The Last Hike - Richmond, 9/7/2008

Though we shared time on a trail after this, we never Hiked together again.

Looking for an easy, short hike, RS and I headed up to Ashland to climb Richmond, a Catskill Hundred Highest. The shortest approach seemed to be via County Rte 32c. We did not park at the designated Parking Area (which is the site of some major logging operation). Instead, we turned up the logging road, following the Aqua Long Path blazes until they turned off into the woods, where I parked on the side of the dirt road. We shouldered our packs at 4:45 pm, and set off.

The Long Path was essentially an  old logging road at this point. After about a 1/2 mile, the path split off yet again into a more of an ATV trail than a hiking path. The logging road continued on and up in the direction of the summit. We stayed on the LP, until it started dropping downhill - we lost a little bit of elevation before I had us bushwhacking uphill. Along the way, we encountered an itsy bitsy toad that narrowly escaped my boot treads. While we were taking photo's of it, something large and four legged came crashing through the woods in our direction. Not sure what it was, as we had seen both fresh deer and bear scat.

Once we intersected with the LP, things got rather overgrown. Once again, we found ourselves on a logging road, the continuation of the road we had turned off of earlier. We rather quickly lost the Aqua blazes in the maze of logging roads, but it was fairly easy to pick our way up. In the middle of the trail/road was a fairly happy spider, which we whacked around. Shortly before the summit cone, RS almost walked over a very large nest of Bald Faced Hornets - the branch the nest was on had fallen out of the tree. One of the Hornets landed on RS and all of a sudden, the nest started buzzing with an angry, black mass - I told her to "MOVE, NOW!". Backtracking seemed to quite down the swarm, so we gave them a wide berth and whacked around them.

We then popped up onto the summit cone, RS sat down to rest since she was a bit out of shape and her back was hurting her. I wandered off to find the true height of land and the actual summit. The descent was rather quick, with only the two 'whacks to avoid the Hornets and spider. We decided to follow the logging road, which is apparently on private land (accorinding to my tracklog) though we saw no posted signs, blazes or markings until we got down pretty low and encountered a DEC Forest sign. On the way down, we heard something fairly large tearing something log like apart very close to the trail - we are assuming it was bear digging for grubs or other insects in a dead log. We also flushed our 6th or 7th grouse.

Once back on the LP, and almost out to the car, a Great Horned Owl landed in a tree right above us. At first, it was hard to see due to the gloom of the evening, however RS has long since learned to trust my my blubbering, pointing I-just-saw-an-animal response. It sat there for a good five minutes, flew off to another tree 40' away, hopped around, changing it's position, then flew back to another tree a few feet away from us, where it eyeballed us for another minute before winging away to the forest depths. A very magical experience, and one of the last we actually shared together. We experiencened many miles and many magical things together over the ensuing time, but this was the Last Thing We Shared, which makes sense, since this was the Last Hike.

{minor book keeping: GPS showed 2.5 miles, and 600' of vertical, and was peak #53/102 of the Catskill Hundred Highest List. }