[at-l] Trip report

[hudsom at us.ibm.com (Mark Hudson)]

I just waded through a whole weekends worth of at-l and didn't see one trip
report. What, did you all stay inside all weekend? Come on, at least the
sun was shining!

Headed back to the Catskills Saturday morning. Picked up Bascom Grillmaster
and his buddy Frank, and headed up to Spruceton to climb Hunter from the
"back" side. We were going to make an attempt at Southwest Hunter, but a
late start and the fact that it was a bushwhack took it off our route. We
had also decided that we wouldn't need crampons... turns out that the rain
we had last week must have been an ice storm up there. There was a lot more
ice than my last jaunt over to Slide Mt, but there was also so little
groundcover that I suspect that having crampons wouldn't have been all that
fun anyway.
There are two trailheads at the end of Spruceton road, and only one other
vehicle. Where is everybody on a nice day? There was also about an inch and
a half of fresh snow on the ground. We followed tracks up to the junction
to Devils Notch, and then were on our own up to the Devils Acre lean-to.
Started out cold, had to get my hands warmed back up, but after about a
mile of uphill it was time to unzip and try to shed some heat. The fresh
snow was really beautiful on the trees, and the sun was actuall warm. We
moved through the shadow of the ridge just before we reached the shelter,
and the temperature difference was amazing. Stopped for an early lunch
break at the shelter, hot tea and pop tarts...
The trail from the shelter to the summit was very pretty, and much easier
that I expected. We reached the summit and found one other gentleman there,
the owner of the other vehicle down at the road. He had a thermometer/wind
chill gauge that read -5 degrees with a -48 windchill on the firetower. The
old theremometer on the fire cabin porch said 0 degrees, but that might
have been in the sun.
We climbed the tower for a quick look around, the views were awesome, but
obviously you don't hang around in that windchill too long if you don't
have too.
The descent to the road was an easy walk down the old road from the fire
tower, and the trail had lots of sun. One more tea break at another old
shelter, and managed to get to the parking lot about 2:30... nobody was
interested in a night hike at these temps....

skeeter