Episode 219 - Listener Questions & Catskill Confessions

[00:00:29] The Bushwhacks were some of the worst days I've ever had in the mountains, or life really. Whereas Pantsy Mountain is totally opposite, it's a mountain on top of a crater. I think the weather challenges on this incident were particularly difficult. It is really the development of New York State. Catskills will respond to it.

[00:00:58] Listener Inside The Line, the Catskill Mountains Podcast. Sound is up there. We gotta change everything. You gotta keep talking at this time, Ted, because it gets... Oh, oh. And now your thing is off, now you're... Yeah. Well, I'm getting on the thunder box, okay? I'm ready to hop on the thunder box. We're in the thunder box. And do my thing.

[00:01:28] Alright, so we're gonna celebrate for a big occasion. So I'm popping this... Are you gonna pop open or me? Oh, you can go first. Alright. Am I supposed to have mine up here where I can... You can see it? Nice. So, congratulations on your two-year anniversary here, buddy. Yeah. I actually... Ready for this? I actually have a special hat. How's that? Nice. I made it on mine? I'm gonna tell you myself. Can you tell?

[00:01:58] Yeah. Well, yeah, I got the hat on the line and the patch I made in my little counterfeiting booth back here. Are you the one running the show back there? It's only you? Yeah, I am. Nice. Short-lived. Well, congratulations. Two-year anniversary. Yeah. Glad to have you on two years, man. What started out as, you know, like, I don't know, like a test came into an awesome, fantastic... A test? Yeah.

[00:02:25] That was a... I started off... You were like testing me? And after two years, you're finally accepting me? I'm finally... It's finally gone to it. What a judgy person. This is what I do for the listeners. Yeah, Tad's chugging it now. He's like, all right, this is what it is now. Yeah. But I'm still in the thunder box. Right? Yeah, we're still there. We're still there. So, great to have you on. Congrats to two years. Congrats to... Right now, it's like okay weather, I would say.

[00:02:54] Congrats to me, you say. I say I do it for my people, the fellow hikers out there just taking in nature one step at a time. Kudos to all of you. It's what keeps me going. Yeah, right. I mean, same thing here, you know, like as I said in the previous episode when we have awesome donors, sponsors, everybody who just supports the show, gives feedback about the show, encouraged me to keep going on.

[00:03:22] I mean, it's... I mean, in August, it'll be five years that this podcast is going, which is insane. I didn't... It feels like maybe like two or three years. It doesn't feel like five years. It's because I make your job easy. That's good. But no, I mean, Stosh does all the work, but I will say, if we don't get voted in again as the region's best podcast, I'm going to have to reassess this gig. That's all I'm saying. Okay.

[00:03:48] Good point. Good point. And it's in the show notes. We're trying to post daily. So forgive me if I don't do my stuff daily. So... What was that you said? Oh, do like my post daily to help you guys out to remember. I was focusing on the burp. Well, I mean, I'm sorry about that. Yeah, that's true. Here's to you, buddy. Here's to us. Cheers. Here's to Catskills, my friend. And he's paused. He'll be back.

[00:04:18] Yeah, I'm back. I just like, it's paused. This happens once in a while. You having thunderstorms? No, I went on the dark side of the moon there. I don't know. I don't know what the deal is. Maybe Kim Jong-un is taking over my wifi. I do like what it was. It's paused that on my side as you have the beer held up to the camera. So that's actually freaking cool. So, but how about we go on to this? So, all right, let's do it. You put this up. Do you want to go over this? Do you want me to go over this? This is pretty interesting stuff.

[00:04:47] You or I. I have my takedown of this at the bottom. Okay. Okay. So, I'll go over this quickly. So, river keeper. So, is this the Catskill River keeper? There's different forms of the river keeper, correct? I don't know which particular offshoot, if any offshoot, is being referred to here as the river keeper, but it might be the overall organization.

[00:05:13] Okay. So, this past week, the environmental advocacy group river keeper filed an article 78 lawsuit against the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, DEP, over landmark supplemental agreement regarding the management of the Catskill Delaware watersheds.

[00:05:31] Now, signed in December 2025, this deal was intended to streamline land use policies and help the city maintain its federal filtration avoidance determination FAD, which allows NYC to avoid building multi-billion dollar water filtration plants. Now, we've talked about the water filtration plants before when we're talking about the aqueducts, the reservoirs and such. Now, that would be crazy, which New York City does not have any filtration plants coming down from the Catskills.

[00:05:59] It's just all gravity fed coming down from the Catskills to New York City. River keeper's legal challenge centers on procedure failure. The group alleges that the DEP violated State Environmental Quality Review Act, CIRCA, signing by the agreement without a proper environmental impact study. Furthermore, the lawsuit highlights the frustration of the environmental community, which felt excluded from the final closed-door negotiations.

[00:06:26] Now, some believe this lawsuit is a tactical move for the river keeper to gain leverage and preserve rights rather than an outright rejection of the deal's substance. We'll talk about that in a second. We'll get more into Ted's smart talks about this because I'm just, I'm going with the flow. So, a major component of the new agreement and key point of local contention is the city's plan to permit renewable energy development on to vast watershed lands.

[00:06:54] So, I remember talking about a while ago that a lot of these, the New York City or New York State is planning to build these solar farms on DEC, DEP lands and to cut down forest, cut down state forest and stuff like that. So, NYC is shifting from a policy freezing development to one that allows for construction of publicly built solar and wind energy projects on city-owned lands.

[00:07:22] This initiative aligns with the city's aggressive net-zero goals. However, it has sparked a debate over which such industrial development might compromise water quality and the rural character of the Catskills, potentially undermining the very natural filtration the city has spent decades protecting. So, now we all, I mean, we're all on social media. We all hear about solar panels and stuff like that.

[00:07:48] The runoff from the rain can cause acidic flow into your soil, then can go into, you know, your creeks, your lakes, your rivers, stuff like that. I have read a lot about this. This is once when this hit the news, it was slow going. And now all of a sudden it has gained some insane traction that everybody's sharing this. And it's not just happening in the Catskills. It's happening up near the Adirondacks, happening over in the Finger Lakes. It's happening up near Rochester, Buffalo.

[00:08:18] I have seen this gaining traction and the public is pissed about this. And it's once again getting to be a big deal because the New York City, well, not New York City, the DECDEP, New York State brought these plans out to take down forest. It's to put solar panels up for the project flow of, I would say, more to the major cities and not to the towns.

[00:08:47] That there was a little bit of an outcry from the local towns. I heard it up here in Delhi, Hobart, Hancock, stuff like that, all around the Capden Reservoir. And I didn't hear anything else about that. And I followed this one guy that was doing it. Maybe I'll share his stuff. But after hearing that, it like exploded. Like there's this one lady online, Ted. I have to show you her Facebook.

[00:09:13] I reached out to her that her name is Alexandra something, Alexandria something. And she is just exploiting all of these areas, you know, that have these signs of like natural area. Wildlife birds are here. And then it has a sign right next to it being like, do not enter solar access only or stuff like that. And it's really weird. Like, it's just like, oh, wait a minute. This is a place for natural birds and for habitat.

[00:09:39] Yeah, right next to it, you have unrestricted or restricted access only to this company. It's really crazy. So crazy stuff that is gaining traction. And I guarantee you'll see more of it now. That's my stupid low-level person take. Tad, what about your take on this? I mean, you brought this a little bit more to my attention. So I just saw this news article in the Times Union around four o'clock today when I was, you know,

[00:10:08] scanning the news for Catskill-related stories. And this hit the radar screen. It is a big story. It has significant implications. So the New York State DEP that controls, monitors, and oversees the New York City watershed areas

[00:10:27] and the Catskills that feed the reservoirs, has been pushing back on the EPA in terms of providing clean drinking water. The EPA generally requires a level of filtration of the water supply.

[00:10:45] And the DEP, to its credit, has done a lot to prevent sediment and turbidity in the water that would require a multi-multi-billion dollar filtration plant to filter out that settlement. So last year we saw that the DEP was scaling back its efforts to purchase lands in the Catskill area that were part of the watershed that feeds the reservoirs.

[00:11:15] The DEP was scaling back on that program and was going to go about doing it in a different way than apparently before the end of the year. So one thing to point out is the agreement that the DEP would streamline and more standardize the assessment and review process to approve renewable energy products,

[00:11:41] such as solar panels, solar farms, and wind turbines, and the DEP-owned lands in the Catskill area. So one thing to point out is the agreement that the DEP entered into does not guarantee that these installations will be invisible from mapped overlooks like Wittenberg, Overlook Mountain, and Mount Tremper.

[00:12:09] While the agreement in the SECRA process, State Environmental Quality Review Act, creates a process to minimize what needs to be studied and streamline that process to assess and address these impacts, it does not create an absolute zero visibility mandate.

[00:12:32] Instead, the SECRA standard is mitigation measures that need to be implemented to avoid or minimize to the maximum extent practical, the visual impacts, but not to eliminate these impacts. So when there are certain practical, including economic constraints on what can be done to minimize a visual impact,

[00:12:59] the state environmental quality review process says you can pump the brakes and not go any further if you've done this to the maximum extent that's practical under the circumstances. As to the Wittenberg, Overlook, and Mount Tremper areas, which are all mapped viewpoints, they will likely be considered visually sensitive resources,

[00:13:25] and the DEP will be required to include these mapped areas in their visual assessments and theoretical line-of-sight assessments, but this does not mean that the solar installations or wind turbines will not be seen from atop Wittenberg. In fact, it is likely that you will see these installations from mapped viewpoints.

[00:13:55] One of the things that the materials I read report, that while some of these standardized review procedures have a limit on the line-of-sight that's studied, whether it's five miles, ten miles, or something else, where there are these visually sensitive resources, they will extend that line-of-sight analysis to include the visually sensitive resources.

[00:14:22] The problem is, if you've been listening closely, I've been talking about mapped viewpoints, but what do we do about the ones that aren't mapped? Right? We all have those spots in the Catskills that we've discovered that are exceptional views, maybe of a limited area, maybe of 90 degrees or 180 degrees, never really 360 degrees,

[00:14:49] but they give you a unique perspective and overlooked view on the Catskill Mountains and that viewshed. Those won't be included as part of the study because they're not mapped locations. So arguably, when they site these locations for solar fields and wind turbines, which generally are pretty visible from wherever they put them in, they're not going to take into account, or they're going to give little account

[00:15:19] to the visual impact on unmapped areas. So the bottom line is that this agreement's been reached, it's going to streamline the process, maybe make it faster and more cost-effective to site these locations, and the legal experts are of the opinion that the reason Riverkeeper started the lawsuit

[00:15:47] is not to win the lawsuit. Because if they win the lawsuit, then what happens is DEP just doubles back and goes through more of a secret analysis to adopt this agreement and maybe making some modifications to it. But if the DEP wants to adopt such agreement, they're going to end up adopting such an agreement. What I think the Riverkeeper's aim is, the strategic aim that they talked about in the news article,

[00:16:16] is somewhere along the course of the litigation to reach an agreement with the DEP as to maybe what areas would be completely off-limit for all types of renewable energy sources, areas that would be off-limits for wind turbines, because you really can visually screen a wind turbine no matter what you do, and other mitigation measures that can be mandated

[00:16:43] and get away from every time the DEP comes in and wants to locate a solar farm or wind farm someplace that Riverkeeper doesn't have to mobilize its limited resources to fight that application. Because at the end of the day, Riverkeeper doesn't have enough money to fight the DEP in each and every instance where the DEP

[00:17:09] wants to site a solar farm or a wind turbine. So it's an interesting story, interesting case, interesting situation. Stay tuned. It is further evidence that the Catskill Mountains and the Catskill Park that you've come to love is changing. There you go. That's what we got. I mean, I don't want to... I hate to be bad news, but this is shit.

[00:17:37] I like how they asked... They said like Tremper and Wittenberg. Like, you know, the places they have wanting to develop these solar panels are more northwest, up in the Pacton area, and stuff in the Delaware area. So if you go up to Balsam Lake Mountain, you could see all over towards that area. Well, I'm the one to put those three locations in. Oh, okay, okay. Sorry. Yeah, but like you said, you can pick Balsam Lake Mountain.

[00:18:05] I know a plenty unmarked viewpoints out there, actually on some of those areas that are in the northern part, the Irish hills, if you will, of the Catskills. You know, maybe they're going to go out there. I don't know. Yeah. And, you know... Good. Maybe there's no DEP land over there, but the problem is, once you let the DEP get their foot in the door, how far is it going to go? Exactly. Maybe they start in the western Catskills

[00:18:34] and then they realize that this is going to be a big moneymaker for them and they'll want to do other areas. It's a lot of DEP land out there. Yeah. I mean, most of them... Which is good and, you know, arguably bad, maybe for this reason. I tend to be a proponent of, and we'll get to that later on when we talk about Jeff Joss' question. I like the DEP land. I like they bought up all that road frontage and, you know, and are preserving it for us. But if they're going to start throwing up

[00:19:04] huge solar fields, hmm, that's kind of a bummer. And then they're going to restrict access for us. It's not going to be New York resident property. They're going to be like, you can't climb here. Like... It'll be fences. It'll be fences. All right. So what I want to take on this is that, you know, I, once again, we talk about wind turbines, solar energy, green energy. Could be awesome. It's great, per se, you know, in places like, I would say the desert and stuff,

[00:19:33] where there's no existence of really animals or, you know, stuff like that. I've seen wind turbines out in California, Tad, you have as well. Just fields of them. Coming to New York, we very rarely see them. I was up on Bramley Mountain on the day of the lighting of the fire towers. And I look west and I see these flashing lights. And I'm like, what the fuck is that? And I look and I'm like,

[00:20:01] I ask Ann Roberti, who was with the Bramley Mountain Fire Tower project. I'm like, are those the wind turbines in Hancock? And she's like, yes, they are actually. So I look on my map. I'm just like, I'm like, shit, that's like, that's pretty far away. And it's 53 miles away by the crow flies. So something, up on top of a fire tower, you can see is 53 miles away. I mean, this is not, we're not talking about, you know, elevated terrain and stuff like that,

[00:20:31] but there's still hills there that I can see 53 miles away. So five miles compared to 53 miles. Like, yikes. And then you say DEP land. If you go look of all your places, you love Tad, the streams and stuff, the small access area, the thin areas are DEP areas. I mean, I wouldn't think they would build on streams and stuff like that, but just like the, once again, like the, you know,

[00:20:59] the chat about the runoff from the rain, like we've gotten a little bit more excess rain and snow. So from those solar panels, you know, a lot of, a lot of things are coming into play. And I don't know if we have the manpower up here, up in upstate, you know, the two, to stop this because, you know, one town of 2000 people can't stop the New York state, DEP, DEC, New York state.

[00:21:29] We can just say our stuff and they can be like, yeah, we're going to put permits in here and limit your access. Good luck. Yeah. Well, at the end of the day, it's certainly going to be a game changer. Who knows how many and where they're going to start developing these. But as, uh, AI consumes more and more electricity, we're going to have to augment our electrical generating resources.

[00:21:57] And wind and solar seem like natural things to do. Ironically, they're not so natural out in the wilderness environment, but you know, this area of New York state, the places to put these are very limited. So there are those constraints that would just be nice to see some way of harmony, putting some harmony to this. I'm a, I'm not a fan of these huge solar farms.

