A long weekend, five peaks, and a few scratches. . . and the July Grid is done.
Going shirtless, in shorts, and barefoot is not the recommended uniform for summer bushwhacking in the Catskills, but it keeps you cool when the temperatures head into the 90s, and not only that, it teaches you to be “mindful,” which is yoga-speak for paying attention. Better pay attention to where you step!
Everything was going swimmingly — until the third 400-meter interval at the track, and then a twinge on the left edge of the left foot. I cut things short and took an easy day (frustrating), returned to the track the following day and had a fine workout with five timed miles (couldn’t be more pleased) and the next day six miles around the park – all good, until the next morning, walking home along the river, and now the left foot is hurting for real. At 4.25 miles I wave down a taxi. This aborted walk gets recorded in the training log as code red: injury. It might be a stress fracture. I might soon be thumping around in boot or wheeling about on a knee scooter. The Grid for June and July is threatened, and not to mention a trip out west I’d just started planning.
I take five days off, during which time I sink into a funk: sleep late, mope around, watch bad movies, find myself driving below the speed limit. Perhaps I should scrap all my plans to run and hike and go back to the corporate world and get a job, as I’m bored out of my mind. But then I come up with some contingency plans: renew gym membership and swim in the pool, sign up to go bird watching, get back to work on the job hunt, see the Doctor and get an x-ray…
Then an even better idea occurs: Try the foot out on a short bushwhack in the Catskills where the forest floor is covered in leaves and dirt, a soft and forgiving surface, not the relentless cement which made the foot hurt walking home in the city. And since force is proportional to speed, I can limit impact by moving very slowly, which would not be hard to do since bushwhacks in the Catskills are always slow — suppose I target a 0.5 MPH pace: how much damage could that do?
Halcott Mountain comes to mind: it’s just a little over a mile to the summit. An interesting strategy to clarify my situation. In one scenario, the bushwhack goes fine, the X-ray comes back negative, and we’re off to the races again with another June peak scratched off the list. In the other scenario, things don’t go so well – in which case, the summer’s screwed anyhow, so what’s the difference.
“Now bid me run,” says Ligarius in Julius Caesar, “and I will strive with things impossible, yea get the better of them.”
And so with a shout for my loyal page Odysseus the Labradoodle, I lower my visor, level my lance, and ride into battle, to strive with things impossible and perhaps pointless and possibly even ridiculous, but so be it, this is my war, and I shall not give up quite yet….
Slowly whittling away the remaining peaks for April, the warmer weather finally making things at little easier — and not just for me, but birds everywhere calling and singing and flitting about from branch to branch or circling overhead. I started out this hike in high spirits, but well before the half-way point it was turning out to be more difficult than anticipated….
With a Nor’easter blowing in, it was touch and go, but I managed just barely to complete the Grid for October, and along the way was the chance to explore some off-trail ridges. These are magical places that make you feel like you’re walking across a suspension bridge, or the battlements of a castle. They give you a break from the claustrophobic tangles that blanket much of the Catskills, reveal the wild and soaring topography of the mountains, let you revel in space and light.
The mission was to complete the remaining twelve peaks needed to scratch the month of May off the Grid, and accordingly I arranged to take a week off of work. But the Rock The Ridge 50-miler left me with a sore ankle, which required a reduction in speed and mileage. In Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Walking,” he used the word “saunter” to describe the act of sallying forth into the woods, which was for him the adventure and escape of his day, and he likened this daily saunter to the motion of a stream flowing downhill to the ocean:
The saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.
— Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”
To complete the Grid for May, I’d need to saunter instead of run — and rather than pushing myself, I’d need to “flow” through the mountains, just like a stream, except I’d be going uphill as well as down…
I’d climbed Halcott several times from the west, but driving along route 42 one day I noticed a small parking area on Halcott’s eastern flank, where the road cuts through a steep-walled mountain gorge. This area is labeled on the map as “Deep Notch,” and appropriately so: the mountain walls rise 1,500 feet to the summit of Halcott’s neighbor, Sleeping Lion Mountain, reaching grades in some points of 100% (equivalent to a 45-degree incline). But if you could make it up to Sleeping Lion, it occurred to me, a long, flat ridge would take you straight to Halcott. This was intriguing…
There are times to go fast and times to go slow. Recently I headed off for the Catskills with the goal of bagging a few more peaks for my record of barefoot ascents. It had rained earlier in the morning and was still cloudy, but the rain had let up, the winds had calmed, and the temperature hovered in the mid-50s — conditions which encourage a person to relax, move at a more leisurely pace, and take in the sights. In no particular hurry, I was sauntering up the gravel road that leads to the saddle between Bearpen and Vly mountains, looking down at the ground to avoid stepping on sharp rocks, when I noticed a small green ball of puff lying on the ground.
The Long Brown Path 