Nothing left but the foundation of Jim's Pop Corn Stand, which sold sandwiches and ice cream where the AT crosses the Mason Dixon Line at the Maryland-Pennsylvania border.
Virginia is Not Flat
Nothing left but the foundation of Jim's Pop Corn Stand, which sold sandwiches and ice cream where the AT crosses the Mason Dixon Line at the Maryland-Pennsylvania border.
Virginia is Not Flat
Pyramids built with help from aliens.
Doodletown is an abandoned mining town in Bear mountain state park in New York. It was finally abandoned in the mid 1960s. it has a very old (and creepy) cemetery. It is a couple of miles from the trail when you pass by the Bear Mountain inn.
Yeah, I think I mentioned that upthread. The Twin Forts (Fort Clinton, Fort Montgomery) are also right off the trail, with some Revolutionary War stuff.
If you're willing to wander on the secondary trails, Bear Mountain/Harriman/Sterling Forest has all sorts of interesting ruins - from the burnt-out hulks of robber barons' mansions, to abandoned (and still open) mine shafts with various pieces of heavy machinery crumbling into rust, to a failed 1890's project to build the world's largest roller coaster on the east side of Dunderberg Mountain. It has multiple ghost towns - not just Doodletown, but Johnsontown, Surebridge, Pine Meadow, Orangeburg (actually, that's on the West Point side of the line, off limits nowadays) and others whose names escape me at the moment. One of the village churches is still in service, even though the village isn't there any more.
I didn't mention much of this because I was trying to concentrate on what someone might want to do as a short side trip from a thru-hike.
The place was pretty much an industrial wasteland when Mary Harriman gave it to the state - and it's never really been cleaned up. That's why it's not lawful to bushwhack there - too many cellar holes, mine shafts, unstable slopes, and so on.. (I've never been denied permission if I've stopped at Bear Mountain or Tiorati and asked, but I do know people who've gotten tickets for not asking. I think they might be inclined to tell me 'yes' because I know where I'm going and how to get there, and I'm happy to discuss plans.)
I always know where I am. I'm right here.
Duplicate post
Last edited by Feral Bill; 06-12-2018 at 13:18.
"It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how." ---Dr. Seuss
It was a pretty confused situation, and now my Google-fu is failing me with finding the postings that discussed it.
The enforcement was on a road, sort of, there were a couple of park police riding an off-road vehicle of some sort up one of the old mine roads that people were hiking on. (Not all of them are on the official maps, of course.) It surprised the hikers, and it surprised the Trail Conference people, too - the hikers were following a route that was described in one of the guidebooks.
I don't recall what the outcome was. It could have been that it was a temporary regulation, or overzealous enforcement of the regulation that's intended to prohibit technical rock climbing outside The Powerlinezz, or the cop thought that they were looking to camp off trail (surely illegal in Harriman), or just got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. But since hearing about that, I always ask permission in Harriman before going off trail. I've never been told, "no," but I've also not been told, "you don't need to ask," so they seem to like to leave it ambiguous.
The park police do tell the occasional white lie. Two Martin Luther King weekends ago, I was heading in to night-hike from the Tiorati ranger station to meet up with the guys at Fingerboard, and at the parking lot there was a guy in uniform explaining to a couple, "The park is closed!"
I hung back and after they left, said to the officer, "Closed? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over?"
He glanced at me, with my usual deep-winter pack (minus snowshoes, crampons, ice axe, no need for them where I was going in the forecast weather, but with Microspikes jingling on one of the outside pack straps), and said, "Oh, you go in!"
"Huh?"
"When I tell people that they don't have adequate gear to spend a night in there, they argue. When I tell them we're closed, they go home. We do at least one rescue a week from there, and I didn't want it to be them. I can see you know what you're doing, and have what you need!"
I always know where I am. I'm right here.