[00:22:24] I really wouldn't mind seeing some wind turbines out there. I got to admit, they're pretty, they're pretty cool to see. Yeah. I mean, you know, obviously they're not natural on the one hand, but when you think of what they're preventing, you know, in terms of air pollution and other things, it's, it's a decent trade off if you have to make it, but solar fields, they just take up so much land area. They, they displace a lot of the animal habitat, uh,

[00:22:55] large solar installations. Like you said, they're, they're better off for areas where the terrain is flat, maybe with a long history of farming in New York state, and it's not being farmed anymore. It's easy to justify putting in solar farms there. And we talked too much about this. So yeah, let's move on. This is supposed to be like a good episode. My like two year anniversary. And you're, this is like the big buzzkill. Well, if it's two years anniversary, you might as well pass out. So start drinking,

[00:23:25] like just pass out. Like this hiker did on a, up on ball mountain fire tower in the Adirondacks. Yeah. That is, I mean, I'm surprised this wasn't the cat skills that this happened. So, uh, April 18th. So 10 days ago, 36 year old hiker passed out on a top of ball mountain fire tower in the Adirondacks for state. DC forest Rangers responded after the witnesses reported the hiker had been drinking with another person. Rangers said they saw the hiker dump something out of a bag and parent attempt

[00:23:54] to hide it, raising concerns about possible drug use. Rangers, uh, administered Narcan, but had no effect. Cruise and multiple road system were used to carry the unconscious hiker down the trail and transport them to an old Ford ambulance. The hiker was awake and stable condition the next day. And then, uh, I will have the DEC report in the info in our, in our notes. So, yeah, these fire towers and they're, they promote these fire tower challenges.

[00:24:24] And all of a sudden, you know, we have people getting naked, uh, with shrooms on tremper. We have a guy passing out with alcohol on, on this mountain. Uh, there was another incident on tremper. There was actually like two separate instances on tremper. I think so. I'm promoting the wrong stuff. Yeah. Well, hikers just want to have fun. I guess so. I mean, that's a little bit too far. I mean, I would drink. I think the guy was up there celebrating my two year anniversary, frankly. True.

[00:24:54] True. He's like, two years. Cheers. Yeah. Ah, I mean, earlier I talked about, so just wanted to, to update everybody on that good old incident that happened. Remember to look back on that Mount tremper incident where like two guys, three guys went up and then one of them, they were all on mushrooms. And some, one of them thought he was being a murder by the other one, getting attempted murder, stuff like that. It was absolutely phenomenal. I will try to find that and post it in the show notes. So earlier I talked about, you know,

[00:25:24] getting the like, like zoning and stuff like that and having restrictions and stuff. So big, uh, the past couple of weeks when we get out the caterskill clove VUM and the Adirondack VUM, there has been some insane pushback on the, not only just a clove, but more in the Adirondacks because they are looking to do this all over the Adirondacks. And I have just seen on all these local town pages on all these small pages,

[00:25:51] just a lot of resistance of this, especially from the hikers, you know, who want to get up there and do their peaks. Want to go on a hike and stuff and experience this, this, and it has just gotten crazy pushback. And, you know, I have a feeling we're going to see this, you know, once again, $600,000, that was like 120,000. Uh, hard ciders that they had to write like one, two, yeah.

[00:26:20] That they could have donated to us to do the same exact review. I would have been like, yeah, yeah. Let's just like put permit systems and gates up. That's, that's it. And then I, I could have for 5,000, I would have had Google AI generated work for you. Exactly. Yeah. And then, you know, it would have saved all sorts of money and we could have put that into the bridge over the, the West branch of the never sink. Yeah. It's, you know, whether it happens the next five years, the next 10 years,

[00:26:49] the next 15 years is the popularity and accessibility of these wilderness and hiking areas increases. Limitations are going to need to be imposed on hiking traffic. And maybe what we should say is instead of the DEC having spent $600,000 on a study that basically was designed to justify the restrictions that they want to impose,

[00:27:18] they ought to spend 50,000 on the study and $550,000 on building some more loop trails in the Catskills. And when you, when you start building some nice loop trails out there and maybe promoting, uh, some of the, the lower elevation mountains, the mountains between 3,000 and 3,500 feet, um, maybe go so far as to put ready.

[00:27:47] This is a left field idea. Um, create some view sheds, cut some trees, give some people, um, like they have the fire tower challenge, give them the Catskill view shed or whatever, challenge where they can go out and hike 10 or 12 mountains that are over 3,000 feet, under 3,500 feet to disperse that hiking traffic elsewhere. Um, give people another challenge to do,

[00:28:14] and maybe they'll take some of the pressure off the un, unmarked trailed summits and elsewhere just to disperse the load. And, and it's not rock and science tree to, to figure that out, but they, you know, just telling everybody that they need to get permits, it's really not going to work. You're going to get people out there. Maybe it's going to force hikers to do what I do and just bushwhack where they want to go. And I mean, when the Catskills that, uh,

[00:28:44] I mean, that's more of an option. The Adirondacks, I really don't think that's a, that's an incredible option unless you go up like the slides and stuff, because we know that the Adirondacks is absolutely insane thickness with their trees. All's I know is you're driving me to drinking with all this. Hey, you know, I am a person of viewpoints. You know that. And I, Ted, have I mentioned my, my thoughts on, you have, but you've never produced a list, Dosh. Oh, and that's why,

[00:29:10] that's why we're having this problem in the Catskills is because you never cashed the check for $600,000 published your list. I'm well, once again, I'm holding back the list. Number one, uh, number two, I'm holding back the name because I got to think it's an amazing name, but, uh, you know, as we, I chatted earlier, I don't know if I, I'm pretty sure I chatted with you, Ted about the vanishing viewpoints that we have and that's going on.

[00:29:38] And that is in the Catskill park visitor units or unit management plan. The whole Catskill park is that to keep marked viewpoints from the 1980s, 1990s up to date. And that has not happened. It's only happened in a couple of spots. Balsam Lake is losing it. We have Thomas Cole, the bottom of Thomas Cole is losing it. We have, uh, Peekamoose mountains losing it. Uh, there is Table Mountain that, that lower part on Table Mountain's losing it.

[00:30:06] I have a bunch that are losing it. And, and now we know why. We know why. Because they spent 500, $600,000 on a unit management plan. No. So they can put solar farms out there. Oh, there you go. Yeah. I mean, I mean, it takes, it takes $600,000 to make a viewpoint when you got to cut seven trees. Strategically cut. I mean, I understand, I know being a trail maintainer, I know what trees you can and can't cut, you know, with this, but I mean, with the DEC, I know there's a little bit more restriction, you know,

[00:30:35] it has to be this sort of tree. You can only push it this way. It can't be this many years old. It's, it's a little bit more restriction, but as we saw with Slide Mountain, you know, they opened up that like crazy. And it's been, I, to me, it's one of the best viewpoints in the Catskills. Cause you just feel like you're on top of the world. So, you know, Peekamoose is a, as a viewpoint that, you know, you would like to be like, Hey, you want to come to the blue hole? It's full up, but go up to this viewpoint. It's absolutely phenomenal.

[00:31:05] Like, but no, they're losing. But that's, but that's also an area where, look, they've got that improved parking lot over there on Peekamoose road. And what they could do is they could actually put a trail out to Vanwick. Continue that to table. Vanwick has got a great viewpoint. People just don't get to it because there's no trail, but you build a trail out there. It's a nice trail, you know, with some switchbacks going up the steep slope of Vanwick,

[00:31:35] then continue over to table. That's a nice run from table to Vanwick. Table's got a little viewpoint. Go over to Peekamoose. You've got a couple of viewpoints there actually that you could tie in. And what do you end up with? A nice loop trail. That's going to take some traffic off of other mountains. Yep. Excellent. Again, these viewpoints, man, it's, but yeah, I think that's a $600,000 idea.

[00:32:03] And I hope the DEC puts the check in the mail and sends it to us. Yeah. We just, we just in a matter of 60 seconds solved a big problem. Exactly. You're right here. We're that good. Right. Leave it to the hikers. We'll figure it out. I mean, last, last question, Ted, I have a question for you. We have a lot of questions later on, but okay. All right. The last question of this section, you know, I have a plan for battling these ticks, this tick problem that we have.

[00:32:32] Put a bunch of chickens on a leash. I can hike up with them for four chickens, a leash hike with them to the summits. Boom. You think so? You read that the chickens, what they eat, the ticks is that they eat the text. The chickens will eat the text. They, they love insects. They love small stuff. They'll find it. You just gotta go super slow. But you know what? I think everybody hiking with four or five chickens up to the summits. We meet, you know, we, we converse,

[00:32:59] we battle this tick fricking bullshit going on and the battles won. And then everybody will tell us the same thing for post hike brews and bikes. They, they just roasted some chicken after the hike. I know not even that eggs. They get eggs sale, like egg sandwiches. They're going to be. Oh, there you go. Like it's all that's, it's simple. Another great idea from your team at inside the line. I mean,

[00:33:23] it's just more reasons you guys need to vote for us as the best regional podcast and problem solvers. I, I seriously do not know why we are like co-commissioners of the DEC. We're not co-commissioners. We should. This is ridiculous. So I think given my two years on the podcast, your five years coming up, we have the credentials to open up our own consulting firm. Now we can be environmental consultants to the DEC, get like a contractor's number,

[00:33:54] submit proposals and do work for the DEC. I'm for it. Let's do it. Yeah. Everybody let's get in. Everybody want to chip in? Let me know. We'll, we'll start this. Yeah. All right. So once again, Tad's two years. He would like to thank the month of supporters, Bob McClend, Chris Garabian, Eric, Azario, Jeff Jotz, Vicky Ferrer, Mikey S, Henry Burmeister, John Kaminsky, Summit Seekers, Desert City Radio, Betsy A, Denise W,

[00:34:24] Vanessa, Jim C, and thank you to our new member, Oskana Nichols. Thank you guys very much for supporting the show. Really appreciate it. Once again, if you support the show, it's not just going into the, back into the podcast, it's going back into the Catskills. We've donated so much money and so much time to back in the Catskills to make this place a better place. And that's what you are doing when you're supporting the show as a member and as a sponsor. And folks, check out Oskana's Insta feed.

[00:34:54] I think it's Catskills ever after. You know, thank her for being a sponsor and like a bunch of her photos. It looks like she's really into Catskill hiking and that's great to see. It's a catchy name. I love it. Yeah. You know what also is catchy? Our sponsors, like Outdoor Chronicles Photography. Molly from Outdoor Chronicles Photography specializes in adventure couple photography,

[00:35:19] and she'll immortalize your moments amidst the stunning landscapes of the Catskills, Adirondacks, and the White Mountains. She will craft timeless images that reflect unique bond in nature's grandeur and bark on an unforgettable photographic journey with Outdoor Chronicles Photography. Don't hesitate to get a hold of Molly on all platforms. Now, Molly's stuff is top-notch shit. She is up in the Adirondacks, the Whites, the Gunks. She's all over the place.

[00:35:46] Check out her stuff because it is amazing to see and it's absolutely stunning. And, you know, if you're not going to get married and you just want some amazing pictures, ask her and she will do it. So, also, if you want to be out in the wilderness, you should check out Trailbound Project. They have expert-led hiking and backpacking education programs that offer unparalleled outdoor experiences. Whether you're a beginner or seasoned adventurer,

[00:36:14] join us at Trailbound Project to learn essential skills, explore stunning trails, and connect with nature. Start your journey today with Trailbound Project and unlock the wonders of the great outdoors. Thank you guys for supporting the show. Really appreciate it. All right. So, who was really outdoors this previous week? So, mention the podcast on one of your hikes through social media and we'll chat about it on the show. Tag us by typing at

[00:36:42] ITLCatskillMTMPodcast on your post or send me a message of what you did. So, I don't know about how this works on Facebook. So, Facebook, it's really weird. So, first and foremost, Tracy is back. She's back out. PinkPony18 was on Panther and Giant Ledge for Earth Day. Doing Leave No Trace and cleaning up on the trail with Moe and Vicky. So, appreciate you guys. Thank you much very, very much who did that hike. I remember they said they cleaned about two pounds of trash on that hike.

[00:37:12] So, that's a lot. That is a lot and it sucks. But hey, Giant Ledge, one of the most popular. Ted, do you have you ever seen anybody say it's Giants Ledge? No. You really haven't? You need to get on Facebook. Really? People have said Giants Ledge. And I'm like, why? It doesn't say Giants anywhere on any map in the world. It says Giant. Yeah. I'm sorry. I have a little rant. Yeah.

[00:37:42] I hope their map reading skills are better than that. So. Yeah. Awesome. Nigel, a.k.a. Farrell Howells, did Russ Hunter and Southwest West Hunter on a beautiful day. Thank you, Niall. It's good to hear from you. Jeff Jotz and Orla tackled some gnarly stuff in New Jersey Highlands and seeing the beautiful skyscrapers, which I am, I got to get down there and see that, you know, I'm not a city guy,

[00:38:07] but I would love to see the Manhattan skyline from New Jersey or New York or somewhere up in the Hudson Highlands. And then they were out and explored more of the New Jersey Highlands as well. So Jeff Jotz and Orla are back at it. And it's good to hear from you guys. Good to see stuff. Joanne, a.k.a. Beyond Blazes, was up at the Mount Tramper Fire Tower and was also at Pelnor Hollow the next week. So Joanne, once again, thank you for hooking us up with.

[00:38:37] Emily. Emily from Panthera about the mountain lion project that they have going in. And I heard the drop off is going to be within the next couple months of the 30 to 50 mountain lions that you suggested that could be dropped off on Grand Mountain. Yeah. I was up there prepping that area this, this weekend. It's coming along. Deer carcasses all over the place. Yeah. Well, we're, yeah, we're starting to bring in some, you know, small game. So the mountain lions feel at home right away. Good call.

[00:39:07] Good call. But, but also going back to Joanne's, uh, hike at Penn Lord hollow, she's working on the all trails and, uh, she did mention she biked and hiked that. I think she had like an eight mile bike ride before her hike. So she's, she's out there putting in her trail miles and getting a few bike miles in as well. Good to see. Nice. Nice. I'm glad people are doing that. It's a good rate to, uh, save, you know, energy or save, uh, gas and save, uh, you know,

[00:39:37] multiple trips. That's right. And miles really, it's really about the miles. So it's also good to hear from hiker Joey NY again, haven't heard of his stuff in a, in a while being in the cats go. So he was up on blackhead, then did the soap is fire tower and then did Bramley and mountain Santa yesterday. So it sounds like, it sounds like he's going after his fire tower challenge as well. So good for him. Good to hear back from me. A hike or hiker Joey, Joe, uh,

[00:40:04] he was back on one of the previous episodes in the hundreds. I forgot what episode. So it was good to hear Joe, Joe T. Joe, Joe knows hiking upstate and Western New York, like central New York and Western New York. If you ever need any, uh, pro tips on where to go up there, reach out to, uh, Joe. He knows what he's talking about. Oh yeah. Hell yeah. So Sean scion 72 was mowing his lawn all the time. And that's about it. Not really.

