Recently inspired by the folks over at gearjunkie.com and looking for a fresh challenge to take on this fall, the Devil’s Path in the Catskill Mountains of New York seemed like a perfect fit for a quick overnight trip. All fall I’ve been throwing around a couple endurance type hikes to take on given that the fall is one of my favorite times of the year to be out. No bugs, cooler temps, way less people and that familiar sound of crunching leaves underfoot. A few other things I looked at were trying to do the Smokies in a day (70mi), as well as trying to do the Shenandoahs in 2 days (107mi). Both had their pros and cons, but one thing that bought me into the idea of the Devil’s Path hike was 1) exploring somewhere new since I’ve seen both the Smokies and the Shenandoahs during my AT thru-hike and 2) trying to reminisce on the relentless climbs and changes in elevation in Nepal earlier this year. After looking into the logistics of the hike and wanting to avoid having to shuttle vehicles and/or hitchhike back to my truck, it dawned on me that I could just commit and try and hike end-end-end in one go. Why not try to do that in under 24hours? Thus the hike was born.

    A few goals I had in mind for the hike were:

1. -See how my body would react doing a 50 miler off the couch.
   

2. -See how I liked night hiking
   

3. -See if I could gain that much elevation in under 24 hours
   

4. -Explore the Catskills
   

    After driving the 6 1/2hr north to New York, I arrived at the trailhead around 7pm at night. Plan was to bed down for some rest and then begin walking by 3am. All went well and smooth as far as getting up anad out by 3am, but things quickly began to deteriorate after that. I pulled 3 classic rookie moves. First, I neglected to put fresh batteries in my headlamp, which began to die after only 30 minutes into the hike. I had 2 sets of spares but knew I would be spending a lot of time hiking in the dark. Secondly, I got lost. Yup totally took the wrong trail. I could come up with some lame excuse like the trail was poorly marked or the color of the blazes were hard to see with my headlamp or I was tired and groggy, but no, I simply wasn’t paying attention and missed a junction. Consequence being walking in the wrong direction for about an hour, or 2 hours cumulatively. And thirdly, I was sick of the food I packed before even my first break. How can this be you ask? Well, in needing to find foods that I could eat easily on the go, be energy dense and cost efficient, I error a little too heavily on the ‘need to save a few pennies’ when I was food shopping. So the thought of eating pepperonis at 3am wasn’t the most appetizing breakfast fare. So long story even longer, I opted to cut my losses, head back to my truck and make a second attempt the following morning. Well only after hitting up the grocery store for a revamp of the food items.

    The second attempt went much smoother. I modified my strategy a bit. Yogurt and bananas were purchased for the pre-dawn meal at the start. Star Wars gummies were utilized to keep me bopping down the trail, headlamp batteries changed and I decided to start at 2am instead of 3am. The thought being that I knew I would have about 12 hours of daylight to hike, thus leaving 12 long hours of night hiking. If I split the difference and woke 6 hours before sunrise I knew that having 6 hours of hiking under my belt by sunrise would reenergize me and pushing myself to minimize the amount of night hiking would push me to return in under 24 hours. One thing I did as a safety margin was to bring along enough gear to know that I could last the night if in fact I needed to bed down, got injured or fell short. The weather report was looking clear and cool while I would be out, so I opted out of bringing a shelter given the fact that there were several lean-tos along the way and a number of noted ‘emergency rock bivies’ mentioned on the map. I only brought a 50 degree sleeping bag, even though the night time temps were slatted for the mid 30s, but knowing that if I did need to camp for the night, I would only realistically be sleeping for a few hours at a time before getting on the move again. In the end I think my gear choices worked out perfectly and there was actually much more water running on the trail than led to believe by some of the trip reports I read in the planning process. The video below has a pretty good description of how things went for me out there. Enjoy!