We don’t have a car. We came here on foot.
Long Path Sections 14 - 19: Witch's Hole to Phoenicia
This is the eighth installment of a series on section hiking the Long Path. The adventure begins here, and you can read the previous installment here.
Witch’s Hole to Vernooy Kill Falls
The Mine Hole Trail was a river of debris left behind by the bulldozers that clawed out trees and earth to stop a wildfire last fall. We peered down with wistful longing; it would have been so much simpler if we could have continued down that path as expected, instead of making our way back to the Long Path reroute.
It was already late morning; if this was to be our last day on trail we didn’t want to rush out of camp. Instead we slept in, letting our bodies and minds soak up the much needed rest.
It was another hot, sunny day. We considered our options as we walked along the wide, smooth Smiley Carriage Road: Call a cab in Kerhonkson and get a bus back to the city in New Paltz; hike the 20+ miles to our planned destination that evening; or some mysterious third option, which I was still working on.
If our schedule wasn’t so firm, we could have booked a room in Kerhonkson that night, bought more food to extend our stores another day, and then split what would have been a monster day into two manageable days, extending our hike by a day. This would have been ideal. But E had a work call he needed to be on in a few days, and we both wanted to get back to the city for our friend’s book launch, so this wasn’t really an option. We decided to hike to a brewery outside Kerhonkson, directly on the Long Path reroute, and make up our minds there.
We didn’t see anyone else in Minnewaska until we got to Lake Awosting, a small miracle considering it was a beautiful spring Sunday. It just goes to show that even in the most popular parks, if you get away from the places people congregate it’s quite easy to have the trees and rocks to yourself.
Soon I had a proposal for E: Instead of taking a cab to the bus station...what if we took a cab from the brewery to the next trailhead where the Long Path reentered the woods? It would cut out almost 10 miles of road walking that we simply were not up for, and we would stay on schedule. We could come back and hike or run the road walk another time. It’s not like we were thru hiking and had to preserve the sacred order of things.
(While we have tried to do the sections mostly south to north—Northbound, or NOBO—we had already gone out of order on one occasion and have hiked some sections backwards—SOBO—if it made more logistical sense with public transportation options.)
We saved the final decision for the brewery but since neither of us wanted to cut our vacation short we did end up getting a cab ride to the next trailhead after gorging ourselves on fries, asparagus, and beer at the Rough Cut brewery, and had a short walk to a familiar destination: Vernooy Kill Falls. Already late evening by the time we arrived, the falls were deserted. We set up camp at the (official!) tent site nearby, and then I insisted on an evening dip before dinner.
Vernooy Kill Falls to the East Branch of the Neversink River and Deer Shanty Brook
We woke with the goal of setting out by 8. Even after I insisted on a morning dip at the falls, we were on trail no more than a few minutes behind schedule. We had a big day planned—17.75 miles.
We followed a well-beaten path away from the falls, then turned onto a wide woods road. We tried to make good time on this even ground, and marched on with such determination that we missed the abrupt move into the woods, and only realized our mistake when we popped out on the wrong road. We retraced a significant chunk of road and I squinted in confusion at the “Trail ⬅️” sign facing us, NOT the direction we had been hiking originally on the Long Path.
We turned into the woods, our mood already sour from the added mileage on an overly ambitious day. At least we could have a nice long rest at Blue Hole, I thought to myself. How wrong I was.
I’ll say it: There is no reason on God’s green earth to climb Bangle Hill unless you’re hiking the Long Path. It is only the barest trace of a path through the woods, covered in thick leaf litter obscuring the route, alternately flat, wet, and marshy, and then uncomfortably steep, and always difficult to follow. The air was very close, the trees low, everything was warm, humid, heavy. Mosquitoes emerged from the muck in swarms. I slapped at them resentfully and eventually stopped to dig a rarely-used head net out of my bag.
Through it all the only thing that kept me moving was the thought of our extended lunch break at Blue Hole: A swim to wash away the bug guts and blood and the scum of perspiration and frustration that coated my brow; a bowl of granola and milk; the bag of trail mix; a rolled tortilla dipped in peanut butter; fresh water; maybe even more coffee...
When we finally popped out of the woods on the (correct) road, after a harrowing, bone-crunching descent, I was in a wretched mood. It improved marginally when I spotted the portapotties. We took advantage of the facilities, and as I waited for E I took note of a sign: Peekamoose Blue Hole was by permit for only, starting, uh, that day! May 15. What horrible luck. Today was literally the first day you needed a permit. The last time I visited the area, several years back, permits were only required on weekends.
It was a Monday, two weeks before Memorial Day (unofficial start to summer), the place was deserted, and we had to have a permit.
I took out my phone to try to buy one but of course, had no service. Surely this wouldn’t matter. Who was there to know? The parking lot where we used the portapotties? Empty. The road? Empty. Maybe two vehicles went by in an hour.