[00:40:34] He was up at van wicker mountain, Vander wacker mountain, looking back at his house and then went up good now mountain a couple of days later. And I don't know if he's looking at his house, but both, uh, I, I know good now mountain. I've been up there. It's an absolutely amazing stunning fire tower. Cause you get to look at the high peaks of the Adirondacks, but Vander wacker. It sounds like something Sean would like to do a lot. Oh, Oh, that's bad. We might be getting sued on my second year anniversary. I know. Sorry, Sean. I'll have,

[00:41:04] you can, you can come down and mow my, uh, 0.34 acre lawn. That's that's I'll mow your lawn. But could you, could you imagine having that last name? Vander wacker. Yeah. I'm assuming it's somebody's last name. True. True. Sean will come out with a, what it is, where it's from. So, so Todd T bold outdoors was up on storm King mountain and was enjoying the beautiful views as well. Uh, uh,

[00:41:33] was up on mountain Siantha, uh, enjoying the fire tower challenge as well. A lot of people are starting to do that stuff. I, you know, you can drive up there, but you know, a lot of people look like they're hiking up there. So that's cool. So it's a simple hire, but it's like a, it's a simple hike up a row going up to the top. It's like, I'm pretty sure it's an overall, I think around 2.1 miles. So, um, let's see, Richie, Richie nature escapes.

[00:42:01] Took his friend on a ramp forging adventure to his secret spot. Seems like that's, it's the time of year. It's spring. So, well, if you took your friend there, how much of a secret is it now? Oh, who knows? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Now it's going to escape. Good job, Rich. Sorry, he's taking a swig. So Scott, uh, AKA Catskill mountain brew was doing South double top from black bear. So it's definitely always a challenge from there, but Scott, uh, chose to do a pretty nice, brutal challenge. So Ted,

[00:42:31] I know. Go ahead. When did he do that hike? Ooh, that was, uh, two days ago. So it was Sunday. Yeah. So I'm going to imagine that he ran into some really, really wet terrain because as you go out that road where it no longer is open to motor vehicles, once you get out towards the bend and that road, it just gets so wet.

[00:42:59] There's some beaver dams out there. Yeah. I'd be interested in reaching out to him and seeing what, what the conditions were. Cause I know the last time I was out there, it was really, really swampy. So black bear road comes from the black bear road. You're good. Yeah. You're on, um, frost Valley road and you turn a left, uh, as you're coming out of Denning, um, okay.

[00:43:31] Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. I see. Oh, okay. Okay. That's also part of the Finger Lakes trail. Yep. All right. I don't think I've approached it from there. So went up on the Hardingburg. Did he, I, yeah, what a probably a Hardingburg trail, but never sink. Okay. Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, when the surface conditions are right, that's not a bad way to get out to South double top. Um, actually that road Stosh, you should know this. That's the access road we're using to get the mountain lions out to South double top. Yes. Cause that was once a road.

[00:44:00] I remember that was once a road that went in between possum lake and Graham, correct? Or possum lake and double top one or the other. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it goes, it goes along. What is it? the Mexico brook or something like that. Ah, yes. Uh, Gulf of Mexico. Yeah. Gulf of Mexico. Then there's that sketchy bridge on the road, right. That should have fallen to pieces into pieces like 20 years ago. But it didn't. Yeah. But that's why we're going to, we're going to bring in the mountain lions in from the other end, the end that Richie took,

[00:44:30] or actually the, the end that Scott took. And we'll be able to get all of them out there safely. Correct. So be happy out there. One last person I want to recognize is that, uh, hopefully he's reading this at the time or listening to this. So Steve environmentality should be finishing his 3,500 hike this Saturday. So he's going to be doing the six. So Steve, I don't know when you're going to complete it.

[00:44:59] If you have completed by this time, you were listening, but congratulations on your 3,500 club completion. That's awesome. Good. Good. Glad I hiked with you before. You're awesome. Keep doing what you're doing, buddy. Have a good time. Yeah. Thank you everybody for, for tagging us on the show. Really appreciate it. Get out there and have some fun because who knows what this week's weekend is going to be like, but just be prepared. So, so also buy us a hard cider to support the show. If we,

[00:45:28] if you think we're doing a good job and you want to show us some poor and the cat skills, some support boss, coffee, hard, say, buy us a coffee or hard cider. I'm buying a coffee. Dot com. Oh, shit. Also. Sorry. rate the show. If you can rate the show any way possible, whatever Spotify, Apple podcast, whatever, uh, do it. Five stars is the best. And then only talk about how our mountain lion restoration project is the top notch in the world. So,

[00:45:58] and be great. Uh, so Tad, finally, what are you drinking? You said you had a special brew for tonight. Yeah.

[00:46:36] It's a size can. All right. All right. Yeah. Only available at gas stations. So yeah, it's a good beer. They call it sticky and tropical. I'd agree with the tropical part. I don't know what it means for a beer to be sticky. Frankly, right? I was just going to say down pretty easy. It's not sticking anywhere. Yeah. It's a pint size. That's what it is. One pint. Oh, industrial arts brewing torque. Hazy double IPA brewed in Deacon,

[00:47:05] New York. Nice. Uh, what do you got Stosh? I got a good old awestruck strawberry lemonade. The champagne, the champagne. Yeah. Yeah. It's the twist of rhubarb. It sets that at that with the truth of a 6.3, uh, alcohol volume with 16 fluid ounces. So a little bit bigger. So it's nice. It's nice. So awesome.

[00:47:31] I probably won't be doing any talking on this next one because I haven't been out for previous hikes, but today I know, uh, I went, uh, I did, uh, my men's social group on Sunday. We went to the USS Slater in Albany. It's pretty cool today. Today. I did go. I sort of got out. I went out and did disc golfing that Nathaniel Cole state forest, beautiful day, very windy. I was kind of wishing I was up in the mountains enjoying the wind, but it was a,

[00:47:57] one of those days of like 65 degrees with the wind chill brings it down to 60. So it's very, very nice. It's very, very beautiful. So great day to be out. So Ted, what about you? What are your previous hikes consist of? Okay. So, um, you know, normally I hike on Saturdays, but this past Saturday, the, uh, weather forecast, uh, was for rain. Most of the day, it started around here at 10 a.m.

[00:48:26] and rained on and off consistently throughout the day. So that prompted me obviously to go out hiking on Sunday. And, you know, I was kind of like, uh, I had a certain hike in my mind all week long. I was kind of like fixated on hiking up West kill via one of the drainages, which would be a difficult drainage to get to. Cause it's, it's kind of blocked in by a couple of private properties.

[00:48:53] So you'd have to go uphill and then drop back down to get to it. And I was all set up to do that hike and, um, had the bike loaded on the Jeep the day before, yada, yada, yada. And I go out Sunday morning to, uh, back out of the garage with the Jeep and the bike on the back of that. And for whatever reason, I grabbed the bike on the bike rack and I shook the bike.

[00:49:18] And I realized that the axle for the front tire had fallen out somewhere when I was driving home last with the bike on the Jeep. So. It rattles itself out from the vibrations. Yeah. Apparently it's kind of a weird thing. I've never had that happen to me before. So, you know, I, I took the bike off the Jeep. I took the rack off the Jeep. I hopped in the Jeep. I started driving down the road and mentally processing what hike I was going to do.

[00:49:47] Given the fact that we had got a lot of rain over the past couple of days, that maybe this drainage hike really wasn't the best thing to do anyway. And it's a good thing that the bike had the bad axle. Cause I would have spent the whole day, I get my feet wet, hiking up some drainage. And I started recalibrating what I was thinking of doing and trying to a make it fit into my grid 2.0 and make it a fun and interesting hike and hit something that I hadn't done before.

[00:50:12] So I decided to hike West kill mountain from Sprucedon road, parked at the Western end of the devil's path and set out on that trail, which in all of the Catskill hiking I have done, which according to some people, namely my wife has been a lot of Catskill hiking. I've only done that trail four times. Right?

[00:50:41] So at any rate, I, I did have noticed when I've done that trail that off to the East of the trail, very early on, you start to see, uh, old farmer stone walls in the spruce forest up there. So that was my aim is to, uh, hike out the devil's path just a little ways. I don't even know if it was a half a mile and then, uh,

[00:51:07] start to head up slope to the East to cut the, across the corner of the private property line and continue up that way. I will say two things about that forest. It was a, a well-established, very healthy and hardy spruce forest. There were a ton of old, when I say old, very old roads there. And because I was really only planning on hiking Westkill,

[00:51:36] I did take, um, a significant amount of time to just stay on the roads when I could and follow them versus, you know, just making a beeline to hit the ridge and then get up to the devil's path again. So I, I kind of, you know, went from one road to another road, et cetera. Finally made my way up the Western side of that Ridge, which again, was that entire Ridge, uh,

[00:52:04] to the West side was spruce trees. And then when you get to the top of the Ridge, it turns into your typical, uh, ridge line, hardwood forest. And there's no spruce trees on the Eastern side of that Ridge. I thought it was kind of weird like that, whether that's how they planted it way back when, because you do see a lot of spruce forest plantations along Sprucedon road. I don't know.

[00:52:34] I just found that interesting. Nonetheless, the hike along that Ridge to the devil's path, uh, proper, you know, fairly uneventful. There was no rock outcroppings. It was just, you know, relatively typical of that type of terrain that you found, find elsewhere, got to the devil's path, bang to left, headed up over St. Anne's, uh, mountain, uh, the rocks were wet, kind of slippery, um, made my way towards West pill,

[00:53:04] West kill. I'm going up West kill and around 3,100, 3,200 feet. Uh, I come Ross to backpackers heading West coming downhill from West kill. And we chatted a little bit and they were obviously cold. I offered them some gear, um, and told them, you know, you can take anything of mine. You want my jeeps down there in the parking lot. The doors are open. Just throw it in there when you get there. And they declined.

[00:53:33] But the reason that they were almost shivering cold was because it had snowed. Overnight on top of West kill and presumably elsewhere and the cats skills. And the snow was still sticking to the trees. You can see when I've got up there, a lot of ice was on the trees, but now the temperature was in the mid forties. It's all melting. So they had come through that and just wanted to get through there without stopping to put on their rain jackets.

[00:54:01] And they just got soaked and we're getting cold, cold because they were coming downhill. So what I did knowing the effect it had on them, you know, within not even five minutes of they're going their way. Am I going my way uphill? I threw on my, my rain jacket and headed up through there. I did post on my story feed on Instagram, a little video showing a snow covered evergreen with, you know, what looked like rainwater,

[00:54:30] but it was really just melt water falling off these trees. Nonetheless, you know, hit West kill. Once I got to the summit of West kill, I just banged and immediate left and hike that ridge down to Sprucedon road, which I've done that quite a few times now. And it's, it's more interesting terrain than that first ridge. I hiked, although the forest, um, isn't as kind of like warm and mysterious as a,

[00:54:58] a spruce grove that was on the other ridge. But one of my reasons of going down there is a, it was shorter and B I wanted to explore that area. Cause one of my next bushwhacks up West kill is going to come up through that drainage. So I wanted to see what it likes. And it looks like it is going to be very ledgy coming up through there. So that's good to know. Nonetheless, I made it down to Sprucedon road a little bit before noon. So my,

[00:55:27] where do I wrote it down here? Cause I know you like this stuff. My total hike time was, uh, it was six, 6.15 miles, ascent 2,219 feet hiking time, three hours, 16 minutes. And I, so I did a little road walk out to Sprucedon road. First car that went by me was a dark blue Subaru Forester with one of those cargo things on the top of it. And I took a photograph of it because they didn't pick me up and I was

[00:55:56] hitchhiking. If I ever see that car again in the people. Yeah. I'm just saying I control all the mountain lions and the Catskills. You don't want me to be your enemy. Get them out of them. Yeah. Right. Trained. So, but the next vehicle was this guy, John, who was driving a Chevy crew cab pickup truck. He had his dog in the back. He was, uh, had hiked slide mountain earlier that day,

[00:56:22] drove over to West kill brewing to get some fresh cat or skill IPA. I think that's what their IPA is from the West kill brewing. He sees me with my thumb out. He stops very cool. Gives me a ride down to my car. I get to my car and I say to myself, Jesus, it's like only noon. I'm not going home. I got to do another hike. So I, I say to myself, I'm going to Van Doosens.

[00:56:50] I'm picking up a brew and I'm going to bang out fly and bear pen. Right. I can do a summit brew on bear pen. Beautiful day. Why not? Right. So I get down to the end of Spruxton. I bang a right. And it occurs to me, maybe I'll keep fly and bear pen for another day. Like it's an easy hike next year when I'm trying to close out the month of April, easy hike to do. What should I do? I decided on Hawk it.

[00:57:19] Of course it's right there. Yeah. So I turn around, I do Hawk it, but I, I can't, I can't justify doing it from route 42. Right. How many times can you hike Hawk it from route 42? Hmm. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Right. So next thing you know, I'm driving over to the parking area at Elk Creek on Elk Creek road. Do you know where I am?

[00:57:48] The opposite side of the, the 42 parking area. Yeah. I'm on the West side of Hawk it. And that takes you like fricking years to get to though. Well, on the one hand, it does take you years. If you go back out to 42 and come up from 42, but I went through all of the, like the gravel roads to get there. Cause I'm in my team. Yeah. It was kind of fun. It was like eight or nine miles. And you know, it was a fun drive over. Um, Kelsey P would appreciate that, you know,

[00:58:17] cause I was just kind of cruising along in gravel mode, having fun. Uh, I get out to the parking area and I know what, uh, Joanne, um, beyond blazes can identify with. She's been out there before many times. It used to be super sketchy out there with all the posted signs and cameras and don't go here. Don't go there. Stay here. You know, yada, yada, yada. And the, there's like half as many signs now.

[00:58:47] And actually there's like, it's okay to walk on the, the road that goes out before they kind of left it ambiguous. I think the DEC might've gotten after them. So at any rate, I hiked out the road. There's a lot of old relics out there, old foundations, old stone foundations, a lot of old glassware bottles out there, uh, signs of prior usage and farming. But I get out there, I cross Elk Creek and I'm realizing,

[00:59:17] that I'm leaving out of the storyline that when I got out of my Jeep at the Elk Creek parking area, do you know what I had to deal with for the first time this year? Dicks. Bugs. Bugs. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were over there. They were out. I didn't come across any on West kill at the parking area along, uh, any of the, the hiking I did out there. But when I got over to Elk Creek, yeah,

[00:59:47] I had bugs up to like 2,800 feet. So I had the bug spray in the Jeep. I put some on, they, you know, after about 15 minutes, the bugs start ignoring it and they get closer to you and become more annoying. But nonetheless, that's a pleasant hike going up that way. It's worthwhile to do. You, um, um, I reached the ridge between sleeping lion and Hawkett where it is. Generally speaking,

[01:00:15] I'm going to say 40 to 60% covered with Prickers, uh, pretty densely. Um, but nonetheless, you, you know, I call it the Tom Martone trail, you know, cause I'm sure he spends a lot of time up there. Uh, but you know, it's, it's intermittent the trail. And as long as you can stay on the trail, it's not so bad. I made it to the Hawkett summit signed into the canister, basically came down the same way I went off.

[01:00:42] So that hike from Elk Creek is about four miles, ascent of 1369 feet. Did it in just over two hours, which if you want to compare it to hiking up Hawkett from route 42, that's three miles and 1635 feet versus again, the four miles, 1369 feet from Elk Creek. So it's a little longer.

[01:01:11] And about a hundred or 300, almost 300 feet less vert going from Elk Creek. The real question is, yeah, I've never done it in nettle season. The question is how bad are the nettles in the summertime? Yeah. Is it the same? Yeah. Or worse. So at any rate, uh, Hawkett and Westkill was a total of 10.15 miles, 3,590 feet hiking time, five hours, 32 minutes.

[01:01:42] And it was a great day, man. Anybody who was out on Sunday, great hiking conditions. You can hike in snow and gnats. So, and the melting water coming off of the snow that's hitting from the sun. Yeah. It was almost like rain. Yeah. So it was good. Good. Sounds good. So hopefully I'll be getting out this Sunday. Hopefully. Uh, Saturday, I do have the pause for pints, uh, benefit going on in arcville at the union distillery.

