Date: 2014-06-27
From: Wawayanda Shelter

To: Linden Motel, Greenwood Lake, NY
Miles today: 8.0
Weather: clear sky

Day 44: Fortunately, it only rained for a short while yesterday evening. We awoke this morning to a partly cloudy sky and a temperature of 65 degrees. Our rainfly was dry on the outside, but wet on the inside due to our breathing. We can't win!! We packed up and hit the trail at 6am.Initially the hike was fairly easy, with just ups and downs on a slightly rocky trail. The problem was the mosquitoes. They were swarming around us. Ever since we entered New Jersey, the amount of mosquitoes has been increasing each day. I'm not sure if it's just that time of the year or because we have entered some wetter areas, but today it finally became unbearable. I think we have gotten more mosquito bites in the last couple of days than we received in the first 5 weeks of hiking. We have been carrying a Deet insect repellent the whole hike, but preferred not to use it if we didn't absolutely need to. Today we needed to and it worked like a charm.Just before we entered the state of New York (our 6th state on this hike) we began climbing rock outcroppings. However unlike Pennsylvania's jagged outcroppings, these were rounded to the point the AT used them as a "paved" walkway. The problem was they were not continuous, so we were constantly climbing up an outcropping, walking along it for a ways, then climbing down,only to repeat the process in another 20 feet. We found this slow and tiring going.To add to the challenge there were several places where we had to scale a near-vertical rock face using hand-holds and toe-holds. In fact on one rock face there were no hand-holds so we had to climb a 10-foot ladder attached to the rock face..We finally reached the side trail to Greenwood Lake at 11:50am. We left the AT and headed down the steep 0.9 mile trail to the town of Greenwood Lake, NY.Our first stop was the Post Office to pick up the box with our clean clothes for the trip home (Thanks, Sally). Since our check-in time at the motel was 2pm, our next stop was an Irish pub for cold drinks and some "pub grub". We talked to some locals about the town of Greenwood Lake. With the 9-mile lake nearby, we assumed this was a resort community, and at one time it was. But now, with an efficient transportation system, it has become a bedroom community of New York City.We finally left the pub at 1:40pm and walked to our motel. It's an old style motel, but right on the lake. We have a nice, big room to spread out all our gear as we sort and repack for the flight home. Both our set of boots went in the dumpster. The rocky trail had taken its toll!We went out to a local restaurant and celebrated our completion of the hike. Tomorrow we head home.Animal sighting: We saw 2 more bear today and this time we got the attached photo of one of them. He was almost posing for us. We originally heard him about 20 feet from the trail, when a small tree shook violently right after Spider had yelled something to ET (we have to yell to hear each other as we hike). Then he climbed up on a rock and looked at us. He looked like he was half-asleep. We think Spider's yell woke him up. Once on the rock, the bear saw that all we were doing was taking pictures, so he sat down and posed for us.