The Vermont 4000 Footer Challenge

I'm going to preface this by admitting I did not rise to my own challenge.  HOWEVER, I'm positive it can be safely done.  Vermont has five peaks over 4,000 feet.  In many places throughout the Northeast it's possible to summit five or more such mountains in about half a day.  Vermont is a bit different though.  The southern most peak, Killington, is nearly a two hour drive from the northern most, Mansfield.  Not to mention, only two of the peaks can be climbed in tandem, the rest are single accents requiring a lot of hopping in and out of the car.

The Challenge
You can probably guess where this is going.  Starting at either Mansfield or Killington, you must bag all five peaks in a single day.  I started this journey from Central New York, meaning I did not get to Killington's trailhead until about 10am.  By the time I came down from my third peak of the day it was just past five.  I'm sure I could have completed the challenge, but had no interest of doing so in the dark.  Starting at around 5am should make this challenge both rewarding and a lot of fun.  Here's how I did!

Killington

Killington is the second tallest summit in the state, but like all but one summit you will conquer, it's highly developed by ski resorts and mountain biking trails.  The development ruins the serenity, but it makes for a quick and steep climb.  The best way to climb Killington is to take the most direct route up, following the main ski lift up a leg-busting 1,600 feet in just 1.1 miles.  I do not recommend taking this way down.  The trail is overgrown and difficult to find your footing.  It is a beautiful view for your effort.  Take note of the Long Trail that crosses over the summit.

Killington has an odd color-letter route system that you can follow back down.  All in all, the trip was about a 3.3 miles and took me about an hour and a half.  Not bad for a high peak.

Abraham and Ellen

You got to hit the road! Take VT 100 and snake your way to Sugarbush ski resort.  It takes a bit over an hour from Killington.

I approached this ascent wrong!  After my success climbing Killington with breakneck speed up the ski lift, I thought Abe and El could be done the same.  Despite being lower than Killington, there is well over 2,400 feet of elevation gain between the two climbs.  I took on a lift lane that was under construction, only to find that after a brutally long ascent, I was only 70% of the way up; I was not pleased.  The rest of the climb was on utility roads and finally back to the Long Trail.

Summit of Abe

Abraham offered sensational views of the Green Mountains to the North and the Adirondacks to the West, right across from Lake Champlain.  It was breathtaking, but like all challenges that involve a race against time, I could only linger for a few moments.  Ellen was neither fun, nor beautiful.  The trudge to Ellen felt long and claustrophobic, only to reach a mostly wooded summit with the only clearing being the top of a ski lift not too far off the route.

I wasn't too tore up about having to leave.  By the time I made my way to the foot of Abraham I would see the sun starting to move down rapidly.  I knew I could take on Camel's Hump in good time and have a great view of the sunset, but I would end taking on Mansfield in the dark.  I decided to cut my losses and head to Burlington for a beer.

Camel's Hump, Mansfield, and Your Turn!

I would love to see someone else tear this challenge up, so here's my tips:

• Camp out near Killington or Mansfield the night before and take off at first light; you'll need every bit of time you can get.
• Utilize the ski lift lanes for Killington and Mansfield on the ascent.  
• Don't speed on the road!  There's really no need if you're a strong hiker
• Go South to North so you can get a beer in Burlington ;)

I'll let you know how attempt two goes.
Ramble on! Cheers.

Wanderlusting, Road Tripping Music

I love and hate road trips. I think anyone who regularly travels knows this feeling well. The actual act of traveling is always a thrill in itself. There's nothing like laying eyes on new vistas and towns for the first time, but if you're anything like me, the expansive cornfields and broken down towns can be wearing. After years of experience, I've come up with a short list of the best road trip songs, which also seem to work well if you have a life-crisis and decide to leave everything and drive to Tijuana, whichever comes first. The list, like me, favors music from the 60's and 70's, but hang in there! I swear there's some modern stuff!

• Ramble On - Led Zeppelin

It took me forever to appreciate LZ.  I just couldn't get into Robert Plant's voice on some songs, but I don't care who you are, Ramble On makes you want to drive into the sunset. Pay close attention to the Lord of the Rings references, you'll giggle.