[01:02:11] You go in there. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Supporting. So, uh, I'll be out there. So Sunday, I might be out. So if anybody wants to get together, reach out to me, I might do something. So Catskill news, volunteer New York, New Jersey trail conference, 3,500 club, Catskills trail crew, Catskill mountains club, visitor center, Jolly rovers trail crew, Bramley mountain fire tower. And also if you need stickers, get ahold of me and I will get you some,

[01:02:39] or go to camp Catskill in Terenceville, get your free stickers. So let's break it into the weather forecast. Here is your weekend weather forecast. Expect clouds. Mostly throughout the weekend with sunshine poking in here and there. Temperatures will be into the high thirties down into the lower teens with wind chills, but on Friday, May 1st, expect clear skies in the morning to some clouds in the afternoon and evening,

[01:03:09] a high of 37, a low of 28 and wind chills reaching down to 16 degrees in the early morning. On Saturday, May 2nd, expect some clouds to cloudy skies in the afternoon, a high of 34, a low of 28 and wind chills reaching down to 15 degrees in the evening. On Sunday, May 3rd, expect some clouds in the morning to cloudy skies in the afternoon, a high of 34,

[01:03:38] a low of 27 and wind chills in the morning reaching down to 10 degrees. Looks to be a great weekend to be out. So once again, be safe, be prepared and don't become tomorrow's rescue story. Have at it, fellas. All right. How about we break in our last set of sponsors and then we'll get on to the topic of the night, I guess. I didn't, I didn't mention that in the beginning. So sorry.

[01:04:08] So, uh, discover our set of sponsors, amazing set of sponsors like camp catskill, discover camp catskill in Tanninsville, your ultimate hiking store, find top quality gear, apparel and accessories for all your outdoor adventures. Our expert staff is to help every hiker from beginners to seasoned pros. We also carry a variety of unique catskill souvenirs and gifts. This is the line at camp catskill.co or in the store to gear up for your next journey. Adventure starts at camp catskill.

[01:04:37] Also embark on transformative journey with another summit. Another summit is dedicated, serving veterans and first responders with free outdoor activities, activities like walks in nature, paddling, hiking, and even backpacking. Join our supportive community to rejuvenate in nature's embrace, experience commodity, adventure, and healing at no cost. Take your next step with another summit and ascend to new heights of resilience and joy. Apply today on another summit.org.

[01:05:09] All right. So let's get on to the guest flash topic of the night. So we had a, Ted had a great idea. Ted came up with a great idea. He goes, let's have the listeners give us questions for an episode. And I was at first, you know, that I was, I was second guessing. And I was second guessing. I was just like, eh, that would be weird. But then, you know, I was like, or it could be actually pretty fun. Like who knows,

[01:05:39] who knows? Like what could they, they ask and stuff. It would be fun. It would be serious. It would be, you know, like hiking questions. It would be not hiking questions. And it turned out to be all the above. So this I've been, I've ever since we started this, you know, thank you, Ted, for coming up with this. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to this. It's going to be fun. Yeah. We got some great questions and I'll double back and say that really the only reason I do this is for our,

[01:06:08] our listeners, our hikers, you know, it's helps them stay informed, helps like stoke their enthusiasm for hiking in the Catskills, keeps them abreast of what's going on and kind of makes us all part of a big club. So kudos to all the listeners. We've got a lot of great questions to do tonight. And at the end, at the end, I've got one question that I, I think I added on what's on my list. It's not on Stasha's,

[01:06:39] but so make sure you listen, listen to the end because I've got a question. Yikes. Yikes. I mean, so once again, thank you to everybody who participated in this. If I, if I missed you, please reach out to me. I tried once again to, to get everybody on Instagram and Facebook on here. So let's, let's start out with, with like kind of like breaking the ice. So this is a great question from hiker Yogi Kelsey.

[01:07:08] She said, she would love to hear more about your earlier lives and hiking. And how old were you when you kind of, kind of got more serious about it? So Tad, I want to take this, this because, uh, I was, I wouldn't say it was in hiking earlier in my life, but we all as kids explored, you know, when we were eighties and nineties, that's the way we did. You know, we didn't hike. We explored. I got more into my hiking stages.

[01:07:36] When one of these days I just drove down through the Catskills. And for some reason I saw all these trailhead parking signs. And I was just like, what the hell is this? You know, what the hell is this? What the hell is this? I had Jessica write them down and stuff. And my friend, Chad had gotten me a little bit more into hiking with going to search for waterfalls up in the Finger Lakes region. So I just started deep diving into the Catskills when I drove down through from Oneonta to Kingston. So we went through Marketville, Arkville,

[01:08:06] Venetia. So I see all these trailhead Fox hollow. I see, you know, the cap cat Patakit Kaken, uh, trailhead. I'm just like, what the hell is this shit? I see, uh, Wittenberg, uh, you know, Woodland Valley. So I have her write down all this stuff. I come back and I'm like, wow, the Catskills are an hour and 30 minutes away from me. Holy shit. Deep dive into that. And I go full on exploring. And then the Catskills,

[01:08:36] this was 2015. That's when I started my, I did my first hike in the Catskills on Balsam mountain. And I, why everybody says this, the rest is history. Like, seriously, I fell in love and I've nonstop ever since non fucking stop. And I love the Catskills. I'm deep into hiking. That's when I kind of got into hiking. And to be honest, Kelsey, I went all out in my, I wasn't one of those guys with two fricking water bottles.

[01:09:05] I had a bladder. I had hiking poles. I had a first aid kit. I had like GPS stuff. I had everything to go. My backpack was full, but I was wearing khakis and cotton shirts. Boom. Done. I'm done. But yeah. So, so Kelsey, once again, 2015 is when everything went to all great times. And I, I explored hiking. So it's a great question. Ted, how about you? When,

[01:09:35] when did you start doing this? Yeah. Well, you said what, what year again, 2015. Correct. Yeah. So when I was four years old, my father bought a farm, if you will, out in the country. And it was about 240 acres, mainly wooded. There was maybe 30 acres of tillable land. The rest was upland reforested after, you know,

[01:10:04] the big logging industry in New York state had gone through. So this was in or about, Oh, 1966, 240 acres. My dad got me a dog named shag. And, you know, obviously you just start playing in the backyard. The backyard was enclosed with a, uh, your typical farmer stone wall. And as the weeks went by, the months went by, maybe when I was five years old or so,

[01:10:31] I started going past the wall and you'd go further and further. I do hikes, uh, with my mother, um, mainly her for a while. And then eventually, you know, it was just going out the back door with my dog shag, spending my, my days, whether it was in the summer all day or after school, hiking in that property, eventually leading up to the property behind it, which was a,

[01:10:58] a farmer's property hiking through. We had a lot of maple trees up there and a sugar house where he made maple syrup, go through his property, and then go into about 3,200 acres of state forest land that at the time had no trails. And I'm going to say by the age eight or nine, I knew all of that land by like the back of my hand, because it was literally my backyard and my dog shag. And I would spend a lot of time up there. I created a lot of campsites up there.

[01:11:28] Many of my school buddies, grade school buddies, uh, cub scouts, and then boy scouts. We'd go camping up there all the time. So by the time I was, 15, uh, I was pretty extensively into backpacking, whether in that 3,200 acres behind the house or in the Allegheny state forest or elsewhere, I'd been out West backpacking, all of that stuff. And then we all know what happens when you turn 16,

[01:11:57] you get a driver's license and everywhere you go and everything you do, you do it in a car. So that kind of a brought to an abrupt halt, um, um, my backpacking. And while I did in, um, my late teens through my twenties, I did a lot of, uh, car camping associated with skiing and, you know, spending the overnight in the tent just to be near the ski area and stay cheap. Um,

[01:12:22] I really didn't get back into hiking until my early forties with my daughters. And, you know, we would do hiking and walks in the neighborhood, uh, eventually town parks, county parks. Uh, we moved, we did start gunk hiking before we moved to the toe of the slope of the gunks in 2014. between 2014 and 2016, I'll say my older daughter and I had redlined everything in the gunks.

[01:12:51] And eventually at the end of, um, near the end of 2016, she, my daughter wanted to go over and hike the Catskills. So that's what we did. We started off at slide in Cornell mountain. And between then and the time she went off to college, we, I think we did about nine mountains. Not that we weren't going up every weekend, you know, we didn't hike in the winter, mainly fair weather hikers, but that's how I got involved in Catskill hiking. And then eventually she goes, like I said, goes off to college.

[01:13:22] And I resumed like my normal activities of cycling and other things for a while. And, uh, and then one winter day I had these snowshoes. There was no snow in the gunks to go snowshoeing. So I went over to slide mountain and kind of had been hiking in the Catskills every weekend since. So that's my hiking and Catskill hiking story. Thank you, Kelsey. One of our favorite hikers.

[01:13:51] Not that we don't have non-favorite hikers, but Kelsey is a special person. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, that was fantastic, you know, and now she also asked, uh, I, I kind of previously stated this in my, my last, uh, the last question is where was the one mountain like that just really sold you on the hiker life? And my first mountain balsam lake or balsam mountain, when I reached the top and well, not the top,

[01:14:18] but I hit the viewpoint and I just saw that vast openness of the Catskills. And I was absolutely sold on hiking. And I was kind of sold on viewpoints really just, I just wanted the goddamn viewpoints, but you know, I saw the 3,500 club and I was like, what the, why that, why the hell not? And the viewpoints just kicked in and, you know, 100% sold on balsam mountain. I go up there all the time. I see it.

[01:14:47] I see that diminishing. It hurts, breaks my heart because it's, it's one of those easier mountains that you can get people into that offers a lot of different stuff of the Catskills. Not, not like, like, like crazy, like the, the devil's past and such, but you can get someone hooked on hiking with that mountain. So balsam mountain was my, like sold my, I was sold on it. How about you, Ted? It was your gateway drug. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the question, you know,

[01:15:15] was there one mountain or hike that just really sold me on the hiker life? You know, I go, I go back to growing up in the country. All my neighbors were farmers. All the kids on the farms did farm work. They didn't go out and recreate in their backyard unless it was literally to go out and hunt something for dinner. And I did have neighbors that lived that way. But, you know, from a very early age, I was an outdoorsy person. And, you know,

[01:15:42] even though I fell off the hiking backpacking regiment, when I turned 16 and started driving, all the sports I've ever done have been outdoor sports. I'd never participated really in a stadium sport or a sport on a court like tennis or basketball, anything like that. I was a skier, sailor, bicycles, mountain bike racing, things like that. And then, like I said, you know, I got back into hiking with my daughters because it was a great activity for them.

[01:16:14] And I don't know when the Catskills, what really sold me on Catskill hiking, it's an hour away from the house. That's why I go to the Catskills. If I was an hour away from the Yacht-Arounducks, maybe I'd be up there or the White Mountains, who knows. But I got to say, of all places to have in your backyard, the Gunks, not even five minutes away, the Catskills an hour away. Kind of a good location to live in. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I agree. I mean,

[01:16:42] does that tie into the next question from Joanne from Beyond Blazes? What hooked you on the Catskills? Stosh, what hooked you on the Catskills? Fucking balsam. Yeah. I seriously, dude, I, once again, I went full on everything with my backpack. I was, I probably looked like I was experienced, but was stupid as heck on the trail with my khakis and my cotton shirt. And, but still my backpack was massive.

[01:17:12] I had a fucking 50 liter backpack when I started. Really? 50 liter. Was that all hard siders or did you have other stuff in there as well? I had everything too. Let's go back to the top of the story. Did you ever pass out on what Vander Wacken mountain in the Adirondacks? Was that you? Not yet. Okay. I'm looking forward to it. That's your hiking dream. I gotcha. I mean, I was, I was ready. I had the proper shoes. I'm like, like I said, I wore khakis and a t-shirt,

[01:17:41] but I did this in this, like the, the early summer. Yeah. And you know what? I sweat my, my ass off, but like I have, I seriously, you know, it was funny because I was like, oh, I could, I could record this. I had a GoPro on me. And I always like, look at this. And I always like come back once in a while. And it shows me when I turn onto that viewpoint and my words were, I like, there was nothing. Yeah. And I said, holy fuck. I'm like,

[01:18:11] this is unbelievable. And they're like, it's, I don't know. I've, I've been hiking other places. You know, I did down in Arizona when I lived down there, I did a 12,000 foot mountain that was, it was open, but I didn't get the reaction I did in the Catskills because it was green. It was lush. It was full. It was remote. It was wild. And, and that's, and Balsam once again, got me hooked on the Catskills. I'm, I'm, I'm sorry. Well, good. It's a good, it's a good gateway drug. Yeah.

[01:18:40] I mean, how about you, Ted? I mean, was it still slide? Did slide get you kind of like hooked in there or did you see something from the gunks that you hiked previously? And like, I like that. No, I, you know, the, the Catskills is the access of my, my hiking because it's just so close away. But, um, once you really get into learning about the, the rocks, the vegetation, the trees,

[01:19:08] the whole dynamic process that's still occurring, it's, it's definitely not a static environment. It's in a constant state of change. Sometimes that change is not all that perceptive to you day to day, but I've seen it now that I've been hiking there 10 years. I've seen a lot of change in the Catskills. And then you hike with somebody like Danny Davis and he really ties together the historical change going over thousands, tens of thousands of years back to, you know, 380 million years ago,

[01:19:37] the Devonian age. And it's just really cool to be able to get out there and have that knowledge and be able to read, try to read and interpret different things. So I really enjoy hiking in the Catskills because you, you get to the top of the mountain and they're all different. It's not just getting to someplace where everywhere you look, you see other mountain tops. No, when you get the top of one mountain, it's a boreal forest and you get to the top of another mountain and it could be pygmy, uh, beach trees up there, you know, like I said, I did,

[01:20:07] um, that ridge to the West of St. Anne's and the whole one side is spruce trees and the other, other side of the ridge is just your typical Catskill hardwood mix. Why is that? Very interesting. So just a lot of diversity out there. Exactly. And it gets you hooked to the history, the diversity and stuff like that. You, like you said, you know, going through this one forest that would might've been planted by something, but then you look at this,

[01:20:37] you go up on fly and bear fin and you're like, wow, you know, these, these trees are only like 10 to 15 feet tall. Why is that? Like, why is this forest completely different than, you know, West kill hunter, stuff like that. Well, when you read, when you read Mike Kudish's book, the intro to it, he explains that that's what captivated him. Yeah. Is a, is a, uh, forester is a scientist in that field.

[01:21:03] And I'll say the most unique mountaintop forest in the Catskills that really awestruck me was that first time I hiked up Graham. Oh, from double top. Yeah. And you, and so you come in and it just, it, you summit over the, the top there and you just come into this pygmy hardwood forest. And it's so unique and interesting and different from everything else you see.

[01:21:30] The only thing that comes close to it is a bear pen. That Western side of bear pen is sort of like that, but not as mystical.

[01:22:11] Mm-hmm. Basically do a layup on a basketball hoop. That's what it, it feels like it's a basketball hoop up there. So, you know, and most, and most people that went up there never went past the, the old radio tower. So they never saw that forest. Oh God. Yeah. I mean, was that, uh, like, Joanne also asked the under most underrated, uh, hike mountain in the Catskills. What is your thought about that?

