To all the stop and smell the roses crowd

[Dogwood]

1.2 MPH works out to roughly 100 feet per minute.

try walking 100 feet at a consistent, even, comfortable pace requiring you take one minute or more to complete that distance. you cant do it.

Youre not looking in the right place. It's customary to find these slow wandering vacuous penguins(no disrespect to penguins) in Wally World daydreaming about consuming something or impulse shopping. You'll often find them in the center of the aisle of the Grocery Dept leaving behind whatever food crumbs have fallen on the floor for some hapless "associate" to clean up.


Watch how fast someone who has reduced their world view to a 3.5" x 5.5" device screen walks. I've seen Gopher Tortoises move faster and more aware.

[Another Kevin]

the difficulty of the trail is obviously a huge factor and i am not familiar with the trails youre specifically referencing. it seems like at least some of them could be hard on the level of the whites. and certainly anything off trail is clearly a completely different story.

that said-

13.2 / 11 is 1.2 MPH. on very difficult trail thats reasonable, but lets put that aside for a moment.

My issue with assessing trail difficulty is that I suspect my experience is unusual. I may simply not have seen very much of the 'easy trail' of which you spoke!

I hike nowadays mostly in upstate New York. A few decades ago, I hiked mostly New Hampshire.When I was in high school, I hiked Harriman a lot because I was a NYC kid. To a city kid, Harriman looked tough. Then I went to school in New Hampshire, and learnt otherwise! To my eyes now, Harriman mostly looks 'dead easy' except, say, for the scrambles on the Suffern-Bear Mountain trail, which are interesting.

I'd assess the hike I described as being comparable terrain, say, with the AT over Moosilauke forty years ago before they built the steps up Beaver Brook, or maybe the stretch from Pinkham Notch to US 2. The 'add a factor for rock scrambling' was for one pitch that looks like https://www.flickr.com/photos/mounta...ons/3184443804 at the bottom and includes a pretty sketchy slab traverse https://www.flickr.com/photos/mounta...ons/3184443344 that tops out with a waist-high mantel move https://www.flickr.com/photos/mounta...ons/3184442762. No margin for error, if you wipe out you're going down that near-vertical slab from treetop height. I call it 'class 4' because in bad weather I want a rope.

There are lots of scrambles - the south side of Peekamoose is all 'hike 100 yards, of level trail, scramble a ledge, hike another 100 yards of level trail, scramble a ledge, lather, rinse, repeat" - but that one was the crux on that particular day,

Is that 'very difficult'? It's not too unusual for a Catskill or Adirondack trail. Saddleback and Gothics in the Adirondacks are harder, as are Twin and Sugarloaf in the Catskills.

I've not tried any long section on the AT. On the 137-mile Northville-Placid, I started out with a plan for 8-12 mile days and found out that 12-16 was more comfortable. But that trail is on relatively easy terrain; the chief challenges are the mud and the remoteness (there are two 40-mile sections that don't even cross logging roads).

On my personal scale, Harriman, southern VT or central MA on the AT are all 'pretty easy.' I've always figured that they were the exception rather than the rule.

Also, I do stop a lot when I'm just getting back into things - which seems to be all the time, lately, drat it. Until I've been hiking for a week or two, I can't sustain hiking all day long from sunup to sundown, and I'll get hurt if I try. So I lallygag - take pictures, write, watch wildlife, update trail maps, socialize - for a total of a few hours during the day while my body is getting used to hiking again. By the time I am used to hiking, it's time to go back to work. I need those stops.

I suppose I go briskly enough when I'm moving. Certainly I'd do the occasional 15-in-an-afternoon on the Erie Canal towpath; that'd take about five hours with a day pack. The point of 'stop and smell the roses' isn't about walking pace, it's about it being ok to be interested in other things than hiking - even when on a hike. Even roses, if there are any to be smelt.

[Another Kevin]

oh some are for sure, but its a small percentage.

i tend to only ever pass other hikers when theyre sitting still. in 10 days of hiking a couple of weeks ago i can probably count on one hand the number of times i passed a walking hiker.

I hear the speed demons coming up behind me and step aside, so I'm always standing still when you guys pass.

[Sarcasm the elf]

My issue with assessing trail difficulty is that I suspect my experience is unusual. I may simply not have seen very much of the 'easy trail' of which you spoke!

I hike nowadays mostly in upstate New York. A few decades ago, I hiked mostly New Hampshire.When I was in high school, I hiked Harriman a lot because I was a NYC kid. To a city kid, Harriman looked tough. Then I went to school in New Hampshire, and learnt otherwise! To my eyes now, Harriman mostly looks 'dead easy' except, say, for the scrambles on the Suffern-Bear Mountain trail, which are interesting.

