location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I'd neglected to mention that I'd taken pseudoephedrine yesterday and yet again restrained my drinking. I drank a fair amount of wine and liqueur at Ray & Nancy's but then stopped for a long time. Back home, I drank a little more. But evidently it wasn't enough to trigger a hangover because I woke up this morning feeling great.
Today I would be driving up to the cabin all by myself, without even bringing the dogs. This morning I packed the Chevy Bolt while Gretchen was walking Charlotte in the forest.
As usual, I took the scenic route to the cabin, though instead of stopping for provisions in Cairo, I stopped at the Hannaford in Saugerties near the northbound exit to get a bag of trashy corn chips and a sixpack of Juice Force IPA (so I'd have a road beer). Otherwise, I had plenty of provisions either leftover from the week or waiting for me at the cabin.
When I got to the cabin, it was 49 degrees inside, which was about the same temperature as it was outside. Still, I was a little slow in a getting a fire going, since I'm used to the cabin being a lot colder than that. Eventually I got a fire going and then prepared for a walk down the nascent Lake Edward Trail. This time, I brought my firewood-hauling backpack and a big plastic bag so that I could retrieve some of that pellet-manure-rich cave midden from the high cliffs.
On this particular walk, instead of crossing the semi-permanent brook and then crossing two ridges to get the pond and then the cliffs, I decided to go downstream on that brook and look for places where the old path I sketched out nearly a year ago might've crossed it. Eventually I came upon some blaze-orange clips someone had attached to branches (I don't think it was me). These seemed to roughly define the east-west path I am hoping to settle on, though it didn't go very far. At some point I randomly came upon a pond and imagined it was some unknown pond. But then I saw the hunters' blind and realized it was the pond I knew about; I'd just come upon it from an unexpected angle (when I'd thought I was further north than I actually was). I then set out to find the big split rock that's an important landmark along the nascent trail's aligment about a third of the way to Lake Edward. But I couldn't find it.
I ended up at the high cliffs, where I gathered maybe 20 or 30 pounds of midden. It was more composted than I expected, and also contained roots just below the surface, which made it hard to gather that much of it. From there, I headed northwestward hoping to find the split rock, which I knew to be only about 300 feet away. It turned out it was hidden behind some other rocky landmarks, which was why it had been hard to find. From the split rock, I worked my way back to the semi-permanent creek, finding subtle indications of the trail's surveyed alignment along the way. This gave me a fairly good idea of how I'd extend the trail to the split rock.
Back at the cabin, I was pretty cold and also a little wet (it had been raining before my hike), so I took a nice hot bath in the upstairs bathroom. I also did some drinking, but not as much as I would've in the past.
A tiny old cemetery a little north of Fonda on Old Johnstown Road at 42.972647N, 74.371732W. Click to enlarge.
