Day 106
We left out from Bear Mountain early with Raindancer, Catnap, and Testament and began our descent down into the Bear Mountain Recreation Area. The place was a dump and had the feel of a creepy abandoned amusement park. From here, the AT walks through the lowest point in a zoo, but since the zoo is only open 10-5 we had to go around. They didn’t blaze it and we ended up walking in the wrong direction before figuring it out and then walked across the Hudson River - this is the lowest physical point on the AT at about 140 feet above sea level… Does that mean it’s all uphill from here?! We then walked steeply uphill on Anthony’s Nose (yes, that was really the name of the hill!) and then up another steep climb that looked like an upside down V on the map before descending into what I like to call heaven, The Appalachian Deli! We all spent way too much money here and hung out with more hikers than I can name before we decided to head out for a few more miles. We did a lot of rolling hills here and the scenery was a lot of stone walls and pretty former farmland. At the lower points of the trail, we had some swampy stuff, but nothing too bad. We came on a slow-moving, but drinkable(!) stream and looked around for a campsite. We quickly saw one across the way and hopped the stream to find a great old roadbed with a pretty big campsite. Catnap, Raindancer, Testament, Nokey, and me all had plenty of room here with a raging fire and great conversation. The photo is one of the many stone walls I saw today. It has a double blaze that shows you which direction to turn when the trail changes direction. The top blaze is your guide.