NY AT Day 1 (4/20/25)

Last year Parched and I attempted to hike the AT section through half of New York. We were not successful. My plan was over ambitious and, as quickly became clear, unrealistic. We started at Bear Mountain. Parched made it to the RPH shelter and then went back for the car, while I pushed on to Hosner Mountain Road. This was another mistake on my part. Hosner Mountain Road doesn’t have parking, so it was a dumb place to stop. All of this combined made this year’s hike difficult to plan.

The goal for this year was to clean up all of New York. Parched and I put together a plan where I would drive down on Sunday, hike 25 miles on Monday, and then meet up with Parched afterwards. We would then set up a car spot for the second section (the more southerly section), and hike that on Tuesday through Thursday.

However, you might notice that this entry corresponds to Sunday, not Monday. There’s a good reason for that. I quickly determined that 25 miles was unrealistic, so I realized that I needed to split it up and hike on Sunday as well. Of course, I forgot that Sunday was Easter, so that got me into trouble with Dragonfly. Thankfully, Easter was able to be rescheduled. Not so thankfully, I got sick and missed it anyway. There’s a lot of things I like about my job, but I have gotten four colds this year and I am getting sick of getting sick.

The new plan was to split the 25 mile day into seven miles on Sunday and eighteen miles on Monday. However, I was able to get out really early on Sunday morning, that meant I could push one shelter forward. Effectively, I could make it fourteen miles on Sunday and eleven on Monday.

Of course, Sunday’s hike had to start with cleaning up last year’s problems. I had to park on NY 52, which was 1.5 miles beyond Hosner Mountain Road, hike back to Hosner, and then hike back to NY 52. And that was all before I could start my forward progress. Thankfully it went pretty easily.

In fact, the whole day went pretty smoothly. It was a nice day with the sun shining and good hiking temperatures. The snakes must have thought it was a nice day too, because I saw quite a few of them. 

I came across one of the largest trees that I have ever seen. It was so wide that they built the trail around it. It would take four or five fully grown adults holding hands to get around the circumference of that tree. It was astounding, and I was glad that they left it there when they built the trail.

Early in the hike, I had to cross I-84. There was a road bridge going over it, and I wasn’t thrilled about walking on a shoulder with no place to take cover. It made me long for the pedestrian bridge in Massachusetts over I-90. 

Before lunch, I ran into a friendly older couple, and we chatted a bit. I had run into a few other people on trail, but this couple were the first people who wanted to talk, the wife especially.

I grabbed lunch at Morgan Stewart Shelter. One cool thing about the New York shelters is that they all seem to have little displays of books courtesy of the local library. What a great idea, giving hikers a chance to read real books that they don’t have to carry.

The older couple met up with me again at Morgan Stewart. We got into a discussion about hiking and age. They told me that a lot of their friends can barely even walk to the mailbox. I hope that I never wind up like that.

Later on, I found a cool rock squeeze. This one wasn’t as tight as some others I have gone through, but it was still fun.

Maybe five minutes later, I came to Nuclear Lake. I did some research and discovered that a company that produced nuclear fuel rods was located near the lake and suffered an explosion that contaminated the area with plutonium dust. It has long since been remediated, but concerns linger, and thus camping is not allowed at the lake. The government acquired the land for an AT reroute in 1979. Anyway, that’s how Nuclear Lake came to be.

One crazy thing I have seen a lot of in New York is vines. Seriously, Tarzan or George of the Jungle would be comfortable here. I have seen a bunch of dangling tree branches held by vines. I’m not sure what all the vines are, but I know that having so many dangling limbs is dangerous.

Finally I made it to Telephone Pioneers Shelter for the night. I have no idea where the name came from. I ran into Mint here, another section hiker. He was friendly enough, but we mostly kept to our own business. He was just finishing up a weeklong section through New York and New Jersey.

Bed time tonight was 7:30. I’ll post some flower pictures below. Always remember that you can’t take flight until you spread your wings.