My pinky toe was no longer an exposed electrical wire sparking at the slightest touch
Long Path Sections 9 - 12: Monroe to Wurtsboro
Dear reader,
There’s another installment from our Long Path section hike below the fold, but first, a quick announcement.
After putting this newsletter on the back burner for the past couple years, I am recommitting to a weekly publishing schedule, and turning paid subscriptions back on.
This will allow me to do several things: Hire someone to design a proper logo. Invite other writers to submit unconventional nature and outdoor adventure stories, and pay them a modest fee for their work. And perhaps also to get take-out on the nights I write and edit Pinch of Dirt, because even a once-a-week newsletter—on top of a full-time job—is enormously time consuming. If I don’t have to focus on more mundane needs, like feeding myself, I can devote more time and energy to the newsletter.
I hope, if you were a paid subscriber before, that you’ll continue to support this endeavor. If you’re newer here, I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription now or in the future.
And thanks as always for reading! I’m happy to have you along on this journey.
This is the sixth installment of a series on section hiking the Long Path. The adventure begins here, and you can read the previous installment here.
Monroe to Goshen
We took the Short Line bus to the Monroe Park and Ride with the end-of-day commuters. I meant for us to start on a Wednesday, so I didn’t take Tuesday off, but then realized we had to be back in the city a day earlier than I thought, so we had to squeeze in 8 miles after work.
After waking up at 6 am to get everything done, I wasn’t exactly fresh when we started walking. My feet were still wrecked from the Great Saunter—just three days before—but the Long Path here followed a flat and easy rail trail.
We passed a very small and very old cemetery, a farm with long fat rows of black dirt (according to the trail guide, this black soil district is known for its onion farms), and the Chester Depot, which was where fresh milk used to be sent by train to the city. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal all day so I was thrilled to find the Chester ice cream store open and bought a heaping cone of banana cream pie ice cream from a teen.
Back on the trail, we thought we saw an owl but at too great a distance to be sure.
There’s no legal camping in this stretch so our destination was the Orange Inn in Goshen, although a town night on the first day on trail is an unusual treat. It was already dark by the time we arrived. We showered and ordered pizza delivery to the room and bought pints of some New York brew at the hotel bar. When we finally tried to sleep, the room was too hot and too bright and the AC made a weird gurgling noise when we finally got it on, so the night is not as restful as it might have been.
Goshen to Huckleberry Ridge State Forest
We ate cold pizza for breakfast.
On our way out of town, E spied a horse and driver on the track behind the Harness Racing Museum. This must be a trotter! Goshen is the Home of the Hall of Fame of the Trotter. More trotters trotted by.
The pinching pain radiating out from my left pinky toe was excruciating from the first step in my trail runners. I had somehow gotten a blister under the nail during the Saunter, and it was going to cause me problems now.
I was briefly distracted by a plaque about Claudius Smith, whose name I recognized from his ‘den’ or hideout in Harriman. Apparently he was hanged for his alleged crimes in Goshen.
After making our way through downtown Goshen and back to the rail trail I wasn’t sure I could keep limping on. Every other step was an agony. I stopped to change into toe socks and my camp sandals: ahhh, sweet, sweet relief. The left toe waggled freely. The sandals had no arch or ankle support but at least I could walk.
The rail trail passed a wetland where a small drama played out. A swan puffed up its wings to intimidate a pair of geese who had come too close to the swan’s mate and cygnets. The swan and a goose took turns diving and sniping at each other. I stood there for many minutes, entranced.
The Long Path turned off the rail trail and onto a county highway. Thus began a 14.5 mile road walk, with the sun beating down on us, cars and trucks speeding by. Some moved over to give us space or slowed down, but most did not. The shoulders were narrow and there was no place to stop and rest, just endless expanses of bland, boring lawns. Infusions of coffee, water, Gatorade, soda, and beer from the shops we passed along the way did little to alleviate the tedium, or the discomfort of walking on a slight slant where the pavement slopes to the ditch all day long.
Finally we stumbled into the next section of DEC land, immediately stopping to rest in the middle of the trail under a tree, dead tired after almost 18 miles of pavement pounding.
We passed up a good open flat camping site by a somewhat buggy pond to go on to a ‘nice lunch spot by a waterfall’ two miles further along, which I thought would be a good place to camp, but was not—although I was able to soak my swollen feet in the frigid stream. We ate ramen in the fading light and slept almost as soon as our heads hit the camp pillows. We could hear the commuter train passing somewhere just out of sight.
Huckleberry Ridge State Forest to the Village of Wurtsboro
My feet were, predictably, a disaster the next morning. Wearing sandals for 20 miles the day before saved my pinky toe, but the grippy footbed had pulled the skin loose on the balls of my feet, which were now hot and inflamed. I taped and bandaged them as well as I could to reduce friction and squeezed them into trail runners. Fortunately my pinky toe was merely tender and no longer an exposed electrical wire sparking at the slightest touch.
We walked out of the woods past a second waterfall and down to follow alongside the train tracks for a brief moment before going back into the woods on a rocky old woods road. I almost stepped on a snake with its mouth stuffed full of frog! Or toad..I tried to get the swallowing on video but the snake played dead.
I opted not to bring my nice camera on this trip because it’s heavy and I knew our mileage was even more ambitious than usual—and I thought it might make hiking feel more like work and less like vacation—but I was starting to regret that. My phone pictures are grainy and washed out in comparison.
We started the Basha Kill section with a lunch break by the water. The path was mercifully flat, mostly following an old rail bed alongside a beautiful wetland, but I had to stop repeatedly to fuss with my sock/shoe situation, and only after laying on overlapping layers of athletic tape, until the roll ran out, was I able to limp along with any kind of speed.
We saw lots of garter snakes and water snakes, dozens of red-winged blackbirds—a mercifully easy bird to identify—geese and baby goslings, and a giant great blue heron. It’s a lovely wetland, although it seemed to go on forever. We were trying to get to the Wurtsboro post office to pick up a package before 5pm, but only once arriving in town did I realize that meant carrying the food to our hotel for the night—more than a mile off trail—and back again in the morning. We decided to put it off until the morning.
Instead we stopped into a Mexican restaurant for a gigantic meal with two margaritas each at 4pm, bought ingredients for beermosas at a gas station, and called a cab to drive us a mile down a busy highway to the Day’s Inn, where we showered and fell asleep watching all the very good boys in the Westminster dog show.
Hike it yourself, from NYC
This section is easily accessible by public transportation. Short Line runs relatively frequent buses to the Monroe, New York, Park & Ride, where the Long Path joins the Orange Heritage Trail. (Careful you don’t accidentally get on a bus to Monroe Township, New Jersey.)
I recommend booking a room in Goshen, New York to break up the 26-mile section between Monroe and Goshen without legal camping options.
Getting back from Wurtsboro is a little less convenient, but possible. There is a daily Short Line bus from Wurtsboro Park & Ride at 8:15 am. If doing this as a three-day hike, as we did, you could spend the third night at the Day’s Inn (a half-mile from the Park & Ride) and catch the bus back to the city the following morning.
I had to wear flimsy water shoes for a few miles on the Conasauga River Trail over the summer and my feet were throbbing! I can't imagine 20 miles in sandals!!