There Will Be Snow

Snowy Sam's Point

Writing to you from New Paltz, NY. I’m here for a short two-day hiking trip, Wednesday to Friday. Today I did a brutally cold and snowy and blizzardy hike in the Minnewaska State Preserve, and now I’m recovering in my hotel room.

This wasn’t my first choice of destinations. I had been planning on doing a hiking and camping trip out west in March to some of America’s best-loved national parks. Over many months, this trip evolved from a month-long trip with a friend to a two-week trip over Passover with a friend to a two-week trip before Passover on my own. Up until last week, it was in the planning stages. I had scouted out airfare, I had planned a route on RoadTrippers.com (an amazingly useful site which I highly recommend). Everything seemed reasonable, doable. And I had a friend in Denver who I could visit along the way - perfect.

My route would take me from Arches National Park to the Rockies and Denver, and then swing northwards towards Yellowstone and Grand Tetons. I would fly into Salt Lake City and rent a car, then fly out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming two weeks later (by the way, is that the worst town name ever? Every time I type it, I feel dirty).

I still hadn’t actually booked anything the week before, but I figured I would feel ready at the right time. Airfare wasn’t too bad - about $350 for a multi-city flight. Then I looked up car rentals. WOWZA! I didn’t find anything for less than $1,000. I balked at this. An expense like that, plus gas, lodgings, and airfare, added up to over $3,000.

I asked my dad for help. The next day, he sent me booking links to car rentals which were at least half the price - $500, $600. Amazing! (The key, by the way, is off-airport rentals. When you rent a car from an airport branch, they charge you hella dollars.) That issue wrapped up, time to book my flight. Except now, a day later, the price of the flight had shot up to $550.

Nooo!!! It had been so cheap the day before. I couldn’t bring myself to pay $200 more for my hesitation.

It was only $200. But it started to feel like the universe was trying to tell me something. I had freaked out at the car rental cost, so I hadn’t booked the flight; when I sorted the car rental, the flight cost went up. And there were some other complications too. My Denver friend mentioned she would actually be in New York, and not Denver, on the dates which we would have overlapped. My family was planning a dinner on my Nana’s first birthday after her passing, and I really didn’t want to miss it. Plus a friend was having a party I wanted to go to. And after checking the weather for Utah and Colorado and Wyoming for March, I realized that it’s pretty much just as cold there as it is here, making camping unlikely. Also, I hadn’t bought a tent or made any real preparations because I’m lazy and I like procrastinating.

All this led to a night of pacing the living room, talking to myself and my dad, trying to figure out my next move. If I didn’t go out west - if I postponed that until summer - then what would I do instead? I had to do something. I was going crazy at home, and I needed adventure, experiences, newness, etc! I had come back for that reason, and I felt I was wasting my precious time.

I mused over the possibility of staying local, doing an upstate road trip with some New York hiking, since I’ve never actually hiked in my home state. At first I looked into the Adirondacks, but then realized it was dumb stupid to go at this time of year, when they would be covered in snow. (Cut to today’s hike, which could not have involved more snow if it had taken place at the North Pole.) And a quick weather search turned up average temperatures of 0 to 10 degrees in the area.

Thwarted again.

There was a theme here. Nothing I wanted to do was working out. Why? Was I not meant to travel just now? Or was I meant to push through all of this garbage and do it anyway? Was I letting circumstances (and my parents) weaken my determination to live my life to the fullest, blah blah blah?

I tossed the Adirondacks on the reject pile and moved on. There were many other hikes closer to home. I selected the Hudson Valley, which is only about a two to three hour drive from Long Island, and had forecasts of 30-40 degrees on average. There’s a lot of good hiking in that area. I decided I’d do two separate trips: one short trip to the New Paltz region, including two days of hiking, then back home for the weekend (and the party), then upstate to Binghamton and Ithaca to visit my college friends, and back home again on Friday (in time for the dinner on Sunday).

