Goosepond Mountain State Park

Goosepond Mountain State Park (3/28/2009)

This is Hike #30 ("Goose Pond Mountain") from the book Best Hikes With Dogs: New York City & Beyond (1st Edition, 2007) -- at least we intended this to be that hike. But the park is such a maze of unblazed trails (and almost every blazed one is orange, and none of them seem to be connected), that even a GPS wasn't helpful in following the description in this book. So instead of spending about half of the hike off of Lazy Hill Road and on the trails, we only spent about a third in the woods and the rest on the road. And without a GPS receiver we might have gotten hopelessly lost. Having said that, this is a beautiful park, and quite large. This 6-mile hike didn't even come close to the actual mountain, though the hike offered wonderful views of the mountain at various points. Since no map of the park exists, when we return to hike to the top of the mountain we'll surely bring our GPS receiver and compass, and bushwhack our way. I'm certain the views from the top are spectacular.

In addition to the description in the book, we added a 1-mile round-trip leg to a private cemetery which contained a handful of graves from the 1800s. Total distance covered was at least 6 miles in just over 3 hours.

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