Rainy social distancing walk

It's been a rainy weekend, so I felt safe venturing out on Sunday afternoon for a five-mile jaunt up to Riverbank State Park and back. As you can see, it was easy to social distance:



The spring bloom continues unabated:

Hello New Jersey

When does an urban walk become a hike? I've never quite found a satisfactory answer, but until recently the question didn't matter so much. Now, the only hikes I can do are hikes that start and end at my house, so every hike is an urban hike.

I've been walking nearly every day, almost always in Riverside Park, but this past weekend I decided to hike to New Jersey, just because I could. So, up the west side and over the George Washington Bridge I went.



Just north of the bridge, the entrance to the Long Path along the Palisades is closed due to construction. So I went into Fort Lee Park before returning home.



At 14 miles, I fully qualify this as a hike, and it was really nice just to get a little farther out and see something different.

Scouting a hike in Ramapo

I corralled two friends into going out to Ramapo Valley Reservation on Saturday to scout a hike I'm leading in April. The sense we had was that the hike I had planned was too ambitious for the day, especially given that the hike has a late start - the only bus leaves the city at 10:15 a.m., but we needed to test that out.



Our first finding was that it really was a very pretty hike. Beyond the waterfall, MacMillan Reservoir is quite nice, as was Glasmere Pond.



We went up to Potake Pond, the state line, and Shepherd Lake - all very nice, but at that point we were in full agreement that the hike was indeed too long. We wouldn't make it back to the bus on time - there are two, but the second one is so long after dark that we wouldn't want to be stumbling around in the woods at that point.



Our hike was about 18 miles and 2,000 feet of elevation gain.

This area (Ramapo Reservation, Ringwood State Park - all on NY/NJ Trail Conference map 115) is poorly served by buses. The 197 bus runs frequently but its stops are several miles from the park. If you don't have a car and don't want to do a massive mileage day, there are parts that are hard to reach.

Hiking Staten Island from bay to marsh (almost)

We took the subway to the ferry to a bus - a rather long bus ride - to Great Kills Park, on the southeastern shore of Staten Island. A short jaunt there took us to a sandy beach, something I had no idea Staten Island possessed.



From there, we walked to the Willowbrook Parkway, named for an intended-but-never-built highway. Instead, it's a narrow hiking path in a woods about a block wide. The trail is not perfectly flat here, but calling the elevation changes "hills" is a bit of exaggeration.

From there, we entered the State Island Greenbelt, which has a hill or two, before reaching the Latourette Golf Course and stopping for lunch. We continued on to St. Andrew's Church.



The "almost" in the title is because I dropped out of the hike early, about 9-10 miles in, right after lunch. The main group continued further along the greenbelt for 14 miles.

Scouting the Ramapo waterfall

Saturday's hike was a partial scout for a hike I'm leading in April, plus a chance to show K the cool waterfall at the Ramapo Valley Reservation.

We hikes four mostly flat miles - there is an uphill near the falls, and then one has to go down again to get back to where one started.



In addition to the waterfall, the trail crosses a creek and goes past a lake, so there are several nice water features.

This is a popular trail, with many locals walking their dogs.