Date: 2017-06-29
From: West Mountain Shelter

To: Stream (1416)
Miles today: 19.6
Weather: clear sky

Ok, so cowboy camping on the roof of the shelter will probably not go down in history as my best idea, but it also wasn't my worst. Since the shelter's roof sloped low in the back it was pretty easy to get up and down from, and the pitch of the roof was slight enough that I could lay pretty comfortably. However sometime in the night the wind picked up and the temperature dropped and eventually the combination of factors just became unconducive enough to sleep that I called it quits and headed over to my tent which I had setup last night just for this scenario. It wasn't all bad though, over the multiple times I woke up in the night (which is very common for me out here) I got to enjoy the view of the city lighting up the sky to the south with it's tall towers pointing straight up onto the night, the rolling hills of the terrain to the south and the lights dotting the tops of the hills, the tiny red and green flashes of the navigation bouys on the Hudson, and a decent showing of stars above for being this close to the city. It was certainly a unique view thus far on the trail.Morning came around and I was able to improve my oatmeal significantly with the addition of fresh mulberries from the tree in front of the shelter. After breakfast I took in the view one more time, the city having faded back into a haze by this time, and hit the trail.While hiking I ran into Michaub, who had come into camp late last night and who I had run into a couple times at this point. I passed him and started up my ascent of Bear Mt. I managed to not slow down too much for the blueberry bushes that lined the trail, strategically grabbing a berry here and there as I hiked. The trail followed an old, cracked asphalt road for a time before turning and heading straight up a rocky staircase and crossing numerous large rock faces which had even been visible from an overlook earlier this morning. On one such rock face I ran into the 1400 mile marker, made from small stones and grass. If it hadn't been so distinctive against the backdrop of the rock I totally would've missed it, even after having seen it in AWOL this morning.Michaub caught up to me at the summit and we headed down the other side of Bear Mt together, chatting about our real lives as we hiked. Down at the bottom we made a bee line over to Bear Mt lodge, a place that I felt severely underdressed and too smelly for, but who nonetheless welcomed hikers in their Hiker Cafe (but maybe not in their other restaurant, though it was never said). Turns out this place has a concession stand which sells most of the real food (burgers, hotdogs, chicken tenders, fries, etc) and didn't open for another hour, so we settled with a couple scoops of ice cream and started charging our gear. While there, Zorba and Shaggy also showed up, and I met ManEater while we both tried to convince the wifi to download our entertainment.Hitting the trail again involved some stumbling through the picnic tables full of cookout food and resisting the urge to Yogi some more food until finally finding the trees, signposts, and trash cans that bore the blazes. Eventually they led to the only zoo on the trail. Hosting only non-releasable animals, this nature center focuses on the flora and fauna encountered on the AT in NY and is the only one of the 14 nature centers that the original idea for the AT envisioned to have been built. Passing a black bear lounging on a hammock in the sun I hit the lowest altitude on the AT of 177ft... all uphill from here!The trail led up out of the zoo and onto a busy road which I followed over the Bear Mt bridge, the first vehicular bridge across the Hudson. It's towers jutted into the sky and thick cables supported the road and I crossed high above the river, with trains passing on both banks. On the other side, to no surprise, was a cliff, opposite in magnitude to our descent of Bear Mt, which I scurried up (though with a fair amount of effort... the terrain is getting steep again!) past a couple groups of day hikers heading up to the view. The AT cut off before said view, and just after the junction I ran into Moxie and TumbleWeed, who I hadn't seen since Bald Knob way back south of Shenendoah and the Priest. We caught up a bit before I moved on, covering the 6.8mi of ups and downs as efficiently as possible, until I came to the Appalachian Deli! I got another ice cream and ended up hanging out there for 1.5hr before finally getting up the energy to move at about 4pm. I almost stayed at the spiritual center just 0.9mi up the trail, which had a booming service going on and probably would've been an interesting experience, but would have only been a 13 mile day. I know it's not all about the miles, but I had to admit that that was a really short day and that I needed to be in Kent by Saturday to meet up with my family and take some time off trail. So I moved on.The trail continued it's ups and downs and I hiked a couple more hours before coming up to Michaub who had setup camp across a small stream from the trail. He invited me to camp if I wanted to call it a day, which I did, so I setup myself and ate dinner, chatting for a while until dark fell and we headed to bed.