While I've done some great winter treks in western mountains, canyons and deserts, I hate to slight the Catskills. Maybe I've done more winter treks in them since they were closer to my home in the New York City area. I was an early member of the Catskill 3500 Club (#488) having bushwhacked my last peak in winter for admittance to the club. It is necessary to climb all 35 of the 3500-foot peaks, four of them in winter, to be admitted to membership.
There was no trail up this peak and we took the steepest side. In fact, that was one of my most exhausting treks. Two of us, Ron Zisman and I, snowshoed up the peak beginning in early morning after breakfast at a B&B near the foot of the mountain. We slogged all day getting to the summit, then wandered about aimlessly looking for the canister to register our accomplishment. Mind you, we were plodding through thigh-deep snow, each step hauling up a massive amount of snow on each snowshoe.
It is said that a day of snowshoeing in deep snow consumes 6,000 calories of energy. I don't know if that is true, but it sure seemed that way. By the time we started back down it was already dark. We huffed through the dark, so tired we daren't sit down on our rest stops for fear we wouldn't have enough energy to get back up.
The B&B owner, who happened to be Arnold Schwarzenegger's brother, was watching for us to return once the sun went down. And bless him, when we did get down he welcomed us into his dining room and had a hot dinner ready for us. I almost fell asleep in my soup.
In my next post I'll tell about the time I was with Guy and Laura Waterman, climbing her last winter peak in the Adirondacks to complete her first winter summiting of all 46 Adirondack 4,000-footers.
I have some great material about winter backpacking in my book, Backpacker & Hiker's Handbook.
No comments:
Post a Comment