Hiking - Taconic Crest Trail

Today was to be another rare sunny November day in the upper 50s, a perfect day for a hike. Today I joined a joint ADK/Taconic Hiking Club trip on the Taconic Crest Trail along the NY/MA/VT border. It's an 8.4-mile ridge walk with a lot of up and down, starting up high at Petersburg Pass on NY-2, with a steep 1400-foot descent at the end to the cars we'd left there earlier.

It was a crystal clear day, and we could easily see the Catskills to the SW and Albany to the west from some of the earlier viewpoints.

Next, we came to the Snow Hole, a local attraction. It's a deep fissure in the rocks that usually contains snow all year. The men, or "little boys" as we were called by the women, all scrambled down into the hole and explored its depths.



After another mile or two, we stopped for lunch on the ridge, knowing that the preferred lunch spot, another viewpoint, was still too far off. We reached it just before the steep 1 mile descent back to the cars below. Vermont lay below us, with distant northwestern Massachusetts off to the far right.



We'd covered the 8+ miles in about 5 hours, not a bad pace for a not-so-young group, especially with all of the continual climbing and descending.