[01:22:37] So it's an interesting question because the first thing, when you dissect the question, what mountains in the Catskills are underrated, right? Is slide underrated? Is hunter underrated? You can't say they're under underrated. You'll say balsam mountain is either underrated or not underrated, but you wouldn't underrate it. You would say that's a great mountain. It's what turned me onto the Catskills. So, you know,

[01:23:06] slide and hunter others are highly rated to me. What is an underrated mountain in the Catskills? Ashokan high point. I bet you you got a lot of people that have done their list, done their winter list, done their four seasons, maybe even their grid. And they never did a Ashokan high point. I think that's a great hike. Another rate mountain in the Catskills, little Rocky.

[01:23:35] And I'm talking about the little Rocky off of two 14 and, and, uh, South of plateau. I think that's a phenomenal mountain. Okay. Um, there's a great hike to it from plateau takes you through one of the most interesting boulder fields and the Catskills. I think it's just, it's a remarkable hike out there. And little Rocky is got, I think the most unique summit of really any mountain out there. Then, um, let's take your mountain balsam.

[01:24:05] There's a great hemlock grove on the West side. And I think one of the most spectacular cherry hardwood forward forests on the Eastern North side. Remarkable. Then we also with balsam, I think what, you know, what we all have to point out is if you're coming from McKinley, just be mindful of the nettles, but you know, balsam underrated, maybe great mountain, other ones, Ashok and high point, little Rocky. I put them on my list. What do you got? Stosh?

[01:24:35] You know, I underrated, you know, once again, you kind of say different categories. I think even though slide is the most popular, I think it's very underrated. Number one, everybody goes up the short way and doesn't do the Cordes Olmesbury trail, which I find to be one of the most, it's one of the easier hikes, the most satisfying hikes to have,

[01:25:03] because you go through all the different forests. You go up a different little ledge here and there, and then you get to the summit or you get to the junction and then you hang it right and you're up to the highest point in the Catskills. And it's, I don't know, just the different forests that it travels through at times, the history of that area and stuff. I find that very, an underrated trail because everybody just wants to get the summit the fastest and they go up that, that area of shore that, that, that trail is,

[01:25:33] is pretty, is, is okay. I mean, you get the tunnel view going up through the, the air, like three quarters of the way up top, but another hike that is underrated to me. And I always think this, I always say this is the hike going up to Campbell's hump from Barnabro to Thomas Cole as well. That to me is one of the more of the new underrated hikes because it's, it's, it's newer. It's more well built, well established, takes you up different areas.

[01:26:02] You get switchbacks, you get a nice little kind of boulder climb right up for four Caldwell's hill. And then you get the view up on Campbell's hump. You get the view right before Caldwell hill, looking over, look, the Western part of the, like a hunter area. And then you get the nice little climb going up to Thomas Cole. You summit, you go back down to your car. It's a nice little, you can jog down through that area like crazy. You know, it's, it's a nice little hike, but you know, there's, once again, you say there's several,

[01:26:32] I mean, underrated mountains that you can have. And it's just, it's, it's endless, you know? Yeah. I, one time I put on a post that, you know, asking somebody what their most favorite Catskill mountain is, is like asking a parent, which of their children is their favorite kid. And you don't want to piss off another kid. Well, another mountain. Yeah. You know, you, you, if you're a parent, you see the beauty and,

[01:27:01] and all different aspects of your children. And you, we could sit here and, you know, find special and unique and wonderful features of each of these mountains to enjoy them. So which one, which one is the most underrated? Yeah. It's hard to say. I, you know, there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of them I'd hike over and over again. Um, what I do think is overrated though. I may, I'll make this my final comment is, is the,

[01:27:31] is people who set out to hike the, the 100 highest list because a lot of those mountains, they've had so much logging activity on them that you hike one, you've liked a lot of them. So I, I find a lot of them just to be uninspiring. And to me, they're, they're just, they're basically bumps with a fricking, uh,

[01:27:58] an insane amount of prickers that are just endless. And it's just, that's not fun. I could do that in my fricking backyard on a mountain. That's been logged 200,000 times, you know, and just get the same experience. So whatever, you can do what you want. And I'm, you know, you talk about kids and such, you know, my buddy, Jason Crone here at, he works with me at Walmart in Oneonta. He asked, uh,

[01:28:24] I would like to take my teenager on a hike that would be good for a novice and still showcase the beauty of the Catskills. Number one, I hate to say this for any human being that wants to get hooked with the Catskills overlook. Yeah. yeah, there's, I mean, there's, there's a certain aspect of overlook that you don't find on other Catskill mountains. And, and that's the old hotel ruins. And there's other ruins up there,

[01:28:53] which makes it interesting. Um, it kind of gives it a unique advantage over other mountains. So one of the, the mountains that I think that is a great introduction to Catskill hiking is a Shoken High Peak, which I mentioned just before. And the Canopy Brook trail. Um, it's a great trail. It takes you through a lot of interesting things, including all the Beaver Dam activity. There's an old, uh,

[01:29:22] Indian shelter there. Um, when you're hiking that you can hike over, it's easy hike over to Mambacus. I just got done trashing the Catskill 100 highest. I don't know if Mambacus is on that list, but of the mountains I've hiked in connection with the 100 highest, I like Mambacus. I thought it was really interesting and unique up there. So, uh, a Shoken High Point Canopy Brook,

[01:29:50] great intro to the Catskills. The Shoken High Point in itself. And I know we've mentioned this time and time before it's got those groves up there that aren't heavily wooded and they're just very unique. And they give you a great view, looking over to the Burroughs range. So, I can't say enough about a Shoken High Point. That's a long hike though. That's like nine miles, man. But you can turn around anywhere. True, true. You can just,

[01:30:18] you can just hike up to the junction where you can either, uh, bang a right and go over to Mambacus or bang a left and do a Shoken. You could just go up through there and turn around, come back down. It's not steep getting up to that point. And it's just a great trail hike. And I think the, the Beaver Dam activity through there is probably one of the most, makes it one of the most unique hikes in the Catskills. All right. All right. All right.

[01:30:48] Under, underrated and, uh, one of his novice ones. So crazy. All right. So let's, let's quickly bang out this one from Lauren Bennett. Top five hikes in the Catskills. I don't know. I have my list. I'll see how many, I'll see how many on your list I have on mine. Top five. Okay. Top five. Go ahead. My number one is always going to be twin. I love twin because of the challenge and the beauty of the, the, the, the view. I can't, I can't say more of that.

[01:31:19] Um, second one is Friday. Love Friday. It's, uh, once again, a challenge and the view is absolutely spectacular from the above Ralph's ramp. Uh, number three. Ooh, slide going up the Curtis homes. We trail. I love that because once again, you were on the top of the Catskills and you are on the, the queen of the Catskills that you're just at top of there and everything else.

[01:31:49] Uh, let's see. Number four. I always, Oh, always like blackhead mountain blackhead, uh, from the East side in the summer, not during the winter because the winter is scary, uh, offers you a challenging ascent going up these steep areas that kind of gets you a little, uh, sketchy situations as well. That is, uh, just challenging and it makes you kind of feel good.

[01:32:19] And then you get also the viewpoint up there towards the, you kind of do the loop. You do the loop around the Lockwood gap. And that, that is a very, very rewarding. And my fifth, you know, Balsam Lake mountain. I adore Balsam Lake mountain because of number one, it's proximity within the Catskills is over towards the Western side. And the fact that the weather is absolutely insane up there kind of just gets me. It's just,

[01:32:49] it's always windy. It's always, you might reach some crazy stuff of where the squall is going to hit there. And it just provides, it's a fire tower, 362. If I had to choose, I would choose all of the fire towers. Like I'm just a viewpoint kind of guy. So I'm going to give you all the above. So, Ted, how about you? This, I'm going to, I'm curious with you. So I actually put, um, in ranking them, uh, I put six. Oh, on my list and,

[01:33:19] uh, tied in the third position with overlook was the Balsam Lake hike. But I, I put mine, um, from number five to number one, the already mentioned Canopy Brook, Ashokan high point hike. Wow. You're promoting that deep. Yeah. I, I really think that's a fantastic hike. Number four, the Huckleberry loop.

[01:33:48] so she said she asked for the top five hike. So I'm including, you know, non high peak hikes, Huckleberry loop. Fantastic hike. Um, love it. The, the next, the next, next one in the third spot, like I said, uh, Balsam Lake or overlook. Um, I think that's my number three spot. Number two is what I call the Hunter loop, typically done from Spruceton road,

[01:34:18] Southwest Hunter, Hunter, and Rusk over East Rusk. Some, you know, you can do the, the loop from, you know, uh, other spots, but I typically do it from Spruceton. I think that's a fabulous hike. You got great views along the way. Uh, you go through the, the spruce forest, the old growth forest on Hunter. It's a wonderful hike. It's a fantastic hike in the winter. And probably when it comes to hikes, which I,

[01:34:47] I did not include Bushwax. Um, but my favorite hike, and this was tough between the, the blackheads or my favorite hike trail hike in the Catskills is Eastern for the devil's path, plateau, sugar, love, twin Indian head, usually in that direction. That's a wonderful hike. Right. Yeah. Wow. Ted, you know,

[01:35:17] I, I wouldn't say I'm surprised that it's a pretty good, you know, it's, it's, it's all the above the Catskills. You kind of do once again, the, like Steve pikes, you get the viewpoint. So it's a rewarding instead of being something like you go up to, you know, Rocky, I mean, Rocky is rewarding to people like you and me, but be like, shit, there's nothing up here. you know what I love? I love the Catskill six, um, but that's off trail. And so it's not making my,

[01:35:47] my list of pikes, which I inferred to mean trailed hikes, you know, Mark trails. I also, you know, it's interesting that we didn't mention the Burroughs Traverse. You did slide Curtis Ormsby. Yeah. But the, the Burroughs Traverse. Yeah. True. That's, that's a fabulous hike. Are we talking about going from, uh, just slide to Woodland Valley? Yeah. But the only problem with that hike is. Two cars.

[01:36:17] No. Once you, once you get down the steep section of. Wittenberg. Still got four miles to go. Yeah. And you hike out the Woodland Valley. That's one of the most awful hikes in the Catskills. That's why I wouldn't put it on my list. I can't admit, you know, going, going up from there. The, I remember I forgot that the, one of the Sundays I did it and I was just like, it was the first time in a long time I did it. I was just like,

[01:36:45] how the fuck long is this fricking hike till I reach some, some actual ascent. Yeah. But still, you're right. You're right. It offers, I would say a lot of these, if you do it with another person, it could be like a lot of longer hikes can be more, um, rewarding. I would say, cause like, like you have these four miles to bang out at the end. You're, you're dead. You're going to. Yeah. Well, I don't know.

[01:37:14] That's usually the four miles that you're, the only two things you're thinking about is how many more miles to go. And what am I going to eat? Well, you got someone like me who just keeps talking. I don't shut up. Okay. Well, we'll have to do it sometime. We're going to have to have a listener hike and take some listeners out and have some fun. Okay. I think the next question, we said we had some interesting ones. I think the next question is an interesting one. Absolutely. So, uh, Nicholas golden money cat said,

[01:37:44] if you could go back in time and stay at any one of the old mountain hotels in their peak, which would it be? And why? Now I'm very interested in hearing Stosh's answer because he's somebody who has spent a lot of time researching these places. So this is going to be something that is presumably very well thought out on his part. And he's going to have an explanation. So take it away, Stosh. It's 1800 and something. Where are you,

[01:38:14] where are you taking the misses to? Did you just pop open another one? I did. Nice. All right. I heard that. Nice. It's a nature's promise. I'm jealous. Non-alcoholic. Okay. So, um, you know, I, I highly doubt you're going to say that I, uh, I selected this, but I'm going to say the lower house. I'm going to go with that because it's right there by cat or skill falls. It has, it's the cheapest.

[01:38:44] Number one, it's the cheapest. I probably couldn't afford this at the time. So it's the cheapest, all the areas. And you get that awesome, cool, interactive hike of where you go down multiples ladders down to the second pool of catariskal falls. And they're selling lemonade down there. So, I mean, the lower house was a very unique place. Once again, I,

[01:39:10] that's probably the only place that I could afford at the time back then. Uh, if it were something that I could have, I, I could afford, it would be the catariskal hotel, because I think they went over the edge with the good old chicken fried chicken, uh, piece and they probably had better food than the cats go mountain house. So, and the views, you know, uh, crazy up there, but the Laurel house, I,

[01:39:38] I don't think I would get enough of because of, you know, once again, you're right by catariskal falls. You can probably hear the falls falling all the time, which would be kind of therapeutic. Uh, and it's just, just an amazing area that I couldn't get enough of. All right. Yeah. How about you? What do you got? yeah. So I was going to go with the catskill mountain house in part.

[01:40:02] I was going to go with the catskill mountain house because just the adventure of getting there, taking a steamboat up the Hudson river train over to the base of the, um, the, what would the Otis rail line going on this railway? Yeah. And then taking the Otis railway up to the mountain house. I just, the adventure to getting there was something that I found intriguing and would be like, if you were with your children,

[01:40:33] taking them on that journey would be really, really cool. And then, you know, I, I did a little looking into it and I thought I would go with the grand. Grand hotel. Yeah. Where's the grand hotel? It's in high Mount. It's 1200 feet long built. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. And the,

[01:40:58] the deal with the grand hotel was supposedly every room had a view of the mountains. So I thought that would be very cool. I mean, you would take the train up there. Obviously you'd stay in this huge motel and no matter what room you got, you were guaranteed to have a few of the mountains sunrise, sunrise sunset. Sounds cool. What are you getting? A resupply?

[01:41:28] Look at this. Wow. Are you right? Right. That's like a team. That's like a team effort there. Delivery. Yeah. Yes. I have like, I have like my little, you know, Yeti cooler here. Like I'm going on a road trip to, to pull things out of. And you have like, you know, the misses resupplying you mid podcast. I got jealous that you, you opened up, but you know, I, I'm going to hold on. I have to. So that is,

[01:41:57] I know you, yours was so much better. Sorry. So that's the opposite side of the Bel Air ski center. That was located. Right. John Burroughs did like a, like a, a kind of like through, he went there to often like, right. I'm pretty. Yeah. That's, that's one of the, the hotels that I, I kind of wish that kind of still had some history about, but it's, it's all, it's all gone. It used to be to the, what?

[01:42:26] North of Bel Air ski center. And I forgot what the, the area was, but you said it was how many rooms. It was like 150, 200 rooms. Yeah. I, it had to be a ton of rooms. It was, you know, 1200 feet. You know, that's what three, four football fields. Wow. Jesus. And you, and this was, uh, once again, a hiker friendly. Yeah. Like they wouldn't like deny anybody. Yeah. Well, I don't know if back, you know,

[01:42:54] if I would have been a hiker or not, you know, I, I might've been a poet if you will. And they probably would have let me stayed for free. Just to, yeah. Well, but I mean, Burroughs was like dirty. He just probably hiked up the top of slide mountain during the rain. He was like, Hey, can I stay here? You guys, you know, wouldn't you want to know what Burroughs wore for hiking shoes? Like what type of tread were on these? Was it, were they leather souls? Were they made up of rubber? Right.

[01:43:24] What was this guy hiking with for footwear? You, you talk about having, starting off with a 50 liter pack. What did he have? What did he carry water in? Was it like, did he carry his water in like at a, uh, uh, goat. Bladder or something like that. You know, was it like something like made out of like, you know, animal skin? I mean, what did this guy go bushwhacking with? Damn. I wish he was still alive. Yeah. You start hiking. You have 50 liters of stuff. You got it at some hiking supply place. This guy had stuff.

