looking east, taking in the view
A couple brief excursions. I took a walk up Route 2 from where it was closed at Islip Saddle with Ben, Erin, Kendra, and Alexis on December 2, 2007. January 5-6 , 2008 I took a *very* brief winter camping trip with Peter and Helen. It snowed.
I’d been thinking of heading up towards Islip Saddle and maybe hiking Mt Islip, but Alexis was a little worried about her knees, so instead we just took a stroll up the closed portion of the road. This actually was pretty awesome, since it was oddly surreal to just walk up this quiet mountain road, with no worries of cars or anything. We found a huge log pile on the side of the road and decided to disregard some advice about climbing it.
Do not climb, kids!
We then continued up the road for a bit, and turning up the dirt road that leads towards Little Jimmy campground (…but where is Big Jimmy’s, that’s what I want to know!!). We just walked up this road for a bit, enjoying the air and stillness and view, and eventually just rested for a bit, turned around and went back. So it wasn’t quite the hike I had been looking for, but it ended up being a really nice day out anyway, with about 4.5 miles of walking.
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I can’t remember exactly the context that brought it up, but somehow both Peter and I expressed an interest in winter camping, and I said something about having a new four season tent, and somehow we went up to Peter’s camping spot that he knows about. Anyway, we drove up in the evening, and after sort of dithering around in the dark and the snow, Peter decided he knew which was the hillside we were looking for, and we pulled into a turnout, and got all our stuff out. The turnout , alas, was a bit smaller than I might have hoped since there was a pile of plowed snow sitting in it.
This wasn’t any sort of registered campground or anything, but since you can camp basically wherever you want in National Forests, that’s not really any problem. What *was* kind of special was walking uphill on a steep snow covered slope in the dark, with snowflakes swirling around. I just kind of followed in Peter’s (literal) footprints and trusted him to have any clue of where we were going. Once we achieved the ridge-line, he declared it found, and we just walked a long a bit, and found an openish area in which to set up the tent. I think we may have made some quick dinner, but we basically just went quickly to bed.
Really, it had snowed. Cold.
Then it started to really snow. We could hear the wind whipping against the tent and the snow beating against it, and feel the snow building up around the base of the tent. of course, this just helped keep us warmer. We slept through the night, got up, found the tree stump we had cooked on the night before, made some breakfast, and hightailed it back down the slope. Well, after I tried to go down it the wrong way at first, of course. Peter set me right.
We got back to the car, only to find a notice about not parking there, and finding that we had been snow-plowed partly in. Lacking a shovel , we used our hands and some friendly pieces of cardboard to dig away enough snow to manage to pull the car forward and put the chains on (now in the right size!) and slowly drove our way back down the mountain. We then made it to IHOP and had some delicious warm food in the mid 50s regular weather, and I even still had some snow stuck in my roofrack when I got home 🙂
In the IHOP parking lot
