A 100-YEAR-OLD 'SECRET' LONG PATH GOES FROM A NYC SUBWAY STATION TO THE ADIRONDACK MOUNTAINS—I JUST FINISHED HIKING IT
THE LONG PATH WAS FIRST SCOUTED IN 1934, BUT REMAINS LARGELY UNKNOWN
The barely-known Long Path goes from the 175th Street A-train subway stop in Manhattan all the way to the Adirondack mountains in northern New York. Along the way it passes through the Palisades, the Hudson Highlands, the Shawangunk mountains, the Catskill mountains and the Helderbergs. Here, the Long Path along the Escarpment Trail in the Windham Blackhead Range Wilderness. The Hudson River is the sliver of blue-silver middle left. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Mar. 31, 2025
Most people use the nearly 400-mile Long Path to escape New York City. I used it to return.
The author standing on the partially frozen lower Awosting Falls in the Shawangunk mountains in 1987. Photo credit: J. Crescenzo.
Hiking to the top of a frozen Catskill mountain in the middle of winter with only summer gear seemed like a good idea at the time, but that was only because I was 15 and invincible in 1985.
My grandmother, Faye, who raised me, knew I was hard to kill and keen to keep proving it. Faye dropped me off—even though it was way too late in the afternoon—at a remote trailhead at the base of the 3,860-foot-tall pile of rock, snow and ice deep in a remote valley outside a small town with a timeless name: Phoenicia.
By the time I post-holed without snowshoes up to the summit of Cornell mountain five hours later, I was soaked in sweat and the arctic wind blowing from the north kept a steady stream of snow flying sideways. Some of it stuck to me, and froze to my sweat-soaked clothes. I was in mortal danger.
I didn't have a winter tent. I figured I'd build a snow shelter instead. The wind made it impossible. I ended up with a trench. I wondered if it would be my frozen grave. I piled all the gear I wasn't wearing at the bottom, slid into my not-winter sleeping bag with my boots on and shivered through one of the longest, cruelest nights I ever lived.
In the morning, a glowing white disc in an icy steel-gray sky gave way to a bluebird day. I tired to eat breakfast, but the can of sterno I brought with me to heat up my now-frozen can of chicken soup wouldn’t do the job. Instead of backing down, I waded through waist-deep snow and pressed forward into the col between Cornell and Slide—the highest mountain in the Catskills at 4,180-feet. There I saw a snowshoe hare, for the first time.
I turned around at noon, half-way across. If I didn't, I wouldn't make my scheduled pick-up with Faye. She scooped me up at dusk exactly where she'd dropped me off about 30 hours before.
The col between Cornell and Slide with Slide mountain rising in the distance. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
I didn't know it back in 1985, but the trail I'd hiked up to the top of Cornell was part of the Long Path.
The Long Path was inspired by the Appalachian Trail then being built in the 1920s through 14 states and Vermont's Long Trail, which traverses the Green Mountain state's highest peaks. New York's Long Path was named after the opening line in an iconic American poem:
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road; Healthy, free, the world before me; The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
So begins "Song of the Open Road" by Walt Whitman. The Brooklyn newspaper editor-turned-poet included the free-verse epic in his controversial, path-breaking and self-published 1856 collection, "Leaves of Grass."
The Long Brown Path was also the name of a hiking column by Raymond H. Torrey published in the New York Post from 1919 until 1938. Benton MacKaye was the visionary who proposed the Appalachian trail in 1921, but it was Torrey who marshalled the means and the muscle to bring it to life.
Readers rallied around Torrey. Together, they scouted, built and blazed the first sections of the Appalachian Trail through present-day Harriman State Park, 40 miles north of the City. By Jan. 4, 1924, there were "20 continuous miles of Appalachian Trail," historian Glenn D. Scherer reports in Vistas and Vision: A History of the New York/New Jersey Trail Conference, 1995. It ran from the Hudson in the east to the Ramapo river in the west.
The entire 2,200-mile long trail was completed in 1937, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.
Hiking companions on the Long Path: (1) in a tunnel of primeval Boreal pines on the summit of Table Mountain in the Catskills; (2) near the summit of Peekamoose Mountain, also in the Catskills; and (3) beside Lake Awosting in Minnewaska State Park. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
A decade after jump-starting the Appalachian trail, Torrey and his co-conspirators went back to work. This time they conjured the Long Path from forests, farms and even the mean streets of New York City. The trail they envisioned went from the George Washington Bridge to Lake Placid or, as Torrey put it in the Mar. 27, 1934 edition of The Long Brown Path, "from the North River to the North Woods."