Fine, so the trip had shrunk, but I was still going to do something, going to get out. I planned to drive up on Tuesday, check into a hotel, relax, wake up refreshed and ready for a Wednesday hike.

Enter… the third nor’easter in two weeks.

At first the forecast was for snow on Monday. Okay, no problem. I was planning on leaving Tuesday anyway. THEN the forecast changed! Snow on Tuesday, people!

Thwarted. Again.

I buckled to pressure from my parents and agreed to leave on Wednesday instead. And I was really angry at myself over it. I’m 30 (as I have mentioned repeatedly throughout this blog), and it is pathetic to let myself be influenced by my parents’ anxieties at this point. And, as it turned out, the snow stopped by NOON on Tuesday and the roads were perfectly clear for the rest of the day. Which only increased my level of self-disgust.

But there was nothing I could do. So instead I made sure I would have no more excuses. I bought snacks for the trip, packed my bag, booked a hotel in New Paltz. This morning I got up early and hit the road at nine to head to Sam’s Point and Verkeerderkill (?!?) Falls in Cragsmoor, NY.

The drive was longer than I had expected; I’d planned for 2 hours, and it took 3. The last few miles of the drive were through some very local, very windy roads that made me doubt Waze’s wisdom. But I arrived at the trailhead ready to go.

I planned to do the full loop, which would have been about 8 miles. I had no conception of what the weather would be like, but what I got certainly wasn’t what I was expecting. As I pulled up, a group of hikers who looked significantly more prepared than I - carrying poles, wearing hiking pants, microspikes on over their boots, bundled up in hats and parks - was heading up towards the trail. Two other guys who had arrived just before me were gearing up in special shin/leg warmer thingies. I started to feel inadequately outfitted.

Though I love hiking, I don’t have the gear. My hiking boots are not even waterproof (this is stupid, I need to get better ones). I don’t own microspikes or crampons or snowshoes, I don’t have hiking pants made of special water-resistant material. I didn’t even have skiing gloves or fleece gloves with me. I just had the regular knit kind. In other words I looked like I was running out into chilly weather for groceries, not prepared for a freezing hike through FEET of snow.

Because that’s what it was, as I very quickly realized when I began trudging up the trail. It was just snow. Just tons and tons of snow everywhere. Nowhere was the ground visible. I was, once again, unintentionally hiking a desolate, snow-covered mountainside.

Brr.

There are many people who enjoy winter hiking. These are the kinds of people who own crampons and showshoes. For some reason they like hiking in this kind of weather. But I don’t particularly enjoy it. In fact I don’t like it at all. That’s something I learned about myself today. I don’t like hiking in the fucking snow. I don’t get the point. Is there a point? You barely get to see any scenery. You’re looking down the entire time to watch your feet. It’s freezing cold, and you can’t even find a dry surface to sit on during breaks. To me, it’s not nature at its finest. Snow is beautiful, but I like looking at it from inside a cozy living room, preferably with a mug of hot chocolate in hand and a cat in lap. An occasional winter romp in the snow can be fun, sure, but not FIVE HOURS of it.

I had a little suspicion of my feelings during my hike in the Great Smoky Mountains. I had a good time - it was an interesting experience - the views were beautiful. It was a major moment in my trip. But really, truthfully, I didn’t love the hike. I didn’t really want to admit that to myself, because I had traveled there specifically to hike those mountains, and because I supposedly love hiking. But the truth is, in terms of actual palpable enjoyment and happiness, I liked the two-hour jaunt in the hot Florida woods much better. Apparently, I like fair-weather hiking. I like hiking where you can see the ground you’re stepping on. I like it when the sun is shining. I like it when you can take off your coat. I like it when you can see nature budding and blooming around you.

What I DON’T like is tramping through so many feet of snow that you can’t even tell what kind of terrain you are covering. I couldn’t distinguish dirt path from spiky rocks, or paved road from wooden bridge. It’s all the same when it’s under a big honking pile of snow!! All the trees were dead. All of the branches were empty. It wasn’t life-affirming. It was cold and depressing. And cloudy.

