Jockey Hill, Catskills

Date	Distance	Time	Elevation Gain	Average Moving Time	Year to Date Miles
12/25/2015	6.2 miles	2 hours 32 minutes	827'	2.6 mph	795.3

Trail Map
Parking: Jockey Hill Road at cul-de-sac (end of paved section)
Catskill All Trails Challenge: Map 146

Directions:
Walk straight ahead on a dirt road - there is a sign saying "Woods Road, Private."
Reach trail parking area.
Continue straight past gate.
Yellow blazes will start.
Follow yellow blazes.
Where trail splits (yellow blazes straight and yellow blazes to the right), stay left.
Hike in a clockwise loop, continuing to follow the yellow blazes.
When you reach the split again, turn left onto the trail you started out on.
Follow the yellow trail back to where it intersects with the woods road.
Turn right onto the woods road.
Pass first parking area and arrive at second parking area.

Notes:
We spent Christmas eve cooking our Christmas dinner so that when we got back from hiking today, we'd have a feast all ready. We chose an easy trail so that we could bring Moxie along. This did turn out to be a very easy hike. We read that it is used by mountain bikers a lot, but today we had the trail all to ourselves. The trail crosses streams several times (Christmas swimming for the dogs). It was a very wet hike - granted we have had a lot of rain for the past few days. I wore trail runners and gave up on keeping them dry. This is probably the easiest Catskill hike I've done - I didn't know any came this easy :) It was perfect for Moxie. Nothing in the way of views, but still just a very pleasant low key hike, with some pine trees to provide some green. In the beginning of the hike there was a lot of household trash (tires, sheet rock cement tubs, paint cans), but after that the trails were very clean.

We did miss a turn once. We were following a very obvious trail, and came across some blue blazes for a mountain bike trail. These weren't on our map. Then we noticed there weren't any yellow blazes around. We backtracked and found the turn we missed. There are several other non-blazed trails that intersect with the yellow blazed trail. The hike is blazed yellow the whole way, so if you stop seeing blazes, you aren't on the right track :)

You can either park at the cul-de-sac here, or drive down the dirt woods road to a closer parking area.

Walking down the dirt road - we passed 4 houses on the way to the closer parking area

Closer parking area - parking here will shorten the hike

Continue past the gate on the road

The yellow blazed trail leaves the road and turns into the woods

Trail splits to the left & right. We rebuilt the cairn a little to make the split a little more obvious.

Oops - we missed our turn and found this after a ways.

This is where we had missed our turn. We kept going straight on the obvious trail, but the small cairn marks a turn to the right.

Merry Christmas from the "summit" of 600' Jockey Hill

We stopped a couple of times for some December swimming.