Foliage on the Tanbark Trail

One of my hiking principles is "never spend longer getting to the hike than hiking." Sadly, this year I had managed to book up my weekends in such a way that I couldn't get anyway for a long weekend to enjoy the fall color. And the fall foliage report declared that this weekend would be peak color in the Catskills! Thus I decided to throw principle aside and daytrip up to the Catskills on a Sunday for a short hike.

There are only a few hiking trails easily accessible by bus. One of those is the Tanbark Trail, in Phoenicia, which has been on my to-do list for a while.

It turns out that it is a nice little hike. The map shows it as being something of a squashed figure eight (or if you prefer Greek, a theta), but I never did find any connecting trail across the middle of the loop. The irony is that the area in general is criss-crossed with old roads, so some kind of connector in the right place ought to have been easy to find.