[01:43:53] He probably made on the farm, you know, no maps, no trails. And the Goulds looked at him and be like, wow, you're pathetic. Yeah. Loser. Loser. I'm making millions right now. So I'm at the grand hotel. You're at the Laurel house. Yeah. I guess that's fitting. I guess it is. It's, it's, it's how it works. Two opposite sides. Yeah. Let's go on to trail life. Yeah. I mean, and survival, you know? Um,

[01:44:22] so Joanne beyond blazes said, have you ever had a Catskill hike go sideways? I will admit that I've had, uh, one, two hikes to go sideways. One, my, it was my hike going up sugar loaf mountain. I decided to bushwhack from the junction and going up that super steep ridge, going right up in the middle of a sugar loaf, because I wanted to reach those overlooks that was right above the quarries.

[01:44:51] Hmm. And I kind of chose a route that kind of looked good going up. But when I look back, I was like in the middle of it and I'm like, Oh shit, this is not what I expected it to be. And I slid down a few feet and then putting my hiking poles in and like drag down. And then I flipped over it like two or three times. And I fell down kind of ledge, probably like 10, 15 feet. And I said,

[01:45:20] I'm not doing this alone. Screw this. I'm out because it just didn't, it just, I didn't, you have that one that got feeling that this isn't right. I shouldn't be doing this. And I turned right around. That was one of them. And that was, I mean, it was a good decision. It was also a shitty day. So I wouldn't have got any views anyway. That's pathetic. Who'd want to not get views on a hike? That's me. And then the other one was with my buddy, John,

[01:45:48] we were going up Barnum road to camel's hump to do my trail maintenance. And he slipped on a rock within 30 feet of the beginning. And I'm like, Hey, try to stay off the slippery areas. That's flat rock all above there. He slipped again. And then he slipped again right before the trail register and like almost hit his head. And I'm like, I'm out. We're not doing this anymore. This is the end of like 0.75 miles in. Absolutely not.

[01:46:17] And as we were going back, he's continuously laughing in the car. Like, and I'm like looking at him. I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Are you okay? Like, this is like, not like normal. And he's just laughing and he gets back home and he's still like laughing. And I'm like, hello, dude, what's wrong? Doesn't really explain. And then, you know, I drop him off. I go home and he comes back and he's like, dude, I went to the, uh, the ER.

[01:46:46] I have a fractured shoulder. Hmm. And like a clap, a collarbone. Yep. And he was, Oh wow. That's a bad injury, man. He was just laughing to kind of laugh it off. Usually it's, it's very noticeable when you break your collarbone because your shoulder drops down and you can't lift your arm up. He was leaning to the side, like, like kind of like in the, in the car, he was leaning to the side a little bit. And I didn't left or right. Right. So when he slipped up, it came down.

[01:47:15] He's the passenger. Yes. So how'd he put a seatbelt down? Oh, good point. Yeah. Yeah. He came over. I mean, he was, he was battling it, but he was laughing. So I guess somebody, the doctor said it was shock. Yeah. That he didn't realize that he was shocked from receiving that, that injury. And he was just going laughing and just, that was kind of ways of dealing with it. And did he sue you? No, no. I mean, I gave him a couple,

[01:47:45] like a, like a 12 pack of fucking beer. Like I was just like, I felt so bad, but he was just like, I'm very grateful that you ended the hike at that time because like, it wouldn't have been fun. And I was just like, yeah, I guess, but that's my, that's my two experience that have gone sideways. How about you, Ted? You know what the lawyers call that 12 pack of beer? Negotiation. A settlement. I was close. I was close. The settlement. That's what happened in the old days where they're just like, Hey,

[01:48:14] either you get shot or we get a beer. How about that? That's how we resolve our disputes. Yeah. You know, uh, hikes that went sideways. Okay. Um, I had a hard time answering this, but here's a hike that went sideways. So last summer I was going to bushwhack up Thomas Cole, uh, via a new route, accessing it, uh, along DEP property.

[01:48:42] And I was going to drop my backpack at my starting point at the end of this road where this DEP property was. And I was going to drive over to the ending point and then ride the bike back to the backpack. Cause I'm just that lazy that I didn't want to carry the backpack weight. And I also wanted to check out where the hike was going to start. So I drive to the end of this road.

[01:49:06] I parked the Jeep and I grabbed the backpack and I'm walking from this really, really poorly paved road onto what was presumably some type of old, a hall road or logging road or some old gravel road that was just extensively eroded with, you know, stormwater coming down at washing it out, relocating the rocks and the wall. That was just a mess.

[01:49:35] And so as you're, you're going through some thick growth because you're at the edge of the tree line. So there's a lot of thick stuff growing at the edge of the road. And before you get into the woods is, and I'm transitioning from the thick, I won't even call it understory, but just the thick growth into the forested area. I go to take a step forward with my right foot. And when I put my right foot down,

[01:50:04] I don't feel it making contact with anything. It just keeps giving away underneath me. And so all my weight is going forward into my right leg. And I reach out and I grab onto some of that green growth to stop myself from falling forward. And my right leg feels really painful. So I, I pull it up out of the ground and as I'm pulling it out,

[01:50:33] I notice that what gave way underneath me is a culvert pipe. That had been like busted up, eroded around it. And apparently you just couldn't see it. And there was this hole in it, not at the end of the culvert pipe, but in the round, you know, circumference area that I had just stepped through. And so I looked down at my leg. It hurts like bad and,

[01:51:02] but it's not bleeding or anything. So I pull my leg out. I'm going to, you know, really hurts bad. I'm thinking, okay, I'm just going to walk like 20 yards. I'm going to walk this off. I'm going to stash my backpack, go to the Jeep. I'm going to do this hike. And as I'm walking to where I'm going to stash the backpack, you keep looking down at your leg. Cause it's like, wow, this still really hurts. And I noticed now it's bleeding and it's bleeding kind of a lot. So I, I'm like, you know, this really isn't happening to me. Is it? I suppose it is. So I make,

[01:51:31] I make the somewhat rational decision that I'm going to turn around, get back to the Jeep for the backpack in it. And the best thing I have to wrap around my leg to control the bleeding is a bunch of paper towels. Nice. Yeah. So I do that. I do some duct tape around my leg with the paper towels underneath it to hold the paper towels in place. And I'm thinking to myself, does this really mean I have to drive home now? I've come all this way to hike. It's a Saturday.

[01:52:00] It's my hiking day. Do I have to go home and not hike? Because I just kind of like put a gash in my leg. So of all things, I'm near Tannersville Hunter. I drive over to tops market. Cause I figure I'm going to buy some real first aid supplies to bandage this up. And before I go into the store, I take that mess off of my leg and I take a photo of it. I send it to my daughter. Who's the registered nurse. And I head into the store to buy like some gauze,

[01:52:30] some bigger bandages, some, some wrap and whatnot stuff that I didn't carry in my backpack. I know Stasha is thinking, well, I have all that stuff, you know, like a, a cat scan machine. And you know, this, that, the other. Well, I don't, you know, I have a couple of band-aids in my first aid kit and I, and ibuprofen. And I think I'm good to go. So I go into tops market. I'm grabbing this stuff. My daughter texts me back and she's telling me, I need to go to an emergency room to get this thing. So now, and I thought, well, you know, I'm just going to go out to the parking lot and see what I can do with

[01:52:59] the stuff I bought, which is what I do. And I, I wrap it up fairly good. And I switch from shorts to pants right there. And the tops parking, parking lot out in the corner. I kind of, I called it like my little mash station, you know, the TV show from the, you know, the mash thing. So I'm, I'm doing like this, you know, little first aid thing on myself and, um, hop back in the Jeep. And I figure I'm just going to bushwhack plateau mountain instead.

[01:53:30] So I, yeah, that's, that sounds good. It's going to be a short, yeah, it's going to be a short hike upper Ridge. So I drive over to, um, where I'm going to start with the bushwhack. I get out of the Jeep. I, I've downed a few ibuprofen that I bought at tops. Um, it's, it's not bleeding through the bandaid or the bandage yet. It does later in the day during the hike, but at any rate, um, I do, I do a fabulous bushwhack of plateau mountain. I do.

[01:53:58] I have to do the summit walk when you're up there. Cause it's a fantastic walk. Maybe you should amend our answers above. I run into, uh, Ed. What is it? Forbin's cheesecake. Coolest guy out there. I bump into Ed that day. I tell him about my injury. We joke about it. He goes on his way. Next thing he says, he, he fell down that day and he hurt himself. But whatever. So yeah, I, I, um, I finished my plateau hike, but I didn't do the, the Thomas Cole hike that day. So I guess, yeah,

[01:54:28] the Thomas Cole hike went sideways. That's a hike that went sideways on me. I have a nice scar in my, my right shin if you ever want to see it. But. Oh, excellent. Excellent. then so battle scar and a bushwhack of plateau. That's my, that's my answer. And I'm sticking to it. So, uh, Catskills ever after. Oscar, uh, said, what is the most unforgettable moment? Each one of you had on the trail bushwhack. I mean, once again, then the Catskills is tough,

[01:54:58] but I have to say my, my first time of reaching Balsam mountain with that viewpoint. It was just unforgettable. It drew me to the Catskills and it brought me in, it grabbed me and it got ahold of me and it never let go. Like, seriously, I cannot explain any other moment. I mean, maybe winter time when, uh, you know, we got a fresh snowfall up, up when I went up slide or something like that. Also grabbed my attention,

[01:55:28] but that, that first hike up Balsam mountain and catching that viewpoint. And just the, the amazement that I had in my mind of that. I am up here and that I am in the moment right now. It's just absolutely insane. Yeah. So we're, or, or narrowly. This would be a hard question, right? Cause you have, you have,

[01:55:56] if you hike the Catskills or you hike anywhere a lot, you should have a lot of these unforgettable moments. And I, and I think I do have a lot of unforgivable, uh, unforgettable moments hiking in the Catskills and elsewhere. But there's, there's really one unforgettable moment that stands out above all, others for me and the Catskills. And I had mentioned previously that before my daughter went off to college,

[01:56:23] her and I started hiking the Catskills in 2016. And the next year in May of the next year, and we might've been on our maybe fifth or sixth Catskill mountain hike. Uh, we hiked Catterskill high peak from Platte Cove. Interestingly, it was the first hike that she ever drove to, um, cause she had turned, 16 over that winter. And so she drove out to the Platte Cove parking area.

[01:56:53] We set out to hike Catterskill high peak. It was our first time ever doing Catterskill high peak. We hiked around the moat to the North side, went up the North side, uh, hung out at the summit. Then we checked out the airplane crash. And then we came down, I think it's called Eagle Ridge down the little chute. And back then the, the chute wasn't as worn out as it is now. The roots were less exposed because less of the dirt had been worn away.

[01:57:20] The hike along the ridge wasn't trailed out like it is now much more green, especially that time of year, maybe later part of may. It was a real genuine bushwhack. It was our first bushwhack and the Catskills together. And my daughter who I refer to as my feral daughter enjoyed it tremendously. We make it back to the trail. We go by the other plane rack.

[01:57:47] We do the short whack to the trail that takes you back to the parking area. And as we're hiking back to the parking area, you go through the hemlock grove. You know where we are Stosh and that hemlock grove. There's a couple of planks in there. Water. Yes. Yep. Yep. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So we're hiking through there, the trails wide and we're almost side by side. And we, and my daughter is a great talker on hike.

[01:58:16] Sometimes it's just a monologue and you ask a question and 15, 20 minutes go by and she's talking about this, talking about that. Just very interesting, very entertaining. And we're just having that same father daughter discussion about going off to college and her future dreams and future ambitions. And next thing I know, my daughter stops and she turns towards me and she says,

[01:58:46] I want to thank you for giving me a sense of adventure and a deep appreciation of nature. Wow. And that is my most unforgettable Catskill highlight is when my daughter said that to me, who is now almost on two years of just basically living out of her car, living in a tent. Uh, right now they're renting, um,

[01:59:15] a room at some farmhouse in Spain, climbing every day. She, instead of spending a month in Spain is going to end up spending maybe three months in Spain before she comes back having a fab fabulous time. And so when she's out there doing that stuff today, I just reflect back on what she said to me that day on her hike of Catskill High Peak. Nice. That's my moment. Nice. Well, thanks. Catskills ever after. Yeah.

[01:59:45] Letting me get that out there. Yeah. What's still, so, it's kind of, uh, I asked again, Catskills ever after, after all your mountain adventure, what still humbles you about hiking the mountains? You know, I can't say, tad, just getting out and getting away from society and life and, and stuff like that. And then being in my own element is something that humbles me and just kind of resets me, sends it back to zero. Yeah. Um,

[02:00:16] the, the thing that really, I mean, there's a lot of things that humbled you about getting outdoors and, and hiking and being in nature, but relative to the Catskills in particular, what I find humbling is you're, you're hiking through this 380 million year old, uh, desiccated or dissected plateau. And it's just a reminder, at least to me,

[02:00:42] that your life is just such a minuscule flash in time. And that this world, this place is going to be around evolving and changing long after you're gone. And, um, you just look around and you see the processes that changed all of this and the forces of nature and how powerful it is. Wow. You know, it's just pretty amazing when you think how the Catskills came to be and, you know, presumably are going to evolve into the future. And I just find that, you know,

[02:01:12] humbling to look at that. we're just, we're just like you said, I can't even a little speck right there of, of maybe what's to come. A blip. Yeah. Yeah. But then I, you know, let's, we can reflect back on that more and, you know, we'll go down in history as being the original Catskill podcast. Yes. Okay. Moving on to Jay's question. Speaking of the future, Jay, yeah, I, uh,

[02:01:40] I worked with this guy with the Catskill 3500 club and I got a, he is one of the most prolific Catskill hikers that I know. He, uh, stays off the radar. So, I mean, Ted, you might know this and it's, it's tough. If you are not familiar with the Catskills, when will big Rosie bone knob be considered for the peak bagging list, AKA the knob list, Ted, don't tell me you didn't have to look this up.

[02:02:11] I know of the mountain. I don't know of the knob list. Oh, okay. There is such a thing. At least you knew of the mountain. I don't know of the knob list either. So Jay, I don't know if you, if you listen to this or you just, he follows the podcast on Facebook and he asked us on Facebook. So I don't know. I don't know of the knob list, which I'm, I'm very intrigued now about the knob list, but, uh, a lot of people don't know where this is and you'll have to know where to look on the map. So we're just going to leave it at that.

[02:03:07] Okay. Now overlooking viewpoints, not Catskill fire tower. So one of the best, I think is on the Western side of blackhead where, or black dome either, or that overlooking devil's path, cataract, skull high peak and stuff. It just captures.

[02:03:30] But if I were to say my top viewpoint would be twin overlooking the vast boroughs range, the vast majority of the Catskills twin has that impact on me. That just like, Oh, I'm dead. I could die there. Yeah. Uh, well, I, I won't give them out, but I,

[02:03:55] on my top four list is it took me four places to get to one that's on the map, but the first three are off trail. So the fourth one I think is the single best place in the Catskills that few people, if any, go to except for a guy with spray paint. John Rob lean to. Yeah. I knew that. That was my number three. The sunsets,

[02:04:25] the sunsets there are to die for, um, to, the camp there and to like hang out with the fire and watch the sun go down. It's gotta be one of the best places to be in the Catskills for a sunset. John Rob lean to looking out in the Spruxton Valley. I know of another, there's another spot now that I think about it. That's kind of like the same, uh, off of, uh, slide mountain has the same view of a valley, but again, it's off trail. Uh,

[02:04:55] but that's on trail. John Rob lean to. Next time you're hiking Hunter from Spruxton, check it out. It's very good. All right. If you haven't been there, that's, I mean, it's, it's, it's a little spur probably what, like 0.2 miles off of the regular trail. Yeah. I mean, it's got, you know, you gotta go through a little rock maze to get out there, um, which is cool in itself. And then you've got the lean to, you can hang out, you can have a fire, you can spend the night, watch the sunset.