The Schaefer brothers from Schenectady came up with the idea. They scouted the northern parts of the Long Path while "W.W. Cady from New York City" scouted up from the south to meet them in the middle, Torrey reported. Today, the New York/New Jersey Trail Conference, whose members volunteer to maintain the path, consider the Long Path to end at John Boyd Thacher State Park outside of Albany for a distance of 356.90 miles.
But the blazed Long Path trail continues another 29 miles north to the Mohawk Rive and, from there, an additional 46 miles north to the start of the Northville-Lake Placid Trail in Northville. Lake Placid in another 138 miles from there—straight through the largest legally-protected wilderness east of the Mississippi.
Keeping with the original intent of the trail's founders to mark a path from the "North River to the North Woods," I consider the Long Path to extend at least to the Mohawk River—beyond which lay the foothills of the Adirondack mountains. It is that trail I hiked and just completed, for a total of 386 miles.
The Long Path is coterminus with the Devil’s Path for 10.25 miles in the Catskill’s Indian Head Wilderness. Here’s a part of the icy trail in winter, headed up Indian Head Mountain. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
I didn't hike the Long Path all in one hike, and you don't have to either.
If I start counting in 1985, it took me 40 years to finish. But I don't count that winter mountaineering trip at all. I start in 2010, when I first ventured into the Windham Blackhead Range Wilderness—one of 25 dedicated wildernesses protected by New York's nearly 3-million-acre large state Forest Preserve.
In the decade-and-a-half that followed, I had all kinds of wild adventures on the Long Path, from Harriman State Park to the Mohawk. One of the wildest was a hot summer night spent with a lover on a ledge overlooking the Hudson River Valley—under the light of a full blood moon. Reflecting the red-tinted moon light, the mighty Hudson River shimmered in the distance far below us like a slithering red serpent.
My companion and I woke up in the morning to find ourselves above the clouds, literally.
In 2019, I hiked from the Mohawk to the top of the 3,423-foot tall Huntersfield mountain in Section 28. The top of Huntersfield is not formally part of the Long Path, but the trail’s founders originally meant it to be navigated free-style, without a formal blazed trail. Route improvisation on the Long Path is acceptable, even encouraged, especially if it involves map and compass.
Above the clouds at dawn on the Long Path. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Being from New York City, whenever I wanted out I didn't want to hike through folks' backyards. So I never finished what, for me, would be the Long Path's last section: from Harriman State Park south through Rockland County, New York and Bergen County, New Jersey, along to the top of the Palisades, to the George Washington Bridge.
The pandemic helped drive me out of the city, as I chronicled for Narratively, and I landed in Malone, a town on the Canadian frontier overlooking the St. Lawrence River Valley. This winter was a long and cold one, the longest and coldest yet for me there. By mid-March I was ready to stretch my spring hiking legs. There was really only one choice for me: finish the Long Path by hiking from the Big Hill lean-to in Harriman to the GWB.
An Adirondack Trailways bus took me from Malone to Albany. There I walked across the Hudson River on a pedestrian path and caught an Amtrak train to Poughkeepsie. (Before I finished, I criss-crossed the Hudson on foot three times.) From Poughkeepsie, I rode a Metro-North commuter train to Garrison. From the train station in Garrison, the Bear Mountain Bridge and, on the far side, Harriman, is a 5.5 mile road walk away.
Since I made Garrison after sunset, I chose to camp for the night at the top of Sugar Loaf, a 785-foot tall pinnacle in Hudson Highlands State Park. The prominent hill is next to another prominent landmark I spent some time at and reported on: Castle Rock. The hill-top castle was once owned by notorious American white supremacist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Conservation icon John Muir wrote in a cabin there, The Free Lance revealed for the first time in 2023.
It took me about an hour to make the hike to the top of Sugarloaf, in the dark, through open fields, old carriage roads and trails. Before making the final climb, a chorus of spring peeper frogs erupted from a vernal pool.
An original Long Path diamond-shaped metal trail marker nailed to a tree in the Catskills. They were originally painted teal. Photo credit: JB NIcholas.
I was looking forward to the morning and enjoying the commanding view of the lower Hudson Valley Sugarloaf's summit usually rewards visitors with. I was disappoined. I woke up in a fog. Sugarloaf's small summit was socked in! I made black coffee and chicken ramen for breakfast on my gasoline-powered hiking stove before hitting the road to Harriman.
