Miner's Needle Loop: Sunday morning we had a good breakfast at the motel, then drove about 30 minutes to the Peralta Trailhead on the southern edge of the Superstition Mts. The Peralta Trailhead is reportedly the most popular in the area around Phoenix and when we arrived at the trailhead around 9:00 AM it certainly looked like it. There were at least 50 marked parking spaces in the lot, and I think we were lucky to get # 49. #50 was taken by the car behind us. And there were several overflow lots below the main lot that were almost full. We were sure we would have wall to wall people sharing our trail, but we were pleasantly surprised at how few people we saw. While we didn’t have it totally to ourselves, we did have ... read more

We flew into El Paso on Wednesday, January 16th, and drove to Deming, NM, where we spent the night. The next morning, we drove about 25 miles north to the City of Rocks State Park where we hiked the Table Mountain Trail and returned to the trailhead by way of a spur trail that took us through the middle of the collection of huge boulders that make up the “city of rocks.” The hike to the top of Table Mountain, which is really more a mesa than a mountain, took us to a neat high point that afforded a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside. We trekked back down the trail to the spur trail that took us through the area of boulders, marveling at how they came to be there in the middle of the ... read more

We spent Friday and Saturday nights in a pretty unique motel in Fairlee, VT, called the Fairlee Motel and Drive-In Movie. It is an old roadside motel with only 12 rooms, but they had been refurbished and were clean and very nicely furnished. The drive-in movie screen is right behind the motel and, when movies are shown, the guests can sit in their room and watch the movie through the picture window overlooking the parking area and the movie screen. Unfortunately for us, movies are not shown after the area schools start, so we didn’t get to see one while there. True to form, it rained pretty much all of Saturday morning when we had planned to hike to Smart’s Mt. near the Dartmouth Skiway outside of Lyme, New Hampshire. Instead, we unfurled umbrellas and hiked ... read more

On Wednesday morning, we left the motel around 8:00 AM and drove south into New York state. We checked out one trailhead around Garrison, NY, that went to a viewpoint called Deming Hill but the AT here was overgrown and traversed a marshy area with tons of mosquitoes. After hiking about a half mile fighting the bugs and humidity, we decided to turn around and go to our second choice – Anthony’s Nose. Anthony’s Nose is a rocky outcropping just above the Hudson River overlooking the Bear Mountain Bridge. The AT crosses the Hudson River here along that bridge. We parked at the base of the ridge that the viewpoint is located on and hiked the AT northbound for about a half mile – straight up. You only gain about 500 feet in that half mile ... read more

Arrived at Bradley International airport in Windsor Locks, CT, on a Saturday, 8/18/18, around 3:15 PM and sat on the airplane for about 40 minutes in a thunder storm that, due to the lightning, kept the ground crew from guiding the plane to the gate. Finally deplaned, picked up our rental car, and drove to Williamstown, MA, home of Williams College, a rather exclusive, expensive, almost ivy league, small college. Checked into our motel, had dinner, and back to a relatively early bedtime. Up on Sunday for a hike to the top of Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts at 3,491 feet. Started at the AT crossing of Notch Rd. in the Mt. Greylock State Reservation and hiked across the summit of Mount Williams on the way to Mt. Greylock’s summit for a hike of ... read more