Climbing Breakneck Ridge

Our spring weather has been extremely inconsistent; it was beautiful over the weekend, and then it snowed on Monday. But J and I took advantage of the nice weather on Saturday to go hike up Breakneck Ridge, which she hadn't done before.

The rocky scramble up is essentially one continuous view of the Hudson River and Storm King behind it, as seen in the photo at left. On my previous excursions, I hiked back down via the Wilkerson Memorial Trail, but we wanted to go to Cold Spring, so we took the Undercliff Trail to a brief moment on the Brook Trail, exiting on the Cornish Trail.

I had never seen the ruins before - never even realized they were there - but the ruins of an estate that burned down make the area around the Brook and Cornish trails fun to explore. Below is a photo of the main house. This part of the trail is wide and flat, and there are occasional nice views of Breakneck behind you.