Letterrock Mountain

Letterrock Mountain, Harriman State Park (8/8/2011)

We took the day off from work today to head back to Harriman and hike some sections of trails and woods roads that we hadn't yet hiked. Recently my friend Mike suggested a visit to Owl Swamp using the Red Cross trail with a return that involved (among several other trails), the Bockey Swamp path. Those were two segments we never hiked before, so it piqued my interest.

We parked at the baseball lot on Tiorati Brook Road and took the Red Cross trail north, then east. We barely noticed the turn for the Bockey Swamp path and probably would have missed it had it not been for a cairn placed near the turn. What followed was one of the most memorable segments of hiking we've ever done. Clearly this path is almost never walked! For at least an hour we found ourselves on a barely-detectable path in a sea of blueberrie bushes (thank goodness were blueberry bushes and not something more thorny). There were cairns spaced far apart, but many of them were beneath the overgrown bushes, so we basically stumbled upon most of them. They gave us reassurance that we were sort-of where we were supposed to be!

Needless to say, we were very relieved to get to the AT and Ramapo-Dunderberg which we then took east to the Menomine trail where we headed south. Arriving at the Red Cross we took that east to where it crosses over the stream on a right turn. But instead of crossing the stream we continued straight ahead on an unblazed path to Owl Swamp, visiting a nice series of cascades along the way. At the swamp/lake we visited the bank for a few photos before retracing our steps to the Red Cross which we took all the way back to the car. But before we got to the car, we decided to bushwack up Letterrock Mountain and we were rewarded with some very nice views from the top. We could even see our SUV parked at the ball field.

Total distance hiked today was 8 miles in 5.5 hours.

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