Crystal Hills 5 - Favorite Day

  This was our favorite day so far. Even the trail markers were making us happy.

Seriously though, the blazing was excellent, the trail was well laid out, and maintained, and all but the final mile of the day was in the woods.

It was hard to choose only a few pictures to show you. This was one of the nice views as we crossed a road. I'm not sure this hill has a name, but it might be Borden Hill.

We had lunch at our own waterfall site on Erwin Hollow Creek. A totally perfect lunch spot!

The patterns in the water-washed shale were intriguing.

There were too many interesting plants to show you. I'll settle for a few. This is Beechdrops, Epifagus virginiana. It's parasitic and grows on beech roots.

We found more Dead Man's Fingers, these ones are really weird- all black. The last ones I found were gray.

Best find of the day for me is Old Man of the Woods. I've never seen one of these before. It's actually a bolete. It has pores on the underside, not gills.

And this is the first marker we've seen for the Great Eastern Trail, which this is also a part of. The GET runs from Alabama to New York. We are on the most northern portion of it.

Today was logistically challenging. We had to break camp at the state park where we were. Then we had to spot the cars with the trailer in tow. Since one end of today's hike was in the middle of a state forest, that road wasn't too good. We scouted it in Marie's car and decided I could drive it if I went really slow, so I did and we made it with no problems. Well, except that I had no signal in the middle of the move to our next place to stay. I did a little seat-of-the-pants driving and got us where we were going.

The joke of the day was that the map warned us of two stream crossings where we would need to ford, one of them probably deep enough to get wet. So we carried sandals all day for this. We did not get our feet wet at 7 of the 2 crossings. Our sandals were still safely in our packs when we were done. There are no typos in this paragraph.

Crystal Hills Branch of the Finger Lakes Trail, Steuben County, NY. Kinsella Park to West Hill State Forest. 9.7 miles

See One Big Hill

Letting the Secret Out of the Bag

  I've been keeping a big secret for about a year. With some fear and trepidation, I'm sharing it.

You may have heard the maxim-

Courage is knowing that something is going to hurt and doing it anyway.

Stupidity is the same.

This is why life is hard.

So, um... I am embarking on a thru hike of the North Country Trail on December 1, 2021. This is going to be what has come to be known as an NCT flip-flop. I'm walking south from Timber Creek, the closest the trail comes to my house. I'll walk through Ohio in the winter where there is less concern with heavy snow. I'll reach Vermont in the summer and then get to North Dakota and head east again, arriving back home around December 1, 2022.

This will be a mostly supported hike This is my concession to my age. I'll be trying to average 15 miles a day, which I've proven to myself I can still do, but I'll have to do it day after day.

Stay tuned for full-bore preparations as soon as I get home from this current hike.

Just for memory's sake, here I am at the western terminus of the trail in 1995, with Marie Altenau, David Castro, Mathilda Nance (Blackburn), and Chips.

And here are Marie and me at Maine Junction, Vermont, the eastern terminus in 2014.

This hike will be a bit more philosophical than the section hike E2E completion I did before. That's all I'll say for now, except tell you the wonderful people who have signed on to support me on this crazy venture. Ester Lamb- Dec-Feb. Sue Crawford- March. Marie Altenau and Mary Coffin- April-May. Loretta Young- June. Annie Nelson- part of July/Aug. Omer Young- Sept. Sue Crawford-Oct. Unknown yet for Nov. Support team that have been helping me prepare: Loren Bach, Cathy Laman, Monica Hatch.

I'm not going to bog this post down in explanations. You'll see the plan unfold as I get closer. Only 10 weeks left after I return home!

See The Party's Over But It's OK

Crystal Hills 4 - One Big Hill

  Today was all road walk. I was expecting a challenge because it was not blazed, and it looked like a lot of twists and turns on the map, possibly with a zillion unmarked two tracks going off. It turned out the following the route wasn't a challenge at all. Even the section the map said was undriveable turned out to be fine. I drove it on the way back to retrieve Marie's car.

The challenge of the day was the fact that the road went straight up 550 feet in a couple of miles of walking. But we couldn't complain about the views from the top.

The fall flowers are bright and cheerful- goldenrod and New England Aster.

After we got to the top, the road was paved and went straight down 650 feet, into Painted Post. This chimney looks as if it might have been part of an old cabin that burned down.

But I found this amusing- little trees are growing out of the top!

Nature was working on decorating this spruce for Christmas with garlands of Moonseed vine.

