Blue Mountain

This is a post election day hike. My son and I planned this day off well, unlike the results of the presidential election. We knew that we had to get out into the woods and just get away from the buzz of the election results. Blue Mountain, in Blue Mountain Lake, NY was a great choice.

The forecast was for misty rain in the morning and then clear up in the afternoon to be a mostly cloudy day. The weatherman was partially right, it was a misty day. The radar showed the rain from overnight was on its way out, so in theory we would have an overcast day.

We signed in to the trail register at 9:13am with a slight drizzle of rain. We weren't worried as we were dressed for the wet weather. On this trip we had a few new pieces of gear to try out. One was a Go Pro camera that I had won by raffle last year, and finally got around to trying it out. The other new piece of equipment was a new pair of hiking boots. It was a good day to try out both.

I was surprised at this trail, a lot of rocks and roots, with several boardwalks then finally slabs towards the top. It was a 4 mile round trip hike, with a fair amount of vertical elevation gain, at 1523 feet. It was fairly steep towards the top as well, which would be interesting in the winter with the snow and ice. There was no snow or ice for us today as the temps were in the high 30's to low 40's. Quite a bit of running water right down the middle of the trail. I suspect a fair amount of flow ice in the winter.

Towards the top after the slab climb it evens out a bit and becomes basically a ridge walk to the summit, probably about 2/10th of a mile until you reach the tower. We arrived at the summit at 11:22am.

With today's weather there would be no views, other than the clouds zipping by. The entire summit was in the clouds. We would not see open sky until we were on our way home.

It was still nice to be out in the woods, we had the mountain to ourselves with no other hikers.

We were back at the car by 1:02pm.