We pulled into Woodland Valley campground outside of Phoenicia, NY around 10pm at night. We set up the car to sleep and made our first campfire.
The next morning we woke up and took on our first big hike of the trip. We opted for an Alltrails “hard” trail as the trailhead was at our campground steps away from our camp. The trail led us through dense forest, with lots of different trees, plants, and a large variety of mushrooms everywhere we looked. There were very few people which was nice because it felt like we were alone with nature. The trail was a constant climb, often so steep we had to boulder up rocks and at one point gained 1000 feet of elevation over 1 mile. Our quads, glutes, hamstrings and calves are used to flat land so this was considerably challenging but also fun and rewarding to accomplish. We reached the viewpoint after 3 hours or the steep climb and sat down to look around at the valley surrounding us. The weather was perfect and the view was impressive. While The Catskill mountains are considerably smaller than The Rockies and ranges out west, the layers of forest and density of vegetation made for a spectacular first day in The Catskills. From there we turned back and made the descent back to camp. Tired and hungry, we took it easy the rest of the night, cooked our food and made a fire and sat around resting our legs and relaxing before the next day’s adventures.