LANTERN HILL is said to offer the best outdoor climbing in eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island. I’ve hiked up the 500-foot hill many times to see and show off the beautiful view of Connecticut’s hills rolling down to Long Island Sound, a view that is awesomely adulterated by the super-mansion-like structure of Foxwoods Resorts Casino, owned and operated by the recently bankrupted Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.
This time I was there to climb up the quartz cliffs on the first warm weekend of April. Jeff brought all his climbing gear from Brooklyn, I dug out my shriveled climbing shoes, and for four hours we had the cliff mostly to ourselves — impressed with the variety of climbs, rewarding views, and barely scraping the surface of the routes on offer.
My old newsroom editor and fellow adventurer Steve Fagin lives nearby, so he hiked over to say hello. He looked a bit nervous when Jeff had to fix the figure-eight knot that I’d tied in my harness, which perhaps deterred Steve from joining us on the cliff — more importantly, he was also saving energy for the Boston Marathon in a week (here’s a link to a piece he wrote about participating in the marathon one year after being stopped dead in his tracks by the 2013 bombings).
It was a nice way to mark the end of a long winter. The following Wednesday, it snowed again.
