Even from the top of Bear Mountain, 45 miles north of Manhattan along the Hudson River, New York City’s skyline looms on the horizon and lights up the southern sky.
Still, the state park is far enough from Manhattan to easily offer a restive city dweller the chance to trek a few miles along the Appalachian Trail and pitch a tent in the woods in the middle of winter without a soul around. Mostly.
Me and Jeff, Miles and Joe, all left New York City at 2:30pm on Friday and by 4:30pm had parked at the Bear Mountain Lodge, from where we could hike the mile up Bear Mountain for a sweeping view of the Hudson River Valley, and then traverse another five miles along the AT to West Mountain shelter. We’d expected a warm first weekend of Spring. Instead, we arrived to flurries and several inches of snow.
Within two miles of the hike we had encountered our first wildlife: a doe and her three babies. But what was initially cute quickly turned weird. The deer didn’t move. They stared at us, wild-eyed. Even when we began walking forward, within 10 feet of the youngest deer, none flinched. The deer were more receptive toward human interaction than your average New Yorker. Talk about taking the “wild” out of “wilderness.”
We arrived to the first shelter at nightfall. I was quickly shivering and hungry.
“Hunger is the best sauce, dude,” declared Jeff, the chef for the weekend. He pulled together a dinner of couscous with sausage slices. It tasted excellent, washed down with whiskey.
The next morning we hiked another seven miles into Harriman State Forest and pitched our tents at Stock Bridge shelter, an open-faced hut atop a rocky hill. Inside the hut we found an unread Asian-language newspaper, and outside we saw a pile of uneaten sushi — a whole California roll, practically. Maybe this is what those deer were looking for the previous day.
Bear Mountain and the surrounding forest offers some respite from the city, but it’s no respite from civilization, what with the occasional road to hike across, the Boy Scouts to ruin the silence, the echoes of cars off the Palisades Parkway, the unthoughtful hiker littering aluminum foil and food scraps.
Sunday morning we trekked six miles back into Bear Mountain State Forest, around Turkey Hill Lake and Queesboro Lake, down through Poplopen Gorge along the Hell Hole Path, and beside the highway to the parking lot at the base of Bear Mountain, which was now flooded with day hikers and people eating brunch at the nearby lodge.