One of my favorite parts of hiking is when the paths change beneath your feet: from a dirt road to a forest path to a rocky scramble to an open field. I love clambering over rocks, and I love walking through sun-studded woods. I love carefully hopping from stone to stone over a running stream. I love stopping for snacks on a fallen tree trunk, or flopping down in a grassy knoll for a rest. I love green.

My hike today was not at all green. It was purely monochrome: black and white, with a sky of grayish blue as far as the eye could see. But mostly, it was white. It was snow.

In the snow, there are two kinds of trails: broken and unbroken. A broken trail means that hikers have gone before you and blazed the way, opening a kind of path through the many, many inches of snow covering the ground, making it much easier to hike. An unbroken trail, as you probably can deduce, is just clean, untouched snow, mocking you with its impenetrability.

But just because a trail has been broken doesn’t mean it’s accessible or easy. In some places, enough hikers had passed that the snow was fairly tamped down, so you could walk over it. But in lots of other places, a broken path just meant deep, discrete holes in the snow that you had to stick your whole leg in. It wasn’t pleasant. And if you stumbled, you could find yourself thigh-deep in snow. There was one point when I actually struggled to free myself. And it took about ten minutes of walking for the bottoms of my pants to become soaking wet.

Oh. This is fun.

I started off alone, a few hundred yards behind the two older guys who had arrived just before me. After an upwards trudge, the path opened onto a cliff face with a stunning view. I took a few pictures there. But the actual Sam’s Point, with reportedly even more amazing views, was off to the other side, and I decided to catch it on the way back through the loop. (I would later come to regret this decision.) So I walked past and continued down the path.

I paused every few moments to wait for the sounds of the two guys, now behind me. I had already thought of targeting them as hiking buddies, since, like the Smokies, this was a hike I didn’t want to do alone (though it wasn’t nearly as dangerous as the Smokies hike since there was no ice). But after I turned off the loop to head towards the Falls, I didn’t hear them. So I continued on alone through a dwarf pine forest which had fallen victim to a wildfire a few years earlier, leaving the trees with a particularly morose look.

Sad!

The path was really bad here; not many other hikers had come this way. I was having doubts. I had intended to do the longer hike, but now I felt it was unlikely. Without hiking partners, I knew I wouldn’t have the motivation or stamina to continue through this crappy snowy slog. So you can imagine my delight when I happened upon the larger group that had set out just as I’d arrived. They were resting, grouped around a large rock. I halted as soon as I reached them. When they offered to let me pass, I quickly said, “Nope, I’m staying behind you.” I had already learned the wisdom of allowing others to break trail for you.

They were a group of eight older New Yorkers - I assumed most were retired, but didn’t ask - who knew each other through various hiking meet-ups throughout the region. I did get most of their names over the course of the hike, but I had no idea which name belonged to which parka-covered person. I know there was a Bill, a Liam, a Mike, a Brad, and a Gail. There were two married couples among them (I think).

While I did tell each of them my name at one point or another, understandably, most struggled with it. So throughout the hike I was hailed, alternatively, as “Long Island” or “the M&M lady.”

They were all pretty nice, but once again I experienced the strange phenomenon of the men being much nicer than the women. Why is this? Everywhere I travel, any time I meet a couple or a group, the men are ALWAYS so much friendlier and the women are ALWAYS cooler and bitchier. Why? I honestly don’t know. It’s not like I was in any way flaunting my youth and beauty, but for some reason the women were automatically less interested in talking to me or accepting me into their group. Well, fuck ‘em! I made friends anyway. Some of the guys even learned my name!

One woman in particular I quickly began to hate. I think this was Gail. Someone asked me my age, and when I told them, a murmur of shock went through the group. I honestly have no idea why. They were amazed I was 30, but whether that was because they thought I was younger or older I couldn’t tell you. Anyway, that Gail bitch immediately began to make a huge deal of it. I was generally walking at the back of the group, for a few reasons - first, I was a hanger-on, and felt weird getting all up in their processional; and second, my pants were already soaked, and I noticed that when I was walking closer to the front (and, thus, doing more of the trail-breaking), they got wetter and more snow-caked.

