Peace & Quiet

All we thought about while (trying) to study for finals this last semester was how much we wanted to be out hiking and enjoying the nice weather. Monday we finally got a chance to do that. We packed up our tent, sleeping bags, and some food and headed out to the North-South Lake campground in the Catskills.

After getting out to the campground, we setup camp quickly and briefly admired the view.


You could see the lake a little between the trees. After setting up camp, we headed out on our first hike. The trails themselves were beautiful, but they didn't compare to the views we had along the way. Our first stop was Artist's Rock.

Yes, that's the Hudson in the background there and I'm pretty sure we drove through this area on the way to the campground. From Artist's Rock, we pressed on until we came to Sunset Rock on the other side of the ridge.

That's North-South Lake below us. We stopped here and just enjoyed the view for awhile. We would've stayed for sunset, but neither one of us trusted our footing after sundown. We did take a detour on the way back to admire the view from Newman's Ledge.


Not a bad view at all. After the ledge, we headed back to the campground for the night. Unfortunately, we didn't really think about sleeping (beyond the sleeping bags), so we had nothing between us and the cold hard ground but our sleeping bags and it got cold that night. The next morning, we grabbed a bite to eat and headed to Wal-Mart in Catskill (about 5-10 minutes from the campground) to pick up an air mattress. After a short catnap on the new mattress, we headed out to explore some more.

This time, the trail was much harder than the previous evening. In some places we had to scale large piles of rocks, but it was completely worth it. Our first stop was Ashley Falls.


After climbing up along the side of the falls, we followed the stream to Mary's Glen.


From Mary's Glen, we climbed up until we came across another set of waterfalls. Once again, we had to climb up along the side of the falls, but we managed to get a great picture on the way up.


The next day, we packed up camp and headed down the road just a little to Kaaterskills Falls. Kaaterskills Falls is the highest waterfall in the state of New York (taller than Niagara Falls). When we visited New York last summer before the big move, we saw the top of Kaaterskills Falls, but the road to the bottom was closed and we weren't sure how else to get to the bottom. This time, we had a chance to explore the bottoms of the falls.


This is just the very base of the falls at the very start of the trail. We still had a steep hike ahread of us to reach the big falls.


This is just one example of the some of the rock piles we had to climb. Eventually, we reached the falls themselves. They looked even more impressive from the bottom of the falls.


The upper portion of the falls is 175-feet high and the bottom portion is another 85-feet for a total of 260-feet.

Overall, it was a nice getaway and it was great to be able to pick up and go in the middle of the week. Next post will likely be from London!