I'd assess the hike I described as being comparable terrain, say, with the AT over Moosilauke forty years ago before they built the steps up Beaver Brook, or maybe the stretch from Pinkham Notch to US 2. The 'add a factor for rock scrambling' was for one pitch that looks like https://www.flickr.com/photos/mounta...ons/3184443804 at the bottom and includes a pretty sketchy slab traverse https://www.flickr.com/photos/mounta...ons/3184443344 that tops out with a waist-high mantel move https://www.flickr.com/photos/mounta...ons/3184442762. No margin for error, if you wipe out you're going down that near-vertical slab from treetop height. I call it 'class 4' because in bad weather I want a rope.

There are lots of scrambles - the south side of Peekamoose is all 'hike 100 yards, of level trail, scramble a ledge, hike another 100 yards of level trail, scramble a ledge, lather, rinse, repeat" - but that one was the crux on that particular day,

Is that 'very difficult'? It's not too unusual for a Catskill or Adirondack trail. Saddleback and Gothics in the Adirondacks are harder, as are Twin and Sugarloaf in the Catskills.

I've not tried any long section on the AT. On the 137-mile Northville-Placid, I started out with a plan for 8-12 mile days and found out that 12-16 was more comfortable. But that trail is on relatively easy terrain; the chief challenges are the mud and the remoteness (there are two 40-mile sections that don't even cross logging roads).

On my personal scale, Harriman, southern VT or central MA on the AT are all 'pretty easy.' I've always figured that they were the exception rather than the rule.

Also, I do stop a lot when I'm just getting back into things - which seems to be all the time, lately, drat it. Until I've been hiking for a week or two, I can't sustain hiking all day long from sunup to sundown, and I'll get hurt if I try. So I lallygag - take pictures, write, watch wildlife, update trail maps, socialize - for a total of a few hours during the day while my body is getting used to hiking again. By the time I am used to hiking, it's time to go back to work. I need those stops.

I suppose I go briskly enough when I'm moving. Certainly I'd do the occasional 15-in-an-afternoon on the Erie Canal towpath; that'd take about five hours with a day pack. The point of 'stop and smell the roses' isn't about walking pace, it's about it being ok to be interested in other things than hiking - even when on a hike. Even roses, if there are any to be smelt.

Yep, catskills are easy

[tdoczi]

I hear the speed demons coming up behind me and step aside, so I'm always standing still when you guys pass.

haha well i mean literally sitting down and taking an extended break.

it was really quite interesting the pattern that emerged on my most recent trip. i had never noticed it quite so fully and consistently before. basically everyday thered be 3 -5 people i ended up playing leap frog with all day, until they presumably stopped hiking and i never saw them again. then at night i'd maybe meet some people at camp or a shelter, we'd leap frog most of the next day and then suddenly theyd be gone. by the end of 10 days the people i was leap frogging on day 1 were who knows where, and my last day frogs stopped for the day 6 miles short of my endpoint.

these were almost all people who, arguably, hike faster than i do in the most literal sense of the term.

[tdoczi]

except, say, for the scrambles on the Suffern-Bear Mountain trail, which are interesting.

pingyp mountain i'm guessing. thats putting it mildly. ive only hiked that section once, in winter. definitely a challenge.

ive always thought it curious and perhaps enlightening that everyone and their cousin goes to breakneck ridge but that section of trail, which is very similar and perhaps even more difficult, practically no one ever goes to.

i guess its either the relative lack of views or the fact that to get to pingyp you either need someone to drop you off or to first hike several miles (my doing it in the winter was, in part, because it allowed to me to get away with some very "creative" parking on a road closed for the season) or somecombination of the two.

[Another Kevin]

Yep, catskills are easy

Heh. On that trip I thought we were taking the lazy approach by going up from the Neversink, after all, it's starting about 1500 feet higher than coming up from Ashokan. I learnt why the west approach is unpopular.

(Hobblebush tangles, blowdown, and spruce thickets were all worse than the scrambles, which were only moderately sketchy, as in "Kevin didn't want a top rope and a helmet, at least not too often.")

Partway through that trip, I said to Elf, "Am I being a wussy or is this some really tough hiking?"

He answered, "Kevin, let be put things in perspective for you. The typical AT thru-hiker..." He paused, as if trying to choose phrasing to let me down gently, then continued, "...would have had a panic attack about two hours ago."

But I know bushwhacking is nasty enough to scare off most hikers. It's on-trail hiking that I have trouble telling where the ranges are that run from "easy" to "hard" - maybe I just don't hike much on "easy" trail, which would explain why I just can't make the kind of pace that a lot of the people here consider to be reasonable. But how much does that matter? If I were in a hurry I wouldn't be walking.

[Sarcasm the elf]

Yeah, on that trip I thought we were taking the lazy approach by going up from the Neversink, after all, it's starting a good 800-1000 feet higher than coming up from Ashokan. I learnt why the west approach is unpopular.

What was our pace on that section again? 1/4 Mile in 45 minutes? Less? I don’t think we touched the actual ground while climbing across those trees. We certainly got a chance to stop and smell the roses while picking through that blowdown patch.