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Mountain Biking at Elm Ridge
This post is a bit delayed, so my apologies in advance. Last month a few of the girls and I drove down after work for an afternoon ride at Elm Ridge near Windham in the Catskills. (Very stoked to have a group of MTB ladies to ride with now!) Even though we arrived to the trailhead 6pm, we still have lots of daylight to get some good riding in. The trails at Elm Ridge are great. Despite a lot of initial climbing to get to the ridge, the descent makes it all the worth it. The trail starts across the street from the parking area for the Escarpment Trail and climbs…
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Mountain Biking at the Mohonk Preserve
Last week Jordan and I had a rare day off–so we decided to go down to New Paltz to mountain bike at the Mohonk Preserve. The park borders Minnewaksa, where I ran the half marathon last weekend. Mountain biking is only permitted on the carriage trails, and paying the $17 biking fee for a day pass gets you access to the trails at Mohonk as well as Minnewaska! We got there too late in the day to check out all the trails, but we did ride on the main carriage trail along the ledge. It was gorgeous! Also, we saw many people rock climbing ! Pretty cool, but not something…
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Blackhead Mountian
Yesterday I took a day off from work to hike with my friend Brendan. He had the whole week off for vacation and Monday’s weather was looking fantastic, so I suggested we go down to the Catskills. I found three mountains we could hike, but ultimately decided just do one to make it a short day: Blackhead Mountain, the fifth highest Catskill peak, part of the 35 over 3,500 ft. We parked at the Big Hollow parking lot in Maplecrest and started our hike at 11:00AM. Late for me! The first mile or so of trail was relatively easy and flat, a nice little walk in the woods with a…
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OPUS 40 Sculpture Park
This weekend was the fourth weekend in a row I found myself driving down 87 to head South. I just can’t stay away from the Catskills! Yesterday Chris and I met our friends Jackie and Brian in Saugerties at OPUS 40, a really awesome sculpture park. The park was built in a rock quarry by one man, Harvey Fite. He did some amazing work, I can’t believe one man made all this! The best is seeing the aerial shot. So awesome! Photo from here.
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Hiking Giant Ledge and Panther Mountain – Catskills
Finally, a weekend spent (almost) entirely outside!! I have been waiting for this. To keep up with goal of hiking one mountain per month, yesterday I went hiking with Chris and our friends Meredith and John. It was a PERFECT day. Yesterday’s high was 80 degrees. There is still a ton of snow in the Adirondacks, so we decided to try another hike in the Catskills. Giant Ledge and Panther Mountain not far from Slide where we hiked the last time. Most of the snow was completely gone, but when we got to higher elevations there was about a foot in some spots. We decided to leave our snowshoes behind…