Trail Maintenance, Suffern - Bear Mountain Trail, Harriman State Park

Date	Distance	Time	Elevation Gain	Average Moving Time	Year to Date Miles
9/30/2018	4.5 miles	4 hours 33 minutes	835'

Map: NYNJTC Northern Harriman
Parking: Anthony Wayne Recreation Area
Directions: n/a

We decided to spend the afternoon doing trail maintenance on the new trail that has been given to us. We went out once with our supervisor Bill, but hadn't finished our short section. This time we took Trek with us. We hiked up to Cat's Elbow, the start of our section. The first thing we did was dismantle a fire ring set up at the view, and pick up someone's egg shells. From there, we hiked through the section that we had already trimmed recently, so work was light. The trail has a combination of metal tags and painted blazes. Glen decided to focus on fixing metal tags which were starting to dig into the bark of their tree. I worked on clearing the trail of any new branches that fell and doing small bits of trimming as necessary. But what we cleared before still looked really good. When we reached the area where we ended last time, we found more trimming to be done. I ended up just sitting down to do most of the trimming, because I didn't want to get a backache again. Trek didn't get the whole sitting down in the trail thing. He wants to hike! I made him lie down. He sulked. And then periodically he'd try to get up and sneak away to go down the trail towards Glen. So Trek is not very impressed with the trail we're maintaining. Maybe next year we'll sign up to maintain a trail in the Catskills which involves more removing of sticks and branches. Trek LOVES it when we try to clear the trail of sticks. He thinks its a wonderful game of fetch.

I really enjoyed our hike. I've been feeling sad about Moxie, but I felt like today there was nowhere else I'd rather be than sitting in the sun outdoors on our trail. I felt so peaceful that I didn't want to leave! Too bad its Sunday and too bad I had no tent on me!

Chicken in the Woods

View from Cat's Elbow

Admiring our work from our previous trip

Sulking