But the next parking lot? Not quite empty: There were three people sitting at a folding table doing absolutely nothing except telling us we could not go down to Blue Hole without a permit, which we had to drive 15 minutes away to get phone service to get. Drive! (Hitchhiking is illegal in New York so even if there were people to flag down, we couldn’t have.)
We don’t have a car, we explained, we came here on foot, on the Long Path.
That was too bad. Technically we weren’t supposed to hike Peekamoose and Table without permits either, but seeing as we were Long Path hikers they would at least let us do that(!!!!!). But, no, we couldn’t go down to Blue Hole.
We needed water, we explained, we had counted on filling up here and our bottles were empty. The next water source wasn’t for miles, after the next two summits.
They suggested walking back on the road to fill up at a spring that RVs use. We dropped our bags and retraced our steps with the water bottles but didn’t think to take food. Our brains were jelly.
E asked if I’d heard what one of them said under their breath, that there’s another swimming spot down the road, out of sight, adding ‘that’s all I’ll say about that.’ I hadn’t heard him. I was sour, but a swim’s a swim. I wanted to claw back some of what I had hoped to get out of today. E plunged with me.
Instead of a long, leisurely break we had stood in this protracted conversation, added a not-insignificant chunk of walking back and forth on the road to fetch water, illicitly took an abbreviated dip in the stream, and did not stop to eat lunch. All I had wanted was a pleasant break from walking!
Again, to be clear, these people were guarding an empty parking lot. Yes, thanks, I did see the photos from when Blue Hole was trashed a couple years ago, but who were they defending it from right now? I don’t know if anyone at all was down by Blue Hole at that moment. Never got a chance to see.
For the record, I would have happily purchased a permit (for how many vehicles though?! two?? four?? one for each foot?) when I had service earlier that day, if there had been signs for Long Path hikers telling us to do so. I would have purchased a permit then and there if I had service. I would have purchased a permit in person if I could have, but it’s online only. My brain was fried, but I wish I had offered them cash to buy me a permit when they left for the day, or sworn that I would buy one as soon as I got service on top of Peekamoose, (and I would have)! But I didn’t think to suggest that and they didn’t suggest anything of the kind.
I was crushed. I was hot, tired, hungry, and thirsty and wow I really hated them. Couldn’t they see how meaningful it was to have hiked here from *New York City*? I could come back here by car some other time, but this was my one chance to swim at Blue Hole on my Long Path hike and really deserve it. Really really want it. Really really really need it. Probably my only chance to visit *ever* when it wasn’t overrun by people and cars.
So we hiked on and as soon as we were out of sight of the table I started crying and couldn’t, wouldn’t stop. Two streams of water poured down my cheeks and my chest heaved with sobs.
I raged at those stupid people who didn’t understand what they had deprived us of; raged at myself for not charming them into bending the rules or proposing some creative solution to our mutual satisfaction; berated myself for not taking the food bag with us to get water and eating at the river after our swim, in an approximation of the leisurely lunch break I had desired.
Even though I knew then and know now that it was not the end of the world...it was a really big blow. I’m not much of a peakbagger. I like waterfalls and spending time in the woods and nice views but what I look forward to and look back on with the most fondness are swims and cold plunges.
So I cried and cried and sat down in the dirt in the middle of the trail and cried some more while I checked the permit rules online (there was service on the mountain) wondering if there had possibly been a misunderstanding, someone other than myself to blame.
I tried to explain my overwhelming feelings to E, who was just as hungry and frustrated as I was, but the noises I made were strangled and inarticulate. I wept almost all the way up to the top of Peekamoose Mountain, alone mostly, except for when E waited to chivvy and cajole me to please try to enjoy the hike. (I figured we had already climbed this mountain a couple years ago—I wasn’t missing anything new!)
At the next viewpoint we finally stopped to eat the granola I wanted to eat at Blue Hole. We only had bars for breakfast, 6 hours ago at this point, so I was definitely running on empty, calorically-speaking—which may have had something to do with my meltdown.
(You know what was also empty? The trail. We didn’t see a single soul the rest of the day after leaving the people in the parking lot.)
That evening, after climbing Peekamoose and Table, we stopped to camp earlier than planned, at one of the lovely, flat sites by a babbling brook. As night fell while we prepared and ate dinner, our headlamps caught movement in the water: two beavers! Big boys (or maybe girls), too. This improved my day immensely. All was not lost.
East Branch of the Neversink River and Deer Shanty Brook to Phoenicia
We could not have chosen a better time for this hike. We rolled into the Slide Mountain Wilderness on a mid-spring weekday. Mud season was in the rear view mirror, the flowers were blooming, the trails were leather hard, and they were empty. We saw a handful of day hikers (4) on or around Slide, Cornell, and Wittenberg. That’s it! All day, until we left the woods.
