Slide Mountain, Catskills

Date	Distance	Time	Elevation Gain	Average Moving Time	Year to Date Miles
6/17/2018	7 miles		1,808'

Map: NYNJTC Catskills, Map 143
Parking: Frost Valley Road
Directions: Take yellow blazed Phoenicia East Branch Trail. Turn left on blue blazed Curtis Ormsbee Trail. Turn right on red blazed Wittenburg Cornell Slide Trail. Hike to Slide summit. Continue to view just past slide summit. Turn around and take the Wittenburg Cornell Slide Trail to the East Branch Trail. Turn right on the Phoenicia East Branch trail and return to parking area.

Today we decided to mix it up a little, and knock off the Curtis Ormsbee trail on map 143 for the Catskills All Trails challenge. We've hiked Slide twice before, but this time, we did a slightly different route. Slide was probably our very first 3500 footer. It's supposed to be one of the easiest ones. When we started hiking the 3500 footers, we always took the easiest or shortest route. Now that we are working on redlining the Catskills, we can try other routes towards the 3500 footer summits. It was going to be on the warm side, so I carried a lot of water - 4 liters. 3 for me, 1 for Trek. Trek also carries 1 liter in his pack.

Using the Curtis Ormsbee trail is supposed to be a little more challenging than just using the Phoenicia East Branch trail. We did some minor trail maintenance as we hiked - just throwing branches off the trail. We started getting good views once we got on the Wittenburg Cornell Slide trail. As long as we kept moving, the bugs weren't bad. I'm not sure why, but the viewpoints seemed to be the buggiest places on trail. We still stopped at one for a snack break. We saw so many butterflies today. They don't pose well, but I tried following some around to get a photo.

We hiked to the Slide summit (cement block), and then went just beyond to the view. There weren't many hikers at all today. We returned back to the parking lot taking the easier WCS trail most of the way.