Gail screamed out, probably on at least three separate occasions, “She’s 30 and she’s at the back?!!” “Hey, she’s 30 and she’s behind everyone!!” “SHE’S THE YOUNGEST OF ALL OF US AND SHE’S AT THE BACK!!!” I’m not kidding. She must have said (whined) it three or four times. At one point, I offered to lead or take her place at the front, but the GUYS kindly told me (and GAIL) that I couldn’t because my boots weren’t waterproof. Not that that was good enough for the long-suffering Gail, whom I personally victimized by being 30!!

The other woman wasn’t much better. She didn’t taunt me with my age, but she made a few unappreciated snide comments about my gear. (“Oh, your pants are like jeans material, and they’re all wet, huh?”) At least when the guys asked, they showed concern. After I confessed to one guy (Bill? Brad?) that my toes were cold, he kept asking me periodically how they were doing. Still, I know for sure that afterwards, when they went out for Mexican, they definitely all talked shit about my lack of preparedness. Hiking snobs.

My co-adventurers.

But the sad truth is, you guys, hiking is a young woman’s game. It doesn’t matter if you’re totally out of shape or if you never hike. If you are young, if your blood is quick and your joints are supple, you can probably outhike most senior hikers, no matter how great their gear is, or how much experience they have. On the way out to the Falls, I was fine with the pace, but on the way back, when the group was getting tired, I grew impatient. We seemed to stop every 30 steps for some reason or another, and everyone seemed to be doing a lot more falling. And these are people who get together often to hike, so they’re clearly in good shape. It doesn’t matter. Younger = faster. It’s science.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but they weren’t at Sam’s Point today.

Anyway - the hike down to the Falls was very long. I chatted a bit with some of the group, at other times I remained quiet. They all knew each other from previous hikes, and they were a jocular bunch, everyone kidding and joshing one another. There were no complainers, which is an important component for this kind of thing. One whiner can bring everyone down with their negativity, and by the time we were through, we had a lot of potential for negativity. But no one went there, and I appreciated that.

Eventually, we reached the waterfall, which was pretty cool. Someone said it was actually higher than Niagra, though not nearly as impressive. Still, the views were nice, and the trickling streams leading to the Falls were super picturesque. If only it had been, oh, I don’t know, literally any other season, I bet it would have been heavenly.

Verkeerderkill Falls

When a Baby Boomer takes a picture of you.

We ate a bissell. Someone had the nerve to ask me if I had brought any nosh. I?!?! Ha! I had brought eight different kinds of snacks! That’s not an exaggeration! (Almonds, craisins, granola bars, Cheeze-Its, a banana, sugar-snap peas, hummus and pretzels, and M&Ms, if you must know.)

Then we headed back the way we came. My fingers and toes were getting very cold now, and I squeezed and flexed them on alternate steps. The forest really looked like a winter wonderland as snow flurries began to float down around us. It felt very Christmasy, until you remembered it was March. The flurries didn’t worry us - they were light. At first.

Though the path was smoother now since we had broken it in, going was slow. We had to stop every few minutes to make sure everyone was within sight, and someone (Mike, I think) had an attack of the feel-bads. He was low on energy. I quickly went to offer him some M&Ms. He didn’t want any, but everyone else did (and thus was the nickname “M&M lady” born). But, with everyone now worried about Mike, we took more frequent stops. And then the real snow began.

We were literally hiking in a blizzard now. The snow was coming down so fast and thick that our own trail was hardly visible anymore. It was frightening, especially as we were still so far from the end of the trail. The snow was getting deeper. And we were going uphill (though it was honestly hard to tell, because of the snow). I squeezed and flexed my extremities with even more nervous vigor. When I attempted to upload a video to my Instagram story to assure my friends and family that I was still alive, my phone died.

Hiking in a winter wonderland.

