Eastern Pinnacle

It's week two of the fall hiking season and judging by the green in the background in this weekend's photo, we have a long way to go before we're blazed in peak colors. And with temps in the 70s and 80s lately, it will take another week or two until autumn feels like autumn. Here I am on the Appalachian Trail's Eastern Pinnacle viewpont near Bellevale Mountain in New York. We started today at Lakes Road where we left off on our Sept. '04 Hudson to Delaware section hike. Opened up with a nice climb up to 1,224 feet on our way to Wildcat Shelter. At the shelter H scribbled in the journal and I was saved by the "cat box" privy located further down the blue blazed sidetrail. Wildcat was hi-tech in relation to other area shelters, having a nice fire pit and grill with tools on hand and food hangers and a windscreen tarp which we read in the journal is the home to some bats. After a short break here we carried on down the trail until H stopped dead in her tracks and belts out a huge scream. Following too closely behind, I ran her over and nearly pushed her onto the big black snake that caused her to stop. After the monster slid into his hole, we continued on and reached the viewpoint on a rocky outcrop of Schunnemunk Conglomerate, which is found only along this ridge between Bearfort and Bellvale Mountains. After another couple of miles we came to Route 17A, where after a short walk along the highway we came to the Bellevale Creamery. This place is legend among thru-hikers and almost everyone stops here for a trail treat after logging the miles on foot. Today's trip was a repeater, so we traced our tracks back the four miles to the car, this time bypassing the AT on a few blue trails, skipping the rock scrambles we had to crawl up and down on the first half of the hike. We ran into a real nice couple of folks from Tennessee with whom we swapped many stories of parrallel experience and adventure that I swear we could have chatted with them for the rest of the day. Good luck to you P&J on your 2007 AT thru-hike! Check in here for some magic and log your story on trailjournals.com. When we finally said fairwell it was only about a mile back to George. On the way home, we stopped in at Campmor for some supplies for next weekend's backpacking trip, where we'll log some more miles on the AT in New York.