A Fish is Killed at Fishkill
November 21, 2009
This was the second visit of Fishkill and so I picked another trailhead and route. The route was 9 miles with a lot of viewpoints. I had Max, Harry, Jennifer, Dawn, Anthony, Scott, Juliet, Magdalene, Chung Kwong, Rose, Esther, Joe, Karen, Philip, Stanley and Moon. There were no new faces in the group likely because it was claimed as a level D trip.
Few cars met at the gas station of Route 52 at 8 am. I got a call from Magdalene telling me the parking area was not opened yet. After we reached there, I found luckily we could still park outside the gate without blocking any traffic. As we were going to climb 1,000 feet to Fishkill Ridge along Outlook Trail, we finished the warming up exercise seriously. The uphill was not too steep and rewarded with good viewpoints. We finished this Red Trail in 2 miles and connected to White Trail after a break. We had a few hikers wearing yellow jackets so it made the team very eye catching. The view over Beacon Town and Beacon Bridge was terrific. We climbed to Lambs Hill so quick that we didn’t really know we were there. We reached the junction of Blue and White Trail at 3rd mile. Magdalene fell on a slippery rock and blamed it to Harry. For the rest of the trip, Magdalene would like to see a fall on Harry for the revenge.
As the trail was not so difficult and all serious hikers were prepared to hike in quick pace and long distance, we kept hiking fast on White Trail. Juliet and Scott used to hike big miles on their own. Jennifer was known to have a motor on her feet. All hikers reached the greatest viewpoint at Bald Hill where we could see the entire area. Stanley liked to climb trees so he made a challenging effort to get into the good pose on a tree. Since I found it was too early, I decided to take lunch at the next viewpoint. We descended from the hill but impossible to locate both viewpoints afterwards. Finally, we took lunch at a spot where we could find more stones to sit. Philip was leading at the front so I had to catch him back to the lunch spot or his friends would have nothing to eat. The sunshine was rich and warm that we could relax enjoy our lunch. Anthony and Rose brought and shared us their food.
We kept on White Trail after lunch. I let them go at the front but surprising they were waiting for me at the junction of White and Yellow Trail. They were puzzled about the direction because the map they got from the information kiosk at the trailhead was outdated. I checked with my hiking map and located our position before leading the team to connect to Blue Trail. Blue Trail was a short trail but it was filled with some abandon vehicles. I just wondered how the drivers could move the vehicles to the mountain by this kind of rough trail. We took the group picture with the biggest one that at the junction. Since it took time for everyone to climb up to the vehicle, Esther had to hide her face away from the sun for a while.
We went back to the section that we climbed this morning but the direction reversed. We were now hiking with great views in front of us. The afternoon sunshine created good shadows for our photographers. Joe knew how steep the slope was this morning when he could see now from the top. The trail was full of fallen leaves that made the downhill very slippery. Karen fell at a spot and there were laughing from the front. Eventually, the laugh came from the group that they were betting if Harry would take the difficult short cut to climb the slope. We finished 9 miles at 2:30 pm. It turned out all 17 hikers probably felt this trip not as difficult as expected. Luckily, not many of them had tried the first route so they would be happy to try the other route next time. If there were 2 fishes in this area, I would say one had been killed because I would never lead hiking on this trail again. The other fish was much more challenging and spectacular.
