Manitoga, Putnam
County, New York – November 6, 2011
My goal this week was to hike along the Appalachian Trail near the Bear
Mountain Bridge. I decided to park at Manitoga and hike through their
trails to reach the AT. Manitoga was the estate of the industrial designer Russel Wright. It has 4 miles of trails.
My car was the only one in the parking lot. It appears that house and
landscape tours are only offered May through October, though as far as
I know, the property remains open throughout the year for hiking. The
parking lot was not marked, and I didn't even know whether to park
north-south or east-west. I guess when you're the first car in an
unmarked lot, you can set the rules.
I didn't think that it was all that obvious to
find the start of the trails, but I finally walked across a muddy field
("Mary's Meadow") and found the trailhead, which led uphill on a series
of stones placed as steps. As with every set of trails I can think of,
the trails are blazed for travel in both directions (i.e., typically a
tree will have a blaze on one side for those hiking in one
direction, and a blaze on the opposite side for those hiking in the
opposite direction). However, a note indicated that the trails were
aesthetically placed and designed for travel in the clockwise
direction. If one wanted to go counterclockwise, he would find the
blazes had a black circle in the center of them, to show that he's
going in the wrong/non-preferable direction. [I think that even if the
trail designer intends a trail to be traveled in only one direction,
for safety the trail needs to be blazed in both directions, in
case one needs to backtrack if a trail is blocked, if someone is sick
or injured, if there's not enough time left to complete the hike as the
designer intended, etc. In addition, many times I have passed one blaze
without immediately seeing the next blaze and without being certain of
the direction of the trail, and I have looked back to see the blazes on
the trees that I have already passed, which help me to line up the
direction in which I should continue to travel.]
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The land was pretty, with a stream flowing through it.
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Unfortunately, I soon discovered that there were many downed trees, limbs and branches, which made hiking very difficult.
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In some places, trees had fallen a while ago and the path had been cleared by chainsaw.
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However, in other places, there were trees that had just fallen down
in the snowstorm of eight days earlier, and they had not been cleared.
There were also downed trees that had been dead quite a while, and in
those cases it's hard to tell when they fell. It could be that these
trails were never cleared after Hurricane Irene came through in August.
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Here a large tree has fallen, only to be caught by a much smaller tree. It should probably be taken down, for safety.
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Branches block the trail.
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More branches and limbs:
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In addition to the trails being blocked by fallen trees, it was hard
to find the trails at times because of the heavy leaf cover. Also, some
of the blazes were on trees that had fallen, which also made it harder
to follow the path.
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After about 1-1/2 hours, I gave up, as it wasn't fun constantly
detouring or climbing over downed trees. I never made it to the
Appalachian Trail that day, so I don't know what shape it was in.
Manitoga looks like a nice place to revisit someday, but it'll be a big effort to clear its trails.