Ten Mile River

It's easy, growing up in California, to be skeptical of New England "mountains." A couple times a year I'd climb the 3,000-foot peaks I could see from my parents' living room in Santa Barbara; most summers, at some point, I'd be camping or backpacking in the Sierra, often at 8,000 or 9,000 feet. Those were real hikes, real mountains, and they made Connecticut look, um... wimpy.

Okay, so I was wrong. I've idealized those California years, for one thing; and I was much younger then, doing most overnights between the ages of 15 and 25. But the real difference, I think, is that it's easy to underestimate New England hiking — in terms of weather, terrain, unpredictability, and even mindset. Climbing New York's Mt. Schaghticoke, for example, just across the border from Kent, seems pretty easy — it's a puny 1,325 feet — but you're foolish if you don't bring foul-weather gear and lots of water, and possibly a change of clothes, because in the summer you'll be sweating like a pig. In the Sierra, by contrast, what you see is what you get — lots of elevation, but generally good trails, good weather and few surprises. Put it this way: when my father, at age 17, climbed Mt. Whitney (14,505 feet, the highest mountain in the Lower 48 states) in 1937, he and his cousins didn't do a lot of planning, because they didn't need to. (Historical footnote: those cousins were Whitneys, descents of Josiah Whitney, the geologist and surveyor for whom the peak was named.)

I climbed Schaghticoke with friends this past weekend, a follow-on to an eight-mile backpacking trip along the Appalachian Trail in New York. I can't say the mountain whipped me... but yeah, four miles of up-and-down after a day of relatively flat hiking can take it out of you (at 53, at least). Hmmm: maybe that's the big difference between hiking in the West and the East — it's always uphill in the West, where I went certainly, so you never really relaxed until you set up camp. If California backpacking is a huge Doberman that turns out to be friendly, New England backpacking is a small dog with a big bite.

We started at the Dover Oak on Duchess County Route 20, a few miles north of Pawling, and supposedly the largest tree along the AT (amazing, considering the AT is 2,175 miles long). (We'd dropped a car at Hoyt Road, on the Connecticut line, so we wouldn't have to retrace our steps.) I don't recall a flatter trail in the eight or so years I've been hiking with Scout groups; wetlands, gentle slopes, meadows shading into decidous forests, all without much scrambling over granite ledges (the bane of winter hiking). The highlight that first day: crossing a swampy area the teenage Scouts dubbed "Nam" a few years back, and recalling how they once ran full-tilt, with full backpacks, across a quarter-mile-long, decaying boardwalk to try to catch up to a train pulling into Metro North's Appalachian Trail Station. They didn't make it: the fun lay in tripping, falling, getting wet and running over one another.

The evening's highlight, when we reached the campsite where New York's Ten Mile River joins the Housatonic? Hard to say: watching the Peterson boys catch crawfish; the hundreds of fireflies (they're back, at last); the cedar waxwings and green swallows turning mosquitoes into dinner; the rock-skipping contests; putting our tired feet in the cold water, listening to the river flow, and knowing it would never end. Though truth be told, the absolute highlight was Kirk Lauri, Troop 135's new Scoutmaster, surprising us by humping in cookies and ice cream — and half his family — at nine o'clock that night. A bit of luxury, after a little rain and a little pain, put the world back in balance.

And it was very out of balance for a while, when we heard the helicopter. Reality intruded: we learned from a volunteer "ridgerunner" that someone, for the second time in two weeks, had drowned near Bulls Bridge. If you've been on this stretch of river, you know how it happens — you slip on an underwater rock and hit your head, you underestimate the current and get pulled under. A tragedy born of inexperience... one reason my friends and I are out here with teenagers, so the kids learn they're not indestructible, that bad choices — or simple inattention — can kill them.