← Sleeping outside in 2024.
I figure I have to post these roundups for one year sometime during the next year–after that, it’s too late. This time, with three days let in 2025, it looks like I’m going to make it by the skin of my teeth.
I spent 21 nights outside in 2024.
🚲 December 31-January 1: NYE at Roosa Gap
Yes, I’m counting this twice (for 2023 and 2024).
🚲 January 13-14: RPH Shelter
Famously, you can order pizza delivered to the RPH1 Shelter–some people seem to consider that a selling point. Mimi spoke highly of this one so Alex E decided to try it out. Sorry, Mimi–this shelter sucks. It’s an ugly concrete thing close enough to somebody’s house that you can see into their windows and close enough to the road to hear every car. There are at least a dozen very-aggressive signs forbidding fires. The clearing around the shelter was totally flooded, which meant wet feet for me. The temperature dropped overnight and in the morning I lost the feeling in my toes on the ride to the diner. 0/10 AT shelter–fuck this place.
🚲 January 27-28: Hemlocks Shelter (disaster!)
This trip was planned far in advance to coincide with a rare gap in Alex S’s childcare obligations. As the date grew near it became clear that the weather would be awful–but we were committed. I made the mistake of planning the route and choosing the campsite. On this sodden weekend, the quiet dirt roads I chose were mud-pits; the brief (15-minute) hike-a-bike in to camp was half underwater (on the way in) and half iced-over (on the way out). This did not endear me to the larger party.
However, our ultimate arrival at the Hemlocks Shelter was smiled-upon. Someone had left dry firewood under the shelter, and we had a proper fire. This shelter is palatial, with bunk beds and a sleeping loft and a picnic table sheltered from the rain. The night went well enough, though everyone’s shoes were soaked through and Scott wondered aloud if we should conserve food in case we were trapped by the icy terrain for multiple days.
In the morning we descended in freezing rain. By the time we rolled up to the diner in Millerton for restorative bowls of pho, our derailleurs were iced up and nobody could shift. “Obviously, I should have just planned a day ride!” Alex exclaimed upon entering the diner. I nodded agreement, but it was a lie; my secret is, I love these trips where everything goes wrong. It’s not an adventure if you know what’s going to happen, is it?
🚲 March 16-17: California Hill
A classic route to a classic overnight destination with Josh and Jason. The weather was fine and the riding was nice, but I had just entered a distressing period that ended a month or two later with my divorce, and I spent this trip deep in my head.
🚲 April 7-9: Eclipse
I had never seen a solar eclipse from the path of totality, and I don’t think I would have made the effort this time if Josh had not planned the whole thing. Turns out an eclipse is a transcendent experience. We ended up watching from South Hero Island in the middle of Lake Champlain, on a grassy knoll with a bunch of WPI-alum engineers who had met up for the occasion. It was incredible to watch the animals and birds lose it during totality, while also feeling yourself react in just the same way–to realize that after all, I’m just another animal getting my mind blown by something totally outside its experience.
Other trip highlights included:
- running into NYC bike friend Ellen randomly on the bike path in Burlington (it seemed like half of New York was in Vermont for the eclipse)
- meeting a retired executive director of the Adventure Cycling Association on the Essex-Charlotte ferry
- and my first Warmshowers stays
We hung our hammocks in a cyclist’s yard in Burlington, just off the lake; in the morning she made us buckwheat pancakes. The second night was spent in a state forest where we were harassed for hours by an angry beaver slapping its tail against the water; and then the last night we stayed stayed behind a farmhouse, with sunset views and a roaring fire.
🚲 May 18-19: Herschel’s Rideout
Herschel quit his job and rode across the country like we all dream of, and a dozen or so of us went with him for the first night. We camped somewhere in New Jersey and stumbled into an old-timey dance in an antique barn. Sarah–some months pregnant–rode out and camped and then the next day rode to take the train to ride to somebody’s wedding.
🚲 May 25-27: Cazenovia for Memorial Day
Mimi planned this trip around a friend-of-a-friend’s annual Memorial Day cookout in their historic house, Tall Pines in Cazenovia, New York. I was newly single, a little lonely, and glad to spend a few days with friends. The weather turned as we (Mimi, Annie, Shanit, and I) were arriving in Cazenovia, and we were glad to have a place to spend the night indoors. We dined well on a whole roast (on a spit) lamb.
One the second day the weather had cleared. We spent a while at the beautiful Chittenango Falls, rode for a bit on the Erie Canal towpath, and ended up camping near a graveyard in the woods in Morgan Hill State Forest. From there it was a quick ride back to the cars in Truxton, where we rode into town on Main Street alongside the Memorial Day parade.
🚲 June 7-9: Harriman for Mimi’s and Michelle’s birthdays
We rode up to one of the Cedar Pond group sites on Friday afternoon for a leisurely evening of swimming.
In the morning I rode down the mountain for a decadent breakfast at Dottie Audrey’s–then back up. On the second evening we had a proper birthday celebration for Mimi and Michelle, and I managed to set my camping stove on fire.
On Sunday we descended to the Haverstraw ferry, which now finally runs on weekends during the summer. It makes for a nice connection across the river to the train in Ossining after a Harriman trip. In this case we had the ferry entirely to ourselves.
🚲 June 17-21: Vermont!
This trip got its own post. Unmentioned there was the promising first date I had the night before I left for the trip. It went unmentioned because when I wrote that post, there hadn’t yet been a second date. But a few days later we had that second date, and many more after that.
🥾 August 1-2: Trout Pond with Maria
One of those dates was a camping trip to Trout Pond, off of Russell Brook Road in the Catskills. I’d been there a few times before, but we found a new site I’d never seen and slept under the stars.
In the morning we packed up (disturbing a snake living in our fire ring). The whole lake seemed empty and it was hot, so we risked a quick nude swim on our way out. But while we were in the water, two men arrived and began setting up right next to where we