn't seen her in person since October).

Friday was ... not as clement.  I was feeling a little guilty for choosing an early start time, but it turns out we should have set out even earlier.  Like 2 or 3 hours earlier.  The air was heavy the entire day and we went quite slowly.  We chose to avoid the initial steep ascent of Washburn and ultimately followed a 7.5 mile lollipop route: Cornish (blue) to Brook (red) to Undercliff (yellow) to Washburn (white) up and over Bull Hill, then the traditional descent down through Notch (blue) to Brook (red) to Cornish (blue).  When you add in the 1.6 miles round trip walk to the train station, that's not bad at all!  

We met a fair number of people on the way up – they were all going the other way of course, like the man with seven wives, each carrying seven sacks with seven cats – but once we got to Washburn, we were completely alone.  

we saw several turkey vultures, but I never had my camera ready when they were close!

a bit of haze on the horizon

Then, by the time we started the descent from Bull Hill, we started to encounter some mosquitos.  Increasingly clouds or swarms of them.  We stopped several times to re-apply DEET and citronella, but nevertheless they persisted.  It was unpleasant, although I don't think either of us got bitten.  It was unprecedented in all my years walking the Hudson Highlands trails.

I was quite tired by the end of our walk.  My friend wanted to get some ice water, while I didn't want to miss catching the next train, which was supposed to arrive in 1 to 6 minutes.  So I directly went to the platform and boarded when the train arrived. I was hitting 'send' on some apologetic texts to my friend when, lo and behold, there she was! She'd made it! In between naps on the way home, I checked the weather and saw that the air quality was rated Very Poor, with a recommendation to avoid strenuous exercise.  Oops.