Slide is the tallest mountain in the Catskill Mountains (and also the highest point on the Long Path) so getting it almost entirely to yourself is rare, and that was evident in the wide (too wide?) trails that we followed on our way up. But we had a big, big day planned, so we couldn’t laze about and gloat.
It was 18+ miles to Phoenicia, including some of the toughest hiking we’ve encountered on the Long Path. After stopping early the night before, we had no choice but to make those miles up today. I had called a B&B from Table Mountain the previous evening to make a reservation in Phoenicia, so we knew a bed and hot shower awaited, but we guessed restaurants would close early in the small town and we really needed a meal, too. We had to make good time.
But the terrain up and down Slide, Cornell, and Wittenberg rivals the Whites for rock scrambles, and after making some decent time on the initial ascent, we slowed to a mile per hour. Then we made a truly amateur hiking mistake. We assumed that because there was a glorious gushing spring at one place marked with a W (for water) on our map, the other places marked W in a few miles would be similarly free-flowing, so we didn’t fill up our bottles all the way, to keep our load light.
Oh, how wrong we were. The next ‘spring’ was more of a seep, marked by a stagnant puddle with pine needles and bug carcasses languishing on the surface. “Practice for the AZT,” I told E, and then dug out the water scoop. I only filtered one bottle; we’d come across more soon, I thought (hoped fervently). E held off, still having some water in his Nalgene.
We were down to just a few swallows by the time we stopped to rest at the last great viewpoint on Wittenberg to eat our lunch. At the rate we had been hiking, we’d be in Phoenicia by 10 or 11. It was time to step on the gas.
We turned off the wide, well-beaten path to a parking lot onto the recent (within the past decade, I think) Long Path reroute that cut out a long road walk. I charged ahead, jogging when the trail was flat enough, which wasn’t often. The next time we checked our progress we had shaved at least an hour off our ETA. We just had to keep it up.
It was a tough descent. Our legs were shot and our mouths were parched. The next water source was a scarily long way off. Not could-die scary, but we were going to be uncomfortable for a good bit longer—almost to the end of the hike.
I may have shed a tear or two, but I was pretty dried up from the waterworks the day before, and also dehydrated, so. We talked very little—didn’t have enough spittle to spare for chit chat. My knees and legs were in such bad shape E carried my backpack for a while, not that he was doing much better.
Earlier in the trip, I had explained to E how nice it was to know that the pain from blisters and other afflictions of the flesh are temporary, however excruciating, compared to the grinding, shooting, pinching pain in one’s bones, joints, and ligaments, where you worry with every step that you’re doing permanent damage. It was the latter kind of pain that day.
That morning, I was so sad that we had to get off trail. I felt I could hike forever. But by that afternoon I regretted ending on a ‘bad’ day, although what made me feel it was so bad was already fading from memory by the time I drafted this post. (The physical pain! Not having water! Remember, Jessica, remember!!?)
That’s one of the downsides to section-hiking: there’s a kind of blues at the end getting off trail without having ‘finished’ or ‘done’ something. And getting off before you’re ready, especially on a bad day, is unsatisfying. You don’t get a chance to ‘redeem’ yourself—not immediately, at least.
We stopped to rest, very briefly, at some of the dwindling viewpoints on the way down, out of necessity more than desire. We tried to determine which of the mountains we had climbed, on this trip or others, but sometimes they just all look the same.
As we neared the promised (hoped for) water source, I told E he could walk on ahead. My hiking had slowed to a hobble.
I soon came upon him sitting on the ground next to a shallow trickle, filtering. The water must have flowed directly from a hidden spring nearby because it was ice cold and sweet in spite of the shallow depth, and we sat in the dirt and passed the bottle back and forth between us, sucking down our fill. “It felt like we were coming back to life,” E says. “Like we had returned from the shadow world.”
We passed the marked spring a bit later, where water flowed directly from a pipe in the ground and we wouldn’t need to filter, but it was a little bit off trail and we had places to go, a bed to meet, a house to see about a shower.
Hike it yourself, from NYC
Short Line runs one weekday evening bus to Kerhonkson, which isn’t the most convenient. Alternatively, you could take a bus to New Paltz and then take a cab to the trail.
Trailways runs multiple (2+) daily buses to and from New York City, at pretty convenient times, all told.
I wholeheartedly recommend the Phoenicia Belle Bed & Breakfast if you want to end your section hike with a relaxing night in town, or need a place to stay before continuing your hike. Phoenicia is a great place to resupply, too, with a grocery/convenience store right next to the B&B.
The proliferation of weird permits and rules in that general area over the past few years is really disappointing. It's impossible to know about all of them when you are doing a route that crosses multiple areas, and they are clearly not designed with any thought given to anybody except car-campers and day-trippers.
Oh man, what a horrible permit situation. I totally understand your rage and then meltdown and then subsequent solution-finding. How unempathetic of those folks (were they rangers or volunteer citizens??) to not offer any alternatives when you explained your situation.