Instead of heading straight back to the road, I took a detour through the woods to Manitoga—the Flintstones-like stone "Rubble Home" designed by Russell Wright with a water-filled, abandoned quarry for a swimming pool. I found Landscape Manager Kathryn Tam busy at work spreading wood chips along the sculptured foot-paths that cris-cross the property.
"This is the time of year we work hardest," she told me, standing next to a steaming pile of fresh chips. "There's a lot to do."
From Manitoga it was a boring but fast walk along Route 9D to the Bear Mountain Bridge. There I walked back across the Hudson and into Harriman, stopping for lunch at the hiker's cafe in Bear Mountain Lodge. From the lodge, it was a long 13 mile-or-so hike to the Big Hill lean-to—a stone shelter just inside the south-eastern border of the park.
Situated on the Long Path, Big Hill was the perfect place to launch my assault on the last section of the Long Path—from there to the 175th Street A-train station in Washington Heights. It took all afternoon and several hours into the night for me to reach it. It started raining a half-hour before I got there, so I really appreciated my decision to spend the night in a shelter not a tent.
The giant 3,813-foot tall Peekamoose mountain with its massive 2,588 feet of elevation gain seen through leafless trees on the Long Path Section 16. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Having marched over mountains for almost 20 miles the day before, I slept in. The first day of spring was bright, blue and perfect. From the front of the lean-to, I could see the outline of the City's skyscraper studded skyline far in the distance. I made coffee and mac-and-cheese for brunch. By the time I was ready to go, it was almost 10:00 AM.
My goal for the day was modest: High Tor, about 12 miles away. It is another pinnacle-like ridge that rises beside the Hudson River, this one in the middle of sprawling suburbs in and around Haverstraw. Along with Manhattan's skyline, I saw the top of High Tor from the ledge in front of Big Hill too. It looked every one of those 12 miles away too, through rolling hills, one after another.
From Big Hill, the Long Path follows a stream down through a wide valley to a reservoir. It looked like a great place to cool off in summer. It was also one of the most pleasant parts of the hike, facing south into the warm spring sun. At the bottom of the hill, the trail exits Harriman and enters Cheesecote Town Park. Here, the trail passes a mass grave for the developmentally disabled residents of Letchworth Village—exposed as a dungeon for children by Geraldo Riveria in 1972.
Looking south out of and packed, ready-to-leave the 100-plus year-old Big Hill lean-to in Harriman State Park on the Long Path. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
As the trail rises over Cheesecote, a development of McMansions rises next to the trail to the west. The ostentatious, wasteful displays of wealth are so close to the trail in some points their backyards abut it. This, to me, is the trail's worst place. Town, county, state and federal officials allowed it to happen. It is just some of the on-going development that threatens the Long Path.
On the other side of the hill, the trail descends to follow the Palisade Interstate Parkway south to Mt. Ivy, where it crosses Route 202 before ascending the 800-foot high ridge that bends toward the Hudson River like the end of a hockey stick.
Use caution crossing Route 202. Even though I had the green light, a driver ran a red light and came so close to hitting me she had to serve out of the way at the last minute.
After relaxing in the sun with an iced coffee I got across the road at a conveniently located deli, I enjoyed a pleasant hour-or-so long walk along a gravel fire road as it climbed toward the summit of High Tor—my destination for the day. I mounted its rocky, exposed top, found a notch, set up my tent, made dinner and watched the sun set over the Ramapo hills.
To the east and directly below, the Hudson River. To the south, in the distance, the nighttime skyline of New York City glowed gold, closer than ever before.
Hiking off High Tor in the bright of another perfect sunny and cool early Spring morning I saw several deer, turkeys and a rabbit all running away from me at the same time as I came over the top of a small rise. The forest was open in all directions, and though the turkey and rabbit were 100 yards away I saw them easily. The forest floor was covered in wild nuts of all kind. Green sprouts shot up here-and-there.
A 1.3 mile road walk takes hikers past the giant TilCon quarry. Crossing 9W, the trail gains the top of the Palisades' ridge that is protected by state and county park land the 5-or-so miles to Nyack. Here the walk is up-and-down small hillocks that rise-and-fall along the top of the ridge. Halfway down, Croton Point Park was easily seen through the trees on the other side of the river.
At Nyack, a roadwalk goes around the town, but I wanted a sandwich so I walked straight down 9W instead. A deli next to the hospital had what I needed: a giant sub for $12.