Ramble on and now's the time, the time is now, to sing my song

I'm going around the world, I got to find my girl, on my way
I've been this way ten years to the day ramble on
Gotta find the queen of all my dreams

• Highway Chile - Jimi Hendrix

I'm a HUGE Hendrix fan! Jimi has a lot of "on the road" songs, so I could have filled this whole post with them, but I took the most fitting. The song is semi-autobiographical, so you can easily picture a young Jimi strolling down the road, thumb in hitchhike position.

Yeah, his guitar slung across his back
His dusty boots is his cadillac
Flamin' hair just a blowin' in the wind
Ain't seen a bed in so long it's a sin
He left home when he was seventeen
The rest of the world he had longed to see
But everybody knows the boss
A rolling stone who gathers no moss

• Up Around the Bend - Credence Clearwater Revival

I was going back and forth between which CCR song I was going to add.  Sweet Hitchhiker was also a top contender. Up Around the Bend not only stokes the image of running away into something simpler and more beautiful, it warns us, Alexander Supertramp style, that the mainstream is going down fast.

There's a place up ahead and
I'm going just as fast as my feet can fly
Come away, come away if you're going,
Leave the sinking ship behind. 

• Take the Money and Run - Steve Miller

I swear, it's my last pick from the 60's or 70's.   Admittedly, Steve Miller and CCR make up about half my road trip music. I think I was born in the wrong era. Take the Money and Run though is one of my classic favorites. I swear, there's no other song that puts a smile on my face like this one.

This here's a story about Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue
Two young lovers with nothin' better to do
Than sit around the house, get high, and watch the tube
And here is what happened when they decided to cut loose

• Fly Away - Lenny Kravitz

Fly Away is the wanderlust anthem.  Driving guitar and a liberating rhythm, Lenny captures the spirit of free spiritedness.

I wish that I could fly
Into the sky
So very high
Just like a dragonfly
I'd fly above the trees
Over the seas in all degrees
To anywhere I please

• Mountain Sound - Of Monsters and Men

I know, I know, you've heard it a thousand times, but it still needs to be part of any adventure's soundtrack, particularly one into the mountains.

I heard them calling in the distance
So I packed my things and ran
Far away from all the trouble
I had caused with my two hands
Alone we travelled armed with nothing but a shadow
We fled, far away

• Conga - The Holidays

Australian Indie rock has never produced a better group than The Holidays. Conga's hypnotic and mellow beat will take you home for the final stretch of the trip. The positive lyrics will see you through life with a smile on the face.

Have you told them, have you told them
About our place where skies are golden
Life is free
Beneath the trees

• Runaway - The Real McCoy

90's. Anti-establishment. Dance music.....more than enough said.

Money, sex in full control, a generation without soul
Perfect people in a perfect world,
Behind closed doors all in control
Life, in a world of luxury,
Cold cash money mentality
You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith
You'd better keep the faith and run away


I have more songs I could recommend, but top-10 lists are cliche, so I think a top 8 is awkwardly perfect. Cheers!

Lost and Found in Ithaca

Despite my absence from the blog and the mountains, I actually have been quite active.  Living in Ithaca has its perks.  I live 20 miles or less to what many will travel across the state to see.  Ithaca may not be surrounded by the peaks I prefer, but the gorges, glens and waterfalls more than make up for it....well, almost.

After losing my phone I was nervous my most recent hikes would be lost.  I'm going back and forth over taking a trip to Colorado for a couple months, so I wouldn't see the gorges again until they were back in their autumn splendor.  The fall colors are breathtaking, but the sole benefit of having weeks of never ending rain is that the rivers are swollen and their cascades rage pretty furiously.  Thank Guinness for Instagram!  I lost some photos, but at least a few memories were saved, like massive Lucifer Falls at Robert Treman Park,

and the enchanting serenity of Fillmore Glenn, just outside of Ithaca,

and of course, one of many trips to Taughannock falls.

With any luck I'll gather the courage and resources to leap into the unknown for a while and finally spend time in mountain sound of the Rockies, but even if I do, I'll miss summer in the Republic of Ithaca.

