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This was another short but really fun hike, in a site which had
been earmarked on my target list for some time.
Why this particular place?
Several reasons.
It first became known to me as a totally random side-effect of cruising
Youtubes about mostly unrelated topics.
I was poking through search results on healthy lifestyle or workouts or
something like that, and noted something with "mountains" in the title
... which turned up a
longish vlog
from someone named Andreea
[not a typo]
about her whole day of food and adventure.
It notably includes footage from her hike in a rather awesome-looking place
called Breakneck Ridge, high above the Hudson River north of NYC.
[Skip to about 04:00 past all the stuff about shopping and breakfast for
the main hike part.]
She lives in Marina del Rey now, but at the time of the video it wasn't
a long drive from where she and her BF lived in southwestern CT.
Once I figured out which park they were in, I realized it was right near one
of my usual travel routes along I-84, and thought "gotta go do that!"
It's part of the Hudson Highlands NY state park system, and here's the
official map.
In researching the park a little more, I also found a
third-party page
warning that the park was about to be *closed* for over a year while some
construction went on with the nearby roads.
Eeep!
With the initial target closing date at the beginning of 2018, I figured
that my only near-term chance to go see it was on my December run out of
state *IF* the weather was still amenable.
This somewhat tentative proposition worked out better than expected, as
a fairly overall warm Fall dawdled late over the Northeast and the forecast
for the day I planned this was to be unseasonably warm, if a bit wet.
I could deal with that for a quick visit on my way by, and laid out
the first legs of my journey accordingly.
I would overnight somewhere fairly near the park, bag it in the morning,
and be on my way before the predicted weather worsened.
Everything was pretty normal as I tooled along I-84 out of Waterbury,
bucking the usual onslaught of aggressive idiots that routinely
plague that corridor.
[Really, as I've noted before, it is one of the worst sections of
interstate I know of -- narrow, winding, ill-maintained, with lanes
that arbitrarily appear and disappear on short notice, and of course
infested with plenty of drivers who think they're more important than
everybody else as they zip between New York and Boston.]
But then, perhaps because of the warming trend that day, as I approached
within ten miles or so of the Hudson the landscape became blanketed by
fairly significant fog.
Oh crap, I thought as I pulled into someplace to overnight in Fishkill,
if this doesn't lift by morning I won't get much of a view.
Things seemed a bit clearer the next morning, however, so I saddled up
and continued according to plan.
It was still misting a little, but around 50F which is ideally comfortable
when one is actively hiking.
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