[02:05:25] Um, it's just a great view. Jessica and I spent the night there. I think God notices in like 2016. And this was when I had like, uh, like, uh, cold, cold weather, 50 degree temperature bags from fricking Walmart. And we survived. We, we watched the sunset. We watched this. We watched the sunrise and I got to admit my love for Hunter,

[02:05:53] like grew from that time, because we just had those moments. There was frost on our, like, uh, our bags, our sleeping bags on our, um, old, our winter hats. So it was, it was that cold. You slayed, stayed in the lean tour. Did you have a tent lean to, we stayed in lean to sleeping bags. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was magical. There was a little bit of mice in there. Let me, I mean, there's mice everywhere in lean to, but that's not uncommon. They're,

[02:06:21] they're mice are more likely to take your food than a bigger animal. Yes. Holy shit. I mean, I mean, we have mountain lions here that'll just, they'll, they won't do shit, but they'll leave your food alone. They'll take you. yeah, Jesus Christ way to promote this mountain lion thing. So moving on, uh, Eric Osario, uh, Catskill 35, or, uh, in your opinions, has social media beneficial to the outdoors and conservation efforts,

[02:06:51] efforts, or is it detrimental? I've always said this is double-edged sword. I mean, as this podcast, it's social media somewhat. So I try to promote the law. I try to promote the love and the leave no trace aspects that we have of the catskills and such. But there are other people who are just looking to get likes and just to get views and just get the money, which is absolutely insane. I don't find that, uh, intriguing at all.

[02:07:19] But I know some people that I've, I'm guilty that I've tried to get on the podcast that I saw that were, I thought were cool people, but I found out that they were just trying to get the likes and keeping the money upkeep and stuff like that. So, so, you know what? Fuck those people. Do leave no trace. Follow the ethnics that you think that any other people would fall under that, that would be respectful to the mountains.

[02:07:45] And don't follow these people that just want to get the likes and that are showing off and stuff. Uh, just, I don't want to give off any names and I'm, I'm kind of, I'm ashamed for saying that I've done this. I've reached out to this, but, uh, no more. So it's a double-edged sword, you know, Ted and I are trying to kind of reverse that, uh, here on the podcast. So. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my, my short take on this. Yes.

[02:08:12] Social media is beneficial to the outdoors and conservation efforts, but the, to the extent that it does promote good, that good is far outweighed by the bad. And I think, uh, Catterskill Falls is an example. Peek-a-Moose Blue Hole is an example. Um, we don't want to be gatekeepers to keep people away on the one hand, but on the other hand, I know at least for myself,

[02:08:39] like I pointed out in the prior answer that my three favorite viewpoints in the Catskills are all off trail. And I'm going to say that all of those viewpoints I discovered on my own. And that's in part what, well, I take that back. One of them, Stosh, Stosh gave me the, the general whereabouts to, I don't think you gave me a pin to it. And that's kind of better to, you know, it, it, the most have a general proximity of where it is, but the best part,

[02:09:09] like Danny Davis and I, um, discovered what I, we called the Burroughs lookout together, phenomenal viewpoint. And as far as we can tell, nobody goes there. And it's great that nobody goes there because, you know, it's a special place, special place to have a cold beer with a friend. Um, yeah. And yeah. And, you know, so when you, when you find those places, you know, share them with your friends, um, like that will respect the mountains. Yeah. And not, and not post them,

[02:09:38] not tag them and, and surely not like publicize them in something that's going to invite the general public, general hiking public to go there. If you're going to give a location to somebody, give it to somebody who is keen on leave no trace, who's not going to share it indiscriminately with every Tom, Dick and Harry out there just to get a bunch of likes or a social following, but share it with another cool person. Right. Um,

[02:10:08] but just throwing it out there for anybody to find out, then, then we're going to bring on, you know, uh, all the bad things that we complain about with these visitor management plans. And then like, like I said, I I've, I've reached out to these people before in, in my past experiences with the podcast. And I am ashamed that I said that, that I've done this, but now I've learned that, you know, these people do not care about the mountains.

[02:10:35] Let's as we do is Ted and I do that want to respect the mountains. So once again, like Ted said, if you have this viewpoint that you know of, that nobody else knows of, give them to the people that respect the mountains, that will take care of it. They kind of don't give them the exact spot. Give them somewhat of spot and be like, good luck motherfuckers. You ain't going to find this. I love it. I was just like, Hey Ted, here you go, buddy. Have fun. I've done that a couple of times actually. To me? No, to, to,

[02:11:04] to the others. And. Oh, right. So Sharon Klein. Yeah, Sharon. So, I mean, this kind of, once again, goes in with the social media somewhat, uh, given what we know about over the use and damage of the formalist trail peaks, uh, that the mountain there experience as well, noticeable decline in montane bird habitat. What do you think hiking clubs that reward hikers with patches and numbers for numerous trips of the same peaks over and over again,

[02:11:34] tend to do to the minimize of this causing, I want to say no comment. I don't want to be involved in this yet, but no. So I have an answer. If you don't have anything you want to share, I got something. I, I just, it's just, it's once again, double-edged sword. I, but go ahead, please, please. I can't. Yeah. So my peeve, if you will,

[02:12:03] is a lot of people are out there hiking for a patch, hiking to complete a challenge, um, doing it to, you know, satisfy the requirements of, of some challenge. And what I think each one of these organizations should do is add on to the requirements, some level of mandatory training for leave no trace,

[02:12:30] mandatory training and appreciation of just outdoor ethics and protocols, and how to minimize your impact on the environment you're hiking in, how to, to be cognizant of, you know, a don't leave stuff behind, but also pick up other stuff. Like I forgot to mention when I was done with my hike off Westkill, I spent about 10 minutes going through that parking lot and picking up a bunch of stuff

[02:12:59] right down to one of those little dental floss sticks. I mean, who flosses their teeth before or after a hike? I thought that was very interesting. Then they tossed the dental floss stick, while it's sitting in my garbage now out in the garage. But so I think with any one of these lists, whether it's the 3500, the 3500 winter, any of the Catskill mountain clubs, and I'm not all that sure if they do or don't have this, but I hope they do. Um,

[02:13:25] the hikers anonymous and any other hiking challenge should have some requirement for, uh, leave no trace training and other things like that. And I do know that Margaret has on her Catskill 100 highest public mountains, I think 15 hours of community service. I think that's a great idea. And I think while that will not stop the damage,

[02:13:55] it is a good start to minimizing it. Correct. And you know, why not influence a couple of people to do that? That's what? Three people. So that's 45 hours. Yeah. Of influence that you had within the Catskills. You know, I mean, I became, uh, a trail maintainer a long time ago, 2016. Uh, and you know, Scott Catskill mountain brew is now a, uh,

[02:14:22] trail maintainer of the Lockwood gap to the blackhead mountain. So congrats to him. A very, very. Very used travel area. So if you can do that, why not? Why not, uh, pack on a little bit about this and, you know, just preach upon a believe no trace. It just, it helps out. So, uh, you know, it's one of those, you know,

[02:14:44] each one of us can do our part and newcomers to hiking should learn to do their part. I think that's, you know, it's as much of a requirement as everything else that's required to finish one of these challenges. Yeah. The shame, the shame is that unless you take it upon yourself to get involved in this, how do you learn about it? True. True. So John, uh, so, so, so, so, so,

[02:15:15] so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, let's go reason this might've been, should have liked the last question. It's tough to say, men, like it's, it's still busy, but I think it's receiving the, the same amount that people that it is Benson for a couple of years. We're kind of like a steady flow. And hopefully we, I mean, as we, the visitor union management plan that we've seen, you know,

[02:15:45] hopefully that's only for the popularity is, but you know, it's tough. and let's hope the DEC will pay us in 120,000 hard-siders to come up with a visitor units management plan that we can devise for this area that will be much more effective than the OTEC people that interviewed, I interviewed a couple hundred episodes ago that I'm just like, the fuck? You come up with this stuff. Like, really?

[02:16:17] I don't know what I've been. Yeah. Yeah. So we heard a couple episodes ago, Ryan, tell us how the hemlock forests are basically going to get desiccated by the hemlock woolly adelgid bug. And when those forests are desiccated, you're going to get a lot of understory growth and new growth coming in. Totally change those areas, the Catskills. We have the destruction by the emerald ash borer.

[02:16:44] We have other things affecting the beech trees. It just goes on and on and on. So the forest is going to change regardless of what we do as hikers and as a society. But then we also heard earlier tonight that the DEP has plans of putting in renewable energy sources in what has to be viewshed areas, because when you're in a mountainous area like this, that's what you have, is a lot of viewshed. So there's going to be all sorts of changes.

[02:17:14] And on top of that, we have this growing problem with increased hiking traffic. So change is inevitable in the Catskills. And education, as I just said, is important. I think building more sustainable trails is important. And in terms of the destruction of the hemlocks, you know, it'd be great if the DEC act faster and had the resources, the money, the economics to try to curtail that change.

[02:17:43] But they're going to change. I was out bushwhacking this weekend and I was saying to myself, I probably got about another two or three weekends ahead of me before bushwhacking in these once densely forested areas is going to start turning into a drag because of all the beach whips and hobble bush, crickers, and all that other stuff that grows when you thin out the canopy. But that's just part of the change. And that's a bummer.

[02:18:12] So there you go. Definitely is. Let's. Okay. So gear skills and quirks. Once again, Ted, thank you for kind of categorizing this. It's kind of, it's actually fantastic. So we talked about this earlier in the episode. What's the difference between DEC and DP land? Can you bushwhack on properties owned by DEC and DEP? You know,

[02:18:40] you are the insane bushwhacker that is on the show. I am not. So what can you say? That I don't care. I bushwhack wherever I want. But as for Jeff, for Jeff Jotz and the rest of you, no, I really pay, pay attention to the rules. And, and they vary. Um, so with respect to the DEP land, which is more restricted than the DEC land, um, at least for now, uh, the deep, the DEP land,

[02:19:08] which is New York city owned land, um, are generally posted very well with respect to those properties that are restricted. We're no, nothing's allowed. Um, no hiking, no boating, no this or no that, or they're posted and they'll let you know if you require a permit. But to be sure the DEP has an interactive map online where you can click the parcel that you're interested in and doing something on,

[02:19:36] whether it's hiking or some other outdoor activities, such as hunting, you can click on it. You can see what the DEP permits and what they prohibit. But more importantly, there are particular properties usually around the reservoirs where you have to get a permit. The permits are free. You can apply for them online. Um, but if you're going to do anything around a reservoir, then you've got to look into the permit. But generally my understanding has been,

[02:20:05] you don't get to hike around the shore of the reservoir. They don't want people doing that. Um, the one thing that the DEP requires on its properties is that all animal waste needs to be promptly cleaned up and removed. So there you go. That's kind of the, the quick take on hiking on DEP property. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's well rounded up. I mean,

[02:20:31] you can go on online and get kind of like a DEP permit that you can print out and put right on your car. If you want to kind of go towards an area of like, you know, reservoir and stuff like that, search down lower shore and stuff, but it requires a more thoughtful, longer process to get kind of like a kayak of fishing stuff. If you want to go on the risk force, you got to kind of be like a land over in the vicinity for a long time to get

[02:21:01] that access. Well, my understanding is you can bring a, what we'll call a watercraft to one of their reservoir properties, but the, you not only need to get a permit, but you need to get it steam cleaned. Seriously. You have to have it steam clean. There's, there's facilities and that have plastered and stuff. no, but you, you need, because you, you on the bottom of the boat can bring in certain types of invasive

[02:21:28] species that are going to affect the reservoir. Um, itself. So they want you to get your, your boat steam cleaned, your kayak. Oh yes. Yes. So there's no invasive species and stuff like that. Yeah. That's a big thing. They have a hardcore. And a lot of the places that I kind of been to with, with the captain and stuff like that.

[02:21:52] I have been down there when DP officers have been removing the boats because they've had some sort of a algae on it or something like that. And they're like, this has been here for two years. We're, we're out with it. And I'm like, really? And like, you just dispose of it. And like, well, we clean it and we kind of like resell it and stuff. I'm like, ah, so you're making profit. It's part of their retirement fund. They sell it on the black market. Jesus. Yeah. So the next, next question I thought was very interesting.

[02:22:22] Go ahead. Go ahead. You take it. Okay. So beyond the 10 essentials, this is from Jess Beach, beyond the 10 essentials, what is the most unexpected thing you always end up carrying the Catskill hikes? Oh, unexpected. Yeah. That's what really throws me. What is it on it? What is it on it? Well, now we know Stosh has everything in his backpack conceivable, but one of those items is unexpected that you always, always end up carrying on the Catskills.

[02:22:50] I would say an extra kind of like a treat to help you out on the way down. It's not unexpected though. Let's, that's tough. Not expected. Jess. I don't know if I can answer this. Yeah. That's, you know, I don't carry whether it's, um, but some people have like those gnomes that they bring out and take photos of them. I don't have anything like that. I know with my daughter, or I'd always bring like some type of fun treat to have on the summit,

[02:23:19] but I obviously don't do that anymore. So the, the answer I came up with here, um, what I have that is likely unexpected to many hikers that I always have with me is I have this barometric altimeter watch. That's solar powered. Yeah. And for me, it's probably part of my three part kit.

[02:23:47] That's essential to navigating in the back country. Because with the map and compass, you, you really can't pin down your location when you have a heavy canopy cover. But when you know the altitude that you're at on a ridgeline, you know, within 10 feet, generally speaking, where you are. Uh, it's very helpful to me. So I always have my, my altimeter with me. It'll let you know how, in terms of vertical distance, how far you are away from the summit or from the,

[02:24:16] the valley that you're going to. It's to me, it's my, my 11th essential, if you will. Interesting. Oh, nice. Nice. So, uh, next, uh, Nicholas, go to the money cat. Uh, what do you do with the old equipment? You can't repair them. I might not want to throw away, uh, like snowshoes. Uh, I would say hiking poles and stuff, you know, you can't, you can't really do that much. And I mean,

[02:24:48] it sucks. Either send them back and repair them or have that, see if you can reach out to the company and repair them or. Yeah. Um, so I've, I've had my MSR Evo a sense now. Eight, nine seasons beat the crap out of them. I replaced the pins on them every couple of years. Every now and then you break a strap, you get a replacement strap, beat the crap out of them. They're still good. Um,

[02:25:16] the stuff that does wear out is things like your Gore-Tex layers or your other technical gear. Eventually they just don't function like they used to. And there's no point in carrying them around. So I have seen folks use those, um, to make like stuff sacks with, if they're good at sewing, make bicycle bags with them, um, patch your backpack or other gear using, you know, your,

[02:25:45] your worn out rain jacket or something. Um, the other thing is so long as the gear isn't so beat, um, sell it on eBay, take it to the, take it to the annex in New Paltz, the rock and snow, uh, store there has a, what they call the annex, uh, two, two doors down, which is basically a consignment shop for all things outdoor from hiking gear, backpacking gear, trail running gear, you name it.

