Day 105
We woke up late today as we were planning to sleep in and let our bodies heal. We set out from the shelter at 9:30 and it was just Nokey and me as Testament wasn’t feeling great and wanted to catch us later. Nokey wanted to walk down to the lake, but I definitely just wanted to get a move on since it was so difficult yesterday and I knew today would be hard as well. For the first time in nearly 1000 miles, I hiked totally alone! I had a huge climb about 11:30 up Black Mountain and was rewarded with a view of the NYC skyline in the hazy distance. From here, I went straight down the steep mountain to Palisades Parkway, where a sign informed me it was only 34 miles easy to the city! I climbed up West Mountain and was surprised to see a stream with clean water running about 1/3 of the way up! I filled my water to the brim, treated it, and headed up the hill. I ran into Raindancer up top and talked to her for a few minutes before heading back down before climbing yet again. On the way down, I walked through a young beech forest losing all the leaves due to the draught conditions. I began climbing Bear Mountain and it wasn’t too hard. For part of it, we walked on old road with tons of beautiful stone work and then we climbed up hundreds of beautiful and uniform stone stairs. When I got to the top, Starcraft was doing trail magic and had cold drinks and clean water. I hung out for over two hours before Nokey showed up bearing gifts: pizza and a coke from the lake! I had the pizza and shared the coke while we waited for the crew to show up. Chiba, Raindancer, Catnap, and Testament all showed up and we decided to stealth camp a little down the hill so we could climb back up and camp with a view of the NYC skyline at night. When we did finally see it, I had a surreal moment when I realized I had actually WALKED here to see this, 1400 miles! It was amazing as a moment. The photo is of the sunset that night.