Hudson Highlands

About two hours from my door via the MTA and MetroNorth, the Hudson Highlands loom above the Hudson. A wedge of Precambrian gneiss running NE-SW across the river, this billion year old rock makes for dramatic scenery and excellent hiking.In a throwback to the whistle stop, the Hudson Line makes weekend morning stops at Breakneck, just north of Cold Springs. You exit the rear door of the last car, onto a little platform of wooden steps. Everybody, and there were about thirty on the early train, headed south along the parallel road for the trail-head to challenge the well-named Breakneck Ridge. But, hell, I wait in enough lines here in the city: I crossed the road to the Wilkinson Memorial Trail, and thus had the woods to myself for more than an hour. The scurry of squirrels across leaves, the squeaky hinge of nuthatches and the ratt-a-tapping of woodpeckers, the rush of descending water. The morning was completely overcast to start, dampening the glory of the Palisades on the way up, but the sun was out by eleven, which meant that the thermals were rising and with them the turkey vultures. Now thick with broadleaf woodlands — oaks, maples, hickories, tuliptrees, sassafras, dogwoods, witch hazel — turning mellow with fall, the Highlands are like much of the northeast’s forest: they are actually quite young. You will search long for a tree bole that challenges more than one person’s out-stretched, circling arms. For this area has been mined, quarried, and lumbered to within an inch of its life. It’s only in the last century that it’s been left alone to recover. Sometimes even less: the Cornish Trail, a carriage road that becomes paved as you descend it, passes the Ozymandian rough stone estate of the former chairman of the National Lead Co., who lived there in the ’20s. The place burned in 1956.Precambrian gneiss and thick hairy vines of poison ivy may keep away vandals, if they have any idea what it is:
A ray of sunshine and a log at the bridge over Breakneck Brook, down in the valley between Breakneck Ridge and Mt. Taurus (a.k.a. Bull Hill), put me in a Basho mood. Another hiker sat nearby ~

Can’t share my haiku
With woman wearing headphones:
Different drummer

At my feet there was this dead beetle:Unexpectedly, a sluggish bullfrog gets in its last licks before heading down in the muck to winter the winter away:There are two afternoon pick-ups at the MetroNorth “Breakneck Station,” but I wandered down into Cold Springs for the return train.