[02:26:14] They sell it there. Take your stuff there. I forget what their take is on it. Like 20% or more, maybe I'm not sure, but I know a lot of people that sell stuff there. Danny Davis to get ready to move up to Alaska unloaded a lot of his gear up there. Cause he only has limited carrying capacity to drive up to Alaska. So I've bought many things at the annex. Um, so it's a good place to buy and or sell used gear.

[02:26:45] Nice. Annex. Annex. A N. A N N E X. He. Okay. I will put that on the show notes. So, all right. So yeah, nice, nice, nice. So next, uh, we got next, uh, Richie nature escapes. Is it true that the Helly Hanson jacket will begin in its own Instagram page? He's asking for a French. Yes. Yeah. I thought it already had one. I don't know. You know,

[02:27:15] you know, I've had at least four or five people buy Helly Hanson from, I suggest. And so I'm, I'm kind of pissed off that I didn't, uh, reach out to them beforehand, but you know what? You will be excited with your Helly Hanson stuff. So let me know how it works out because it's absolutely the most phenomenal fucking gear in history of life. So looking forward to big dreams and closer.

[02:27:44] So Richie nature escapes. Ask the question that I love to answer to anybody that asked me this question. You have a backpack and a ticket to anywhere. Where, where are you going and what hike are you doing? I have one in my mind and it's always been on my mind and I will never say this any different until I do it. It's called bird Lake in Canada, Canada up in the upper Canadian Rockies.

[02:28:11] And it is a 24 mile round trip hike that leads you up to one of the, you don't get to the most highest peak in the, in the Canadian Rockies, but you get to sit at the base of the lake of the, the highest peak in the Rocky called Mount Robson. And there is a glacier that just keeps falling into the lake that you hear all the time. You get to camp out right beside the lake and you get to experience glaciers.

[02:28:38] You get to experience fricking 400 foot waterfalls. You get to experience different forest. You get to experience above tree line, below tree line. You get to experience Alpine lakes. It is the top of my bucket list and it will never be done. Until I complete it. I, I, I kid you not. Berg Lake in the Canadian Rockies up near Jasper. So, so do you need a permit to do that?

[02:29:08] You do, you do. You do now need a permit. So good luck getting that permit, buddy. Oh, I will try day in and day out to get that permit. So Richie, if you want to come with me, Tad, if you want to come with me, who else wants to come to me? Let me know. I will try in every year to get that permit because, it is a look it up. Berg Lake. Yeah. In the Canadian Rockies. I'm going to try to get a permit. Oh fuck dude. So I can post pictures. Stasha won't be on the show next week. I'm,

[02:29:37] I'm doing your bucket list. Oh man. Like you will watch some stuff that people have posted. And, and, and it's just the, there's other places like, um, Havasu falls, like Havasupi, like all the waterfalls down in that area where it has the lime rich stuff. But Berg Lake has got my attention and it is never, ever let go. Like half dome. Fuck that. That's nothing. Uh, you know, stuff like that.

[02:30:06] This Berg Lake is every experience in one. Check it out when you can. And stuff like that. What do you have planned? What, what is your thoughts? What is your dreams? Uh, so honestly, my big dream is either of my daughters, give me a call, tell me what they got in mind. And I hook up and go do something with them. I don't care what it is. A couple of years ago,

[02:30:36] we, we hooked up with our one daughter out in Dingle, Ireland. Fantastic time. We were out there for a week. Um, unfortunately, Sophie was, she probably had COVID the whole week. I mean, we don't really know what she had, but it was like, she was down and out for the whole week and in the bedroom. But Sydney had all these activities planned for us. We had a fantastic time right from, uh, climbing from the shore of the Atlantic up to a mountain. I forget. It was like 3,500 to 3,600 feet.

[02:31:06] Um, but there were no trees. You could see everything. And the weirdest thing about hiking in Dingle, Ireland is you hike with the sheep. There's sheep everywhere. Nice. It's the weirdest thing. Funnovation. Yeah. So, you know, like, you know, last year, my daughter said she wanted to do Death Valley with me. Yeah. I'm down for Death Valley with my daughter. We had a fantastic time. So when the next, next one rings me and says, Hey dad, let's go do this. Yeah. That's what I'm down for.

[02:31:35] Anything with my kids. So, Hey, Hey Ted, Hey, you want to do Bird Lake with me next year? Yeah. I do Bird Lake. I'd be, you know, if my daughter Sophronia was. Oh, I would. Yeah. I'd be more, I'd be more down for it heading out there with her. Cause she's a lot of fun to hang out with. So Sydney, you know, we have a good time together. All right. So I'm not sure if I'd have a good time with you. You know, I'm not into hard ciders. I'll be like popping one every five miles. Yeah. You're probably a big meat eater.

[02:32:05] So we'd have like dietary, you know, issues between us, but. There's outhouses all over the place up there. I've checked it out. Yeah. I'm talking about the food going in, not going out, but we're going to get to that later on. That's, I mean, questions away. That also, you know, Nicholas Golden Money Cat was says, what are your biggest outdoor goals and dreams? You know, that's, uh, my, my dream, my big dream is for me and my wife to take up the,

[02:32:33] the RV life and to get a 30 foot RV and to go out West and kind of live off of BLM land and just work maybe like, you know, waiter jobs or, you know, I wouldn't mind being the dishwasher or doing a six month employee at Walmart and just moving from place to place, you know, whenever I can. That is my dream. And we had that set in stone. We had that written out. How's it going to be? I'm excited. Yeah.

[02:33:03] Truth be told, uh, to presumably many of our listeners, that kind of sounds far fetched and impossible, but in reality, it's not. And I have a daughter who has been doing exactly that, not in an RV and a Subaru, a Subaru cross track that I built her sleep platform in the back. And, you know, she's pretty minimalist. She's got her gear, um, in the, in the car and she,

[02:33:31] she'll do gig jobs. Um, some of them pay a lot of money. Others don't pay a lot, but yeah, she basically lives out of her car. And if I showed you a picture of her, she's like as happy as you can be doing that. Um, my other daughter does a lot of traveling, but she does have a job and she goes to school at the same time. Um, but if you want to do what they call the van life, knock yourself out, man. If I was,

[02:33:57] if I was not in the position where I am in life, yeah, I'd, I'd punch out and do it. So what are my, what is my, I asked what are our biggest hiking goals or dreams? My biggest hiking goal is not to die hiking. What? I would fucking love to die hiking. Oh, come on. Really? That's where I want to be when I die. So you go out hiking next weekend, you die. It's like your goal. So I mean, that's not my goal,

[02:34:26] but my goal is not to die at work. So my hike, my hiking dream is I'd love to go hiking with a grandkid. If one of my kids has a kid, my grandkid, you know, when they're X years old to kind of like pass on that tradition, like my daughter said years ago, when we were coming down Catterskill's high peak, I just love to pass on that appreciation of nature and sense of adventure.

[02:34:55] Cause that's kind of really the key to life. And Stash, you're like scratching at that with wanting to live the RV life. And it's sad that we, in our society, we don't make that more acceptable and we don't make it more programmed into people's existence to, to really take a point in their life where you can take off a year, five years, 10 years, or as much time as you can to just unplug from the,

[02:35:25] you know, economy of our society where it's work, pay taxes, work, pay taxes, and you can just unplug and do whatever you want day in, day out and enjoy life. Because unlike the mountains, you ain't going to be here for 380 million years. Correct. Okay. Deep, go deep. So, Eric Apocalypse, wow, slash, what are your mantras, self-hype techniques for the hard miles?

[02:35:54] Viewpoints. I'm going to wrap that up in, it's viewpoints. I'll be like, oh shit, I can get to the next viewpoint or next source of food. Either or, viewpoints and food. Yeah. I don't know. Mine's more just, kind of like, you're unplugged from everything and you're in this place of solitude. And the only distractions are, you know, the natural environment around you.

[02:36:25] And being out there, step after step, climbing up a mountain or descending into something, checking it all out, being present in that, that's kind of what stokes me up. And the, you know, the, sometimes the best view of the hike is seeing your car in the parking lot, but that's also a bummer because that's where you're like, you're, you're plugging back in. And the next thing you know, your, your phone will be pinging and you'll remember that, oh, tomorrow I need to do this and do that. So, um,

[02:36:54] that time you're out in nature, it's almost as if time stands still and you can, you can escape from the, the social norms and constraints kind of bringing us back up to the RV life. So there you go. Right. Rock full lips. That's what I got to say about that. So let's wrap it up with a rapid fire, wrap it up with rapid fire. What's your pink pony Tracy would be rat.

[02:37:23] Would you rather run into a wolf or a mountain lion? Fuck. The above like, holy shit. That's a tough question. I'll take the one that's the hungriest. Yeah. I mean, Tracy, holy shit. Uh, what does she want us to die? Is that what? I mean, like what the fuck? Like it, that's a tough question. Like, seriously, well, they both destroy the heck out of you. So I think they'd run away. I mean,

[02:37:53] I would rather run into a mountain lion over here because it would be rare and I'd be famous. Yeah. Wolf over, uh, a wolf. Yeah. People would be like, it was a coyote. They would tell me that. So, yeah. So I'd rather run them out of line. Definitely. So Jessica, my wife, potty humor, thunder box or outhouse. It's got to depend on location. Uh, thunder box is definitely my favorite,

[02:38:23] unless it's facing the trail where I have been exposed to people and I've like been doing my business. I've been like, Hey, how are you doing? I'm fucked. Isn't that the beauty of a thunder box? Isn't that what a thunder box is all about? The thunder box is supposed to open up and block the view of what you're doing, but this one opens up and shows the viewer. What are you doing? I don't care if the box opens up and blocks the view, right? Because it's only blocking the view from one direction. True.

[02:38:53] Okay. So the whole, the whole experience of being in a thunder box is you have that sense of vulnerability and exposure. We're in an outhouse. I don't know. It's kind of creepy closing that door and being in that, you know, unlit place with all that human waste beneath you. Who knows who the fuck knows what's growing down there? And like, what if you're sitting there and you feel something grabbing your ass and then you can't get the fucking door open. Okay. That's why all day,

[02:39:23] every day thunder box for me. That's it. That's all. That's it. Let's move on. Hence why we call it the thunder box. Uh, we're reporting live from the thunder box. So, um, so this is, uh, Ted. That's you. What's that? When will you get tired of doing your Catskill hiking list and focus on your honey to do list? Oh, it's, but it's by, you gotta see how to read it. It's by Mrs. Tadcast. Mrs. Tadcast. All right. Well, we'll just move on.

[02:39:52] That was my joke. Let's go to the last question. E rockalypse. Wow. Would she ask stuff? Uh, my favorite, my favorite question, you know, what is your, uh, most awful poop story? What is your number two worst happened in the woods? To be honest, uh, when I was doing the presidential traverse, my question, when we first started from Madison to hut,

[02:40:21] all the way over to Lafayette Europe, Europe of tree line the whole time, I'm like, so how do we do it? What goes, what goes on above here? And he's just like, well, you got to either pick it up like a dog or you got to hold it in till you get to the next spot. I'm like, ah, Oh shit. Well then, this is, uh, a whole new moment. So what did I do?

[02:40:49] I held it in until I got to Mount Washington. So didn't have to pick up. That was one that was two days away. No, no, it was a day. Uh, there was, so Madison was first day. Lafayette was the second day. And then back down was the third day. So, so you, cause you wanted to take a dump at the highest spot in the East coast. I did. And I did. Okay. Grab the fricking foot long, like a hot dog and like three bags of Doritos. Yeah. Yeah. When you do that stretch,

[02:41:18] I suppose you have to think about it the day before when you're eating, you know, what you're eating. Cause that, that is very relevant. So I'm going to go back to the question. I'm going to go back to the question. Iraqalypse. Wow. Asked, what is your number two in the woods? Horror moment. Everyone has an awful poop story. And I read this question and I asked myself when she says,

[02:41:47] everyone has an awful poop story. Who the fuck does she hang out with? And what do they talk about? Right. Is this what you talk about with your other hiking friends? The, the horrible or the horror poop story? I don't know. Um, and then, you know, my, my only other comment, and this is what I'm just going to leave it with is, I don't know what my, uh, worst poop story is,

[02:42:13] but I would want to know what the story is from that person who left their underwear on the Panther trail that Kelsey found. What was their horror poop story? Yeah. Ted just doesn't want to share, you know, we've, we've all had those moments. I, I mean, what's the moment? What is, I mean, it's, it's, you go off trail, you might have to find a spot that that's like a mile off trail because you don't want anybody to see, you know, to be honest, uh, 100%.

[02:42:45] When you, when you solo bushwhack, you don't have these problems. You do. You trust. Correct. Yeah. I, there's, there's nobody with me and I'm off trail. Well, yeah, I mean, you're true. So you don't have these moments. So, but I do like thunder boxes. There you go. There you go. The listener's question. Two years on the show. Dad.

[02:43:14] Love some of the boxes. So yeah, we ended on a shitty note. More than teeth. That's quite. All right. So I, I appreciate everybody engaging. Once again, this is, this is a little bit longer episode than I thought it would be, but you know what? Uh, we got through everyone, everyone who submitted your questions. I really appreciate it. It was fun. I had a great time. Hopefully nobody judges us. Differently. Now that we've answered these questions. You,

[02:43:41] you said everyone submitted their questions and Danny mildly mischievous. He didn't. Yeah. He said, is this where I submit my questions? And then what does he do? He doesn't submit a question. And he said, you answered my question. Like, and he, so he ruined my two year anniversary. Wow. Danny. Shame. Got to love Danny. Same. So, so I, I mean, I appreciate it. This was, this was fun. We,

[02:44:11] we hopefully, if you have any more questions, I mean, let us know. I, I try to answer with what, with respect and responsibility of not just, you know, the podcast of the Catskills as well. Cause you know, 10, I like to represent this area and we'd like to support this area. Yeah. So if you have anything, uh, to chat about, let us know. Uh, and we will maybe bring it to, uh, our topic and stuff like that. We got a bunch of good weeks,

[02:44:40] good topics coming up. I can't wait to chat about it. You know, stay tuned. I'm not going to let out these, uh, these little times to, uh, show what we're going to be coming up against, but it's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. So big, thank you, uh, to, uh, I mean, what? Oh God, going ahead of time. Post hike bruising bites. Did you go to Stewart's? What do you, what do you got? On Sunday,

[02:45:08] my post hike bite was, I stopped at bread alone. Um, of course, a cup of coffee and an egg white sandwich with lots of hot sauce. That's, that's what I had a new thing I'm getting into these days. Nice. Sounds good. Yeah. That's good. So once again, thank you to all who has supported the show. I appreciate it to all who are the monthly sponsors and everybody who has donated. Once again,

[02:45:36] we have given so much back in the cat skills that I can't say that said to me or tad, it's all of you guys that you have done and we appreciate it. And, thank you to everyone who is still listening to the show. 219 episodes in tad. It's three anniversary. Tad, and tad, thank you for joining me and for joining us in the cat skills and being an influence on the cat skills to promote better times. Thanks for having me. Hey, cheers, buddy.

[02:46:06] Have a good night and we'll see you again in maybe 2028. Oh, all right. Have a good night, buddy. Yep. All right. Bye. Hi, everyone. I just want to thank you for listening to the show. If you enjoyed the show, subscribe and throw down a smooth review on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or any podcast platform that you use.

[02:46:35] You can also check daily updates of the podcast, hikes, hiking news, and local news on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the official website of the show. Remember this, you got to just keep on living in the cat skills, man. L I V I N. Wicked, wicked, wicked, wicked.