On the first day of summer, I stepped out into the blistering heat from my apartment building in Alphabet City and headed west on 4th Street, bound for my home in the Catskills, some 130 miles north. I carried a 35-pound backpack filled with camping gear and little idea of what lay ahead.
I had learned about the route I was taking, called the Long Path, from a trail marker I’d seen on a hike behind my house in Edgewood, N.Y. Since then, I’d wondered if I could make use of it to trek between my two homes with only a handful of turns: north onto Broadway, west across the George Washington Bridge, and north again until I reached the Catskills.
The Long Path is a 358-mile hiking trail that begins at the 175th Street subway station in Manhattan and runs to Thacher State Park, just south of the Adirondack Mountains. Conceived around 1930 by Vincent Schaefer, a chemist and meteorologist, and named after a line from a Walt Whitman poem, the Long Path initially had no fixed route and was essentially a sequence of waypoints that led toward the Adirondack High Peaks. In the 1930s, the up-and-coming trail was championed by an influential hiking columnist, Raymond H. Torrey, but its development soon stalled during the war effort.
Interest in the trail was revived in the 1960s, when the Long Path was re-envisioned as a long-distance hiking trail with a fixed route. Today, it remains a work in progress. Mary Ann Nissley is credited with completing the first through-hike — it took her 25 days — in 1998. The trail has since been rerouted to minimize the stretches along public roads. In 2019, Jeffrey Adams ran the entire trail in a record seven and a half days.
Uninterested in breaking any records, or even hiking the trail to completion, I had my own hyperspecific hill to climb and intended to take my time doing so.
After I crossed the George Washington Bridge into Fort Lee, N.J., the trail brought me along the Palisades Parkway — sometimes close enough, it seemed, to hear the conversations of passing motorists.
Many of the first 35 miles track alongside the eastern escarpment of the Hudson River, though I opted to drop down to the breezier Shore Trail for several sections.
Passing back into New York state from New Jersey, the trail brought me through a series of state parks — Tallman Mountain, Blauvelt, Hook Mountain, Rockland Lake and High Tor — and the charismatic river towns of Piermont and Nyack.
It often felt like I was the only human on the trail. Occasionally I encountered others in the mornings or evenings, though all of them lived nearby and were being towed by their dogs.
I began to realize that nobody I encountered was aware of the Long Path’s existence, including several people whose homes sat mere feet from the trail. Despite being well marked (its route is indicated with a rectangular aqua blaze), it appears to be hidden in plain sight. Apparently the ubiquitous patches of paint adorning tree trunks, stones and telephone poles are only perceptible to those who navigate by them.
With no designated on-trail campsites until I reached Harriman State Park, I spent the first few nights trying to figure out where to sleep, as most parks on the trail closed at dusk. By necessity and often by moonlight, I learned to wander off trail and out of sight to hang my hammock for the night, careful to leave no trace.
I later heard that park rangers often turn a blind eye to inconspicuous campers like me, but I would have slept easier with some clarity — and I welcome the day when travelers on the Long Path are afforded safer passage.
After several satisfying days crisscrossing the stately, parklike forests and smooth granite peaks of Harriman State Park, I shared a lean-to shelter with a number of Appalachian Trail through-hikers. I was eager for a bit of campsite camaraderie — but those I met all shared a wearied determination. They seemed to have enough energy in reserve to tell their tales, but when it came to discussing anything beyond the lock-step march in front of them, they just couldn’t seem to find the calories.
If all 2,190 herculean miles of the Appalachian Trail were saddled with long-established traditions and obscure nomenclature, perhaps the Long Path could be whatever I wanted it to be? I was, it appeared, the only one on it.
And so I leaned in and sought out every swimming hole, public pool and waterfall into which I could sink my battered body. I tried to decipher songbird operas. I picnicked with Dominican families. I took field trips to Woodbury Commons for massage chairs and grocery-shopped in Hasidic villages. I joined the citizens of Chester for a blues concert overlooking an onion field. I shared a bucket of balls at a driving range in Goshen with a veteran just back from Kuwait. I slept atop a pile of crushed gravel the size of a bodega in the hamlet of Slate Hill. And I broke bread with as many friends along the way as I was able.
In Orange County, my route cut sharply westward. I spent several days on the Heritage Trail and at least a full day walking through suburbs that were likely farmland a few harvests prior.
Just shy of the Delaware River, the Long Path jogged northeast along the Shawangunk Ridge. As Metro-North’s Port Jervis Line and Interstate 84 receded into the distance, the path climbed toward Minnewaska State Park Preserve and then on to the Catskill Mountains.
Gradually New York City’s gravitational field diminished. A train, airport or highway wasn’t always within earshot. There were weekend homes, vacationers and kids getting dropped off at summer camp. The forests were messier, wilder, and the rivers ran clearer. I saw birds of every feather, bright orange salamanders, fawns with white tails the size of feather dusters, a playful family of fisher cats and the occasional nosy black bear. I was getting closer to home.
My Long Path ended after 27 days and roughly 300 miles of walking, along with some 27,000 feet of elevation gain. I may not have strayed far afield, but not a day went by that I wasn’t pushed to my physical limit, that my assumptions weren’t toppled, that I didn’t have a remarkable interaction or feel I had witnessed something rare and exotic.
Only 231 people are known to have completed the Long Path, either in sections or as a through-hike. Compare that to the Appalachian Trail, which is more than six times longer and saw more than 1,200 completions in 2023 alone.
This trail was carved from forest, field and stone over a century of backbreaking work by countless volunteers. It’s a completely free resource available to all of those in the New York area and beyond. It provides a direct conduit from the heart of America’s greatest metropolis to the vast Forever Wild lands of upstate New York. No logins or reservations needed.
The Long Path waits patiently, just beyond sight, for anyone with the will to make it their own.
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