Hikes in Harriman State Park

First thing I did after I peeled the feathers off me was shut the wide open window. It was in the 40's outside, it was a crystal clear and gorgeous fall day, finally.

I was up at 6:30am on a Saturday for my third hike with Outdoor Bound. It was labeled a 10-mile, challenging hike with nine peaks, stops at an old, abandoned mine and and a ghost town with a "ghost" cemetery.

We left New York City in Richard's rented hike-mobile at 8:15am and headed up the Palisades Parkway. We took Exit 19 (Seven Lakes), then parked in a small parking lot about one-third of a mile up on the right.

For a map of these hikes, visit the NY NJ Trail Conference site.

Now, the previous two hikes had been moderate and easy. I was wondering how hard the challenging hike would really be...well, it was the longest, most challenging hike I had ever done. It was a seven and a half hour day with one short stop for lunch. I was at the back of every long, steep ascent, huffing and puffing and wondering if my heart was going to explode out of my chest.

At some point, Richard lost track of how many peaks we'd climbed, but we found the abandoned mine at six and a half hours into the hike. Skip it. It's a hole in the ground, filled with water, smells bad and is off the trail. Doodletown was a bit bizarre; lots of signs point out what house was where with photographs of the houses, but not a single piece of house remains except an occasional bit of concrete foundation. Why they razed all those homes is a mystery to me.

We were five hikers and Richard, the guide. We had Eric, a Canadian and owner of a PR company who wants to live in the Bay Area, Babel, a German-born art therapist who has lived in the US for eight and a half years, Aleesa, a twenty-something whipper snapper account executive at Ogilvy who works on the Morgan Stanley account, and a woman whose name escapes me, but she occasionally spends time working at the Four Seasons in their catering area when she's not touring the globe. I don't know how she does it, but she is always taking adventure trips. Her last trip, last month, had her climbing the steep hills around Machu Picchu. She said it was the best trip of her life: she'd been training with the Stacy of Stacy's Boot Camp in Central Park for six weeks beforehand. AND she has a really cool iPhone.