Rain was in the forecast, so my goal for the day was the lean-to in Tallman Mountain State Park just on the other side of Piermont, another 5 miles south. That meant ripping through an abandoned military base, summer camp and NIKE anti-aircraft missile base meant to protect the tri-state area from nuclear-armed Russian bombers during the Cold War.
As I exited the forest just outside Piermont, the glow of small lights confused me until I realized I was about to walk through a large cemetery.
Mass graves for developmentally-disabled children who died at the state-run Letchworth Village, along the Long Path. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
It had been dark for hours when an abandoned railroad line led me into the town, past houses, down a walkway and smack dab into an Irish bar and a fancy Italian restaurant. The smell of fine food filled the air and I was tempted to stop for a pint of Guinness and a bite—but I pushed on toward my goal for the day.
Crossing Sparkill Creek, the trail heads up more than 100 stone steps currently being rebuilt by volunteers from the NY/NJ Trail Conference. The lean-to is in a picnic area at the top. It is accessible by car. It is also identical in design to the unique stone lean-tos with twin fireplaces—one on each side of the front entrance—built in Harriman about 100 years ago.
Instead of sleeping inside the lean-to, it looked like it wasn't going to rain so I tented behind it. When I woke, a squad of older Korean-Americans from Queens and New Jersey were making a picnic in the lean-to. They gathered downed wood, cut it into usable pieces with an electric chainsaw, started a fire in one of the fireplaces, then went for a hike through the park. One stayed behind to tend to the fire.
They were all intrigued by my presence at their regular Sunday morning hang-out spot. They didn't realize a long distance hiking trail ran right past it until I pointed it out. It reminded me of Christmas 2014, which I spent camping in a snow storm in Harriman. Christmas morning a group of Korean-American hikers trooped to my spot and celebrated by standing around a rock heating up tea on a hiking stove and eating cookies.
Koreans, I learned, have their own version of the Appalachian trail called the Baekdu Daegan trail. The way I heard tell, all Koreans should hike it in their lifetimes.
The author crossed the Hudson River three times on foot to complete what, for him, was the last section of the Long Path from Harriman State Park to the 175th Street subway station in Manhattan. Here, about to cross the Hudson River over the Bear Mountain Bridge on his way to rendevous with the Long Path. The first section of the Appalachian Trail was blazed from this bridge to the Ramapo River in 1922. Here, the trail’s iconic white blaze on a rock leading to the bridge, then a view looking north up the mighty river. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
It's a 16.5 mile sprint to the GWB from the Tallman lean-to. From the New Jersey border south, the trail is sandwiched between the Palisade Interstate Parkway and the top of the Palisade cliffs. Parking pullouts on the northbound side of the highway and the occasional tunnel are the only access to the park for this stretch. But for the road noise, it feels much more remote than it is.
Most of the feeling is generated by walking along the tops of cliffs several hundred feet tall and looking out over the Hudson river to lower Westchester. There are several ledges or lookouts that almost feel like some of the wildest places I've hiked to in New York. One of them had a small waterfall cascading straight over the edge into a massive U-shaped slot in the cliff face that plunged straight down for several hundred feet.
A road between the river and the bottom of the cliffs offers an alternate route for those who rather walk beside the water.
Waterfall in the Palisades. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Stone ruins from the last century and rocky crevices two-stories deep kept things interesting as I went. Two Peregrine falcons—the fastest animals in the world who can dive at speeds in excess of 250 miles an hour—flew around each other, up and down the cliffs. They mate this time of year then raise their young on the cliff’s ledges. Seeing them up-close with the naked eye was a special treat.
Some miles south I turned a corner and another lookout beckoned me.
I walked over to the edge. The river hundreds of feet below me was amazingly still, with no ripples. I saw the skyline of the City again, and the GWB was so close it seemed I could reach out and touch it. Complicated feelings welled up within me. I paused to untangle them.
My life had been a long and twisting trail. The first time I left the City, in 1990, it was to serve a 13 year prison sentence. When I returned in 2003, a chauffeured Cadillac took me back, across the GWB, to start over. I left again in 2020, to live yet another new life and not die old and poor in a cruel city controlled by global Plutocrats and their willing servants. I was finally able to say Later to All That last Nov., but now here I was—about to cross back over the George Washington Bridge.
Its a maxim that every journeyer hikes his own trail. My Odyssey led me back to the beginning, once again.
“Now understand me well,” Whitman wrote near the end of “Song of the Open Road,” “it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.”
George Washington Bridge at night. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.