Doing the Devils Path traverse: Day 1

The Devils Path has been called the hardest hike in New York, which seems like a difficult thing to measure, but certainly if you are one of the people who decides to cover all 24 miles and 8,000+ feet of elevation gain in one day, congratulations, you're tough! For comparison, the RD and SBM end-to-end are similar distances, with about 6,000 feet of elevation gain each, but neither involve the kind of scrambling or rocky territory that are an inevitable part of any Catskills hike.

One can also do it as either a two- or three-day backpack, or you can do what we did, and slackpack it. This involves taking advantage of the trail's single road crossing at mile 13, which is at Devils Tombstone campground.

Now a bit of backstory: I planned far in advance and reserved a campsite in January, which was good because the DEC decided to close it for the summer to make improvements. Current reservations would be honored, they said, but there would be construction during the day, and neither the restrooms nor the water spigots would be available. This was fine with us.

It turns out that the vault toilets were still in operation, there was no construction on site, and they were still taking campers, just not with advance registration. The water was off and there was no caretaker. The campground was full anyway, because it was the weekend of the Hunter Mountain country music festival.

So we set up our campsite Friday night, shuttled one car to the western trailhead, and went to bed. The next morning we drove to the eastern trailhead and began.



The very first mile and a half is misleading; it's a gentle approach that is out of character with the rest of the trail. It also bears east instead of west. Then the trails turns and begins its first uphill march.

At this point, we had four 3500 peaks, 5,000 feet of elevation, and 14 marked views to cover.



Indian Head and Twin were fine. By Sugarloaf, I was feeling it, and Plateau was tough.



We were helped by having absolutely perfect weather - sunny but not too warm.



But we made it down to Notch Lake, where we had a short walk to our campsite.