Spring flowers come to Riverside Park

Went for a morning stroll in Riverside Park, and the the flowers are starting to get good! Above are some early cherry blossoms.

Wilderness first aid training

Spent my weekend doing wilderness first aid training. See, now I can build a temporary cast for your broken leg in the field!

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.

Snow day in Riverside Park

Hike to Tibbett's Brook

The first time I ever went to Tibbett's Brook Park in Westchester was when I did the Old Croton Aqueduct; unfortunately, I couldn't see most of it very well, since night was falling. So on a nice day during spring break, I decided to toodle back up there.

I started in Van Cortlandt Park, walking up the doomed Putnam Trail. From there it turns into the South County Trail, a paved greenway right next to the Saw Mill Parkway.  Along both the northern end of the Putnam trail and the South County Trail, snowdrops were in bloom.

Upon entering the southwest corner of Tibbett's Brook Park, the trail still parallels the parkway, but it seems to recede behind more trees. Tibbett's Brook has a dramatic but small cascade here. Farther along, there is a small waterfall where the dam spills over.



At the north end of the park is a waterpark. It's limited to Westchester residents and their guests, but of course it wasn't open for the season yet anyway. (The restrooms are year-round, though, if you need to make a stop.)

I then returned along the east side of the park. I wanted to find where the OCA entered Van Cortlandt Park, but two factors hampered me: I hadn't brought my OCA maps, and I on this day I wasn't walking through the woods trails, where the OCA trail actually goes. So when I left the park for the streets of Yonkers, it took some trial and error to figure out where the trail was. However, I did find it, and got to see the Westchester OCA finish line in daylight.



Round-trip, this was 11.5 flat miles. The plan had been to finish up with a walk around the Jerome Park reservoir, but it turned out that it was unattractively fenced in, so I passed.