Syriacuse: From Handguns to Hope

I think this is the longest I've gone without blogging since I launched the blog: yikes! Firstly, I haven't been to the mountains in over half the year (typing that makes me feel faint).  Secondly, I've been continuing to enjoy the natural and cultural beauty of Ithaca.  I've hiked and biked all through the area.....and then I lost my phone with all my pictures.  No, I don't want to talk about it.

So far, 2015 has been kind of a dud.  The winter was truly vicious.  I remember looking up the temperature atop Mount Marcy during a cold snap in February (the coldest Feb on record) and the high for the day was only a few degrees warmer than Everest.  Despite record high temps in May, June ended up being one of the wettest and chilliest on record.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to July, or at least I was until this past weekend.  What should have been a weekend of BBQ's and Sangria erupted in 10 shootings thorough the city of Syracuse, about an hour north of Ithaca.  To put that in perspective, Chicago, a city just shy of 3 million people, saw 7 gun deaths in the same period.  These types of incidents led the city to dubbed Chiraq by some.  Syracuse, on the other hand, has a population of about 145,000; Syriacuse did not make CNN headlines.  Overall, crime has dipped in Syracuse like most other major cities throughout the last few decades, but incidences like this past weekend are still not all that uncommon.

While I was sifting through news on the shootings, I had suddenly had enough and just wanted to plan my next trip to the Adirondacks.  Along my flurry of Google searches I found an article about Mountain Lake Academy.  The academy is an experimental school that takes in at-risk teenage boys and exposes them to the glory of the ADKs along with academic training and community service.  My mind immediately began to fill with scenes of merry kids from urban and rural slums climbing peaks, kayaking and fishing, all free from the consumer-driven idiocy of pop culture, similar to Benton Mackaye's original vision for the Appalachian Trail. Whether MLA is Mackaye's "retreat from profit" with an academic twist, I'm not sure.  However, I am quite sure that institutions that focus on both natural beauty and intellectual enrichment, opposed to submission, have a much better shot of ending the war zone that plagues places like Syracuse...or Syria for that matter.

With that off my chest....the blog is back, I swear! My wanderlust is kicking in pretty badly, so I'm sure I'll have more trail antics and adventures to report soon!

The People's Republic of Ithaca

I've waited a few months to write this post because I wanted to become fully immersed in my latest home before I wrote about it.  Unlike when I wrote about Vermont, I have the pleasure of actually residing in this Republic.  If you didn't catch my VT post, there are several cities, and sometimes entire states, that are derisively and lovingly called "The People's Republic."  That title is normally only given to communist nations, but these cities have managed to become such havens for everything Left-wing and Hippie that both their critics and admirers assign the title to them; I very much fall into the later category.  It's my mission to visit all of the Republics in time, but really I would love to live in a few.

My current home is the People's Republic of Ithaca in Central New York.  Ithaca has the noteworthy distinction of having had a socialist mayor for 12 years, being ranked as the 7th best city for Hippies (We're coming for you Burlington!) and holds the record for the world's largest human peace sign.  To further buck against the system, Ithaca has its own currency, Ithaca Hours, which can only be spent in the city to further encourage local economic growth.  I could go on and rave about our renowned farmer's market and the fact we have more bookstores than banks it seems like.  In fact, you could forgo the bank all together and just use the Alternatives community credit union, or slap capitalist consumerism and shop the the Greenstar Coop (of course I'm a card carrying member!)

Sorry, I got a little Ithaca high for a second.  Very Importantly though, Ithaca is gorges!  Ya get it?!  ....we have a lot of waterfalls.  Try to keep up!  In fact, because of the abundance of cascading rivers, kayaking on Cayuga Lake, and a plethora of other cycling and running opportunities, Outdoor Magazine listed Ithaca as the 5th best city to live in!  In my months living here, I couldn't agree more!  I have the pleasure of living 800 feet from Ludlowville Falls, but it looks like a cascade compared to Ithaca Falls, which sits at the base of beautiful Cornell University.  Not too far down the road you'll have the pleasure of scaling about a billion stairs up the Cascadilla Gorge Trail, enjoying the sight of about a dozen cascading waterfalls.  However, my favorite is the 200 foot tall Taughannock Falls just North of the city.  Taller than Niagara, Taga-knock-aknock-aknock-aknock (What Brian and I have been calling it since we were 12), like all the other falls, only requires a mile worth of hiking to enjoy its splendor.  Despite having a number of challenging bike paths, foot races and a wealth of "hot" yoga courses, most of Ithaca's pleasures are within minimum to medium physical effort.

