(Top left: view of High Tor and Manhattan skyline from West Mountain. Top right: tree on West Mountain. Middle: West Mountain Shelter from behind. Bottom: West Mountain Shelter one week before from the Timp)
Racing Against Darkness
It's easy to get into trouble in the woods when you are pushing to achieve a goal. This year I've set my sights on hiking all of the marked trails in Harriman Park during the calendar year. I'm getting close to my goal but running out of weekends that I'm free. This past weekend I got back from a trip early Sunday afternoon and tried to squeeze in an ambitious hike before dark.
By now I've hiked most of the easy sections. Often I have to hike quite a ways to get to an interior stretch that I haven't covered before. On this hike, I climbed West Mountain on the Appalachian Trail, a section I'd hike this summer. It was beautiful with views of Bear Mountain, the central area of Harriman and even a clear view of the New York City skyline. By the time I got to the West Mountain Shelter, I figured I had an hour and a half of daylight left and I had just reached the new trail I needed to cover.
The descent took me longer than I thought. The entire time I'd been pushing myself to go fast even though I knew to be careful on the wet leaves and I didn't want to take a spill on the rocks. As I finished the hard descent and walked through Timp Pass, I knew it would be tough to get out in daylight. I took out my map and calculated that I could probably pick up a new stretch of the Ramapo-Dunderberg and the Suffern-Bear Mountain Trail and be back on the ridge of West Mountain with a little less than half an hour of daylight to do.
I figured that would leave me doing a hard descent for fifteen minutes in the dark. I've hiked enough in the dark to want to avoid that situation. After dark, it's a much slower walk with a much higher chance of getting hurt. In the middle of Timp Pass with high ridges all around me, I kept looking at the alternatives and decided the best was give up on trying to cover new trails. I'd try to follow an old woods road into Doodletown and out to the parking lot on the 1777 West Trail, one I'd hiked on several weeks before. Everything worked perfectly and I got out just as it was getting pitch black -- the only thing was it was a half hour earlier than I'd thought.
