A Day in the Dogskills: Hunter Mountains
The brown months are sad but I still want to hike. I think maybe I especially need to hike. In this late April, the conditions in the Adirondacks still boast high water in the streams and tall snow monorails on the trails, so Sunny and I headed back to the Catskills to work on our fire tower list. This week we'd be climbing Hunter Mountain. My buddy recommended also bagging SW Hunter while we were at it since it's on the 3500 list. I looked at all the options for summiting Hunter and there certainly are quite a few ways to do it. I thought it might be a good idea to start training up for the longer distances we'd be doing this Summer, so I chose one of the longer routes. For this one, we'd be starting from the Spruceton Rd. trailhead and doing the loop around Hunter Mountain's Western spur. There was lots of advice to hike clockwise in order to spread out the elevation gain over a longer distance, however I really prefer to get the elevation gain done early if I ...