Everyone was focused on getting back now. The mood, though still jovial, became a little darker. Cannibalism jokes were made, “Into Thin Air” was referenced. We laughingly discussed rationing the M&Ms. It was time for this hike to be over.

We met a couple of morons who were heading the other way, back towards the Falls. It was already 4 o’clock in the afternoon at this point, and neither of them had hiking boots on. Our group jestingly warned them about the conditions, but they said they’d “figure it out.”

“Do you think we’ll be the last people to see them alive?” someone joked once they were out of hearing range.

Onwards, upwards. Hallelujah, praise the Lord, we had reached the turn-off for the loop, the end was in sight! From here on out the path was mostly flat, as the snow lay over a paved road. I waved goodbye to my new friends at the turn for Sam’s Point, which I had missed on the way up and they had already seen.

The view was really astonishing, but I didn’t venture far out onto the rocky overlook. It had iced up, and the winds were strong. I didn’t feel like being a cautionary tale. And besides, I couldn’t take pictures anyway. This was the second time I reached a picturesque endpoint without a working camera, by the way! I think my iPhone has a problem with altitude, or cold temperatures, or both, because it did the exact same thing as in the Smokies - died suddenly on 40% battery as I was trying to take a picture. Disgraceful.

But I was actually freezing at this point and I was too cold to care about the view, too cold to even be annoyed at myself for not stopping and taking pictures on the way there. I headed, stiff-jointed, back to the path. It was another 15-minute snow slog to the parking lot. I couldn’t feel my legs; I was surprised they could still bend. I gave up on trying to squeeze life back into my fingers and toes. I just needed to get out of this cold. Once I finally reached my car and sat down to take off my boots, I could barely untie the knots in my shoelaces; they were frozen into place. Yanking them off my feet took all my strength. Both layers of socks were soaked through, and my pants were crusted with snow and ice. I sat numbly, blasting the heater until my feet dried and feeling returned to my digits. This took a good few minutes.

That's ice, people.

All in all, the hike had taken a little less than five hours; I’d hiked about 5.5 miles in the snow, which was less than I had planned when I first chose the hike but more than I ever would have done on my own. I was left, not with that ecstatic pride and joy that comes from completing a difficult hike, but with a slightly cranky aftertaste. I was just so done. Even checking into the hotel, which is pretty nice and totally clean, didn’t buoy my spirits that much.

I guess I was disappointed. I hadn’t thought the entire trail would be covered in snow. I hadn’t fully realized the implications of hiking in New York in the winter. I feel let down by the whole situation. What else could I really be doing, where else should I have gone, you know? Anywhere warm is a plane ride away. This time of year is not ideal for hiking, and I don’t care about other outdoor sports. But I wanted to get away, and I wanted to “do something.” At home, it’s comfortable, but I’m engulfed in ennui. I need action, life, excitement, and I guess I don’t feel like I’m doing enough to pursue it. And I’m backsliding into that guilt, that boredom, that self-judgment that comes with being unsatisfied.

But not only that. It still kind of feels like I’m being thwarted, even as I’m doing the thing. It didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. It didn’t feel like everything was going right. The question remains, the theme continues: why isn’t it working? What am I doing wrong? What am I meant to learn from this? Should I have just given up, stayed home? Did I do wrong by pushing past all of the annoying obstacles in my path?

Tomorrow I’m doing another hike. I know, it seems stupid, after I spent this whole blog post complaining about winter hikes. But I came all this freaking way, and I’m not going to waste the entire day in my hotel room. And several of the guys in today’s hiking meet-up told me that the hike I plan to do should definitely have less snow. But they also said that I probably wouldn’t be able to do the rock scramble, which I really wanted to do.

According to the weather forecast, it will be “partly sunny”, which certainly sounds better than today’s “mostly cloudy.” I guess we’ll see. Maybe it’ll be amazing and NOT covered in snow, but honestly, I need to start being realistic. It’s winter. It’s New York. It's cold AF. And there will be snow.