Best find of the day? Right in town! An 8-point buck in velvet.

Miles hiked- only 8.2, but we are surprisingly tired. Not sure why. Could be the hill, could just be day 4. The weather was lovely- high 60s and slightly cloudy.

Crystal Hills Branch of the Finger Lakes Trail. Beeman Hollow Road to Kinsella Park in Erwin, NY. 8.2 miles

See Crystal Hills Waterfall

Crystal Hills Day 3 - Waterfall

  Today we took it easy. I had to write a news column this morning, so we didn't hike until after lunch. We realized we could do a small loop that would give us a little forward progress on the main trail, and also allow us to visit a waterfall that was off the trail, and we were thinking we'd have to give up seeing it.

You could say the hike was defined by Goodhue Creek. We had a little trouble finding the trail on the east side, but we found the crossing, and had to wade.

This is the view downstream.

After that, the trail followed the creek on an access road for about half a mile. The creek is down on the left.

Other treats include New England Aster with Turtlehead in the background.

And some bright orange fungus growing on stumps.

We finally got to the falls known as Little Niagara. It was part of a park on Goodhue Creek. There were some campsites, and benches and a little viewing platform. This is looking down on the top.

I crossed on a log bridge to be able to get to the bottom and take a better picture. It's really nice!

We closed the loop by using the same route we bailed out on yesterday. Forward progress on the trail 3.9 miles. To the falls and back 0.6 miles. A side trip to a gravel pit when we both missed seeing a turn blaze 0.4 miles. Closing the loop 1.3 miles. Total hike= 6.2 miles.

Chicken alfredo and salad for dinner!

Crystal Hills Branch of the Finger Lakes Trail. East of Addison NY to the junction of Beemer Hollow and Troy Roads. 3.9 trail miles, +2.3 miles side trips.

See Crystal Hills - Rain

Crystal Hills 2 - Rain

  The day started out with light rain, and the red efts love that. There were hundreds of them as we walked through McCarthy Hill State Forest. These guys are standard in eastern forests, and are one of the critters I miss in the Midwest. This one is pale, as were most of the ones we saw. They are often very bright orange. We even saw rusty brown ones.

The woods was open and even though it was raining, the trail was relatively dry.

We found lots of patches of what I believe is Smooth Chanterelle.

The weather forcast was for intermittent rain. We were good with that. But the forecast apparently didn't hear about the tail end of Hurricane Ida, and we hadn't either. It kept raining harder and harder. Misty hills through the curtain of water somewhere in Pinnacle State Park.

So today, most of our walking was off road, but a lot of it was unmowed grassy trail. Can you say "wet?" By now we were soaked to the skin.

By lunch time, we were looking for anywhere with a roof to stop and eat. We found this small pavilion in the village of Addison, which the trail goes through. There was a lot of debris in the town, and we quickly realized they'd had a serious flood. Turns out, the flood was only two weeks ago. Lots of damage.

It was raining so hard, I put my camera away in my pack instead of trusting it to a plastic bag cover. There were a lot of things I would have liked to picture. We walked a long way through Addison Cemetery with lots of interesting graves. Beyond that, there was a warning sign at a small airport, "You are crossing a runway. Watch for airplanes." First time seeing a sign like that!

I warned Marie of a soft spot in the trail with our usual word, "squishy," and she responded, "I can't hear you over the splashing."

I had made an error in figuring the mileage for the day, and by trail, the car was still 4 miles ahead. But there was a way to bail out early and take a shorter walk to the car. We did this. So our total mileage for the day was 10.3, but only 9.0 of them count as progress on the trail. That's OK. It was a good choice because we had evening plans.

A couple who are good friends of Marie live only a few miles from where we are camping. I had met them once in the past, and Marie hadn't seen them for about six years. They had invited us for showers, laundry, and dinner! Marie has only been out a couple of days, but I was in real need of laundry. Winner! And look at the feast they prepared for us. Patty and Richard, with Charley looking very interested in either us or the food.

We got "home" really late, and went straight to bed. Today (9/2) it's not raining, but I have to do some computer stuff, so we are taking at least the morning off. Hopefully I'll get caught up and we can hike this afternoon.

Crystal Hills Branch of the Finger Lakes Trail, Steuben County, NY, McCarthy Hills State Forest through Pinnacle State Park to beyond the Addison Airport. 9.0 trail miles

See Crystal Hills Day 1