     
I had to pause writing this post to grab some vanilla-cherry, hemp granola (Not even joking) for my hormone-free yogurt. Anyway, if you'd like to visit the world's greatest attempt at blending a National Park with Woodstock, CNY has a place for you!  I'll be here with open arms beneath the "Resistance" sign in the Commons, just be sure to bring your walking shoes (Or not actually: see below) or bike, there's no cars allowed.

2014 Measured in Boots and Love

There's a lot of ways to measure and evaluate a year.  I've decided to do it Rent style and measure in love (if you don't get the reference, stop reading and immediately watch Seasons of Love).  There's a lot of things I love, but hiking produces a certain kind of love that can be hard to explain, let alone quantify.  How does one evaluate hiking when the unit of measurement is love?  Why, steps of course.  One will average 2,000 steps in a typical mile.  I estimate I hiked around 200 miles this year, giving me something like 400,000 steps, that's 400,000 footsteps of pure love.  I stepped foot for the first time on both the Appalachian Trail and the Bright Angel in the Grand Canyon, I broke the halfway mark on the way to climbing all 46 peaks in the Adirondacks, and I did it all with a smile on my face, even when isolated or close to death.

Every love story has a downside though, mine coming when I had to dump my long-time pair of boots after my grueling 40 mile hike through the Grand Canyon.  As I took one last shot of them before they were ceremoniously dumped in the trash of the GC convenience store, it dawned on me how my pair of Merrel Moabs had been with me everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE.

I'm talking winter in the Adirondacks:

Spring hitchhiking in the Appalachians:

Early summer in the Rockies:

Later summer in the dessert:

Flirted around with other boots:

And this summer met their demise at the ripe old age of two:

I feel like I'm getting more sentimental over mostly ridiculous things as time goes on, but a hiker is nothing without their boots!  Other than the love of wandering hundreds of miles, 2014 was an extreme roller coaster with rock bottom lows and nose bleed highs.  I look forward to making 2015 much more of the latter than the former, with new stories, boots and as always, love to share.  Happy New Year! 

Mount Jo: Ringing the New Year in Right

Hike Distance: ~2.5 miles

There's never a bad time to run into the mountains, but running to them for New Years is one of my favorite things to do.  Lake Placid is the jewel of the Adirondacks, with a never ending amount of indoor and outdoor activities (not to sound too much like an advertisement).  This year I went up with Eva and her family as we did two years before.  The fun started on New Year's Eve when I decided to take a walk down with Eva's brother Sam to get an energy drink so he could make it to midnight.  Several "accidental" shots of liquor named after narcotics later, I literally woke up in an entirely different bar then the one we were taking the shots in.  After an inebriated attempt to find our coats, Sam and I abandoned them and somehow stumbled home in t-shirts....in 6 degree weather.  Needless to say, we didn't make it to midnight.

To help clear our bodies of "Liquid Marijuana" Sam, Eva's other brother Mike and myself decided to hike Mount Jo, a stubby 2,870 peak that has fantastic views for the effort.  After a quick and mostly uneventful climb up, the weather cleared and gave us spectacular sights to properly ring in the New Year.  We were the first ones to summit for the day and possibly even the year!  Granted, it was a non-High Peak, but still a cool thought.

Tragedy wouldn't be far behind though, that spiteful bastard.  After what sounded like a moderate fall, Sam arose from the snow on the decent down and casually remarked, with smile still on face, "My finger's broke."  After a solid 60 seconds of laughing with him, Mike and I realized he wasn't joking, given the awkward tilt of his finger.  A quick trip to the ER and Sam's dislocated finger was back in place, with no shortage of flinches and jeers from my queazy mouth.

We all celebrated with burgers from the Redneck Bistro who, and I must agree, boasts about having the best burgers in town.  Sam buried his pain beneath the Polish Power burger, a 1/2 lb. of beef topped with a 1/2 lb. of Polish sausage.  A summit victory has never tasted sweeter.