Off-piste hiking in the Catskills

This is BALSAM CAP, in the Catskill Mountains of New York state. It's at 3500 feet or so, and at 10:00 on Saturday 7th October I was at 1100feet .... Hmmmm.


After fighting through incredibly dense tree cover, steep scree slopes, knee-deep leaf-mould etc for 5 hours we covered the 3 miles (!) to the peak. Hoo-rah. This is the view we got, looking back East across the valley. (Up to that point there had only been one break in the trees to see anything more than 50yards away)














Personally I gave up hope of finding the box on top in which you can write your name on the climbing record, and was starting to get concerned about our chances of getting back down before nightfall. But CARL PARRIS is made of sterner stuff (you have to be, to tackle mainframe performance), and located it at 15:20 .
















Then it was a mere 2:40 drop back down - we found a much simpler route (what the locals dismissively refer to as a "herd-path", but still far from a clearly marked trail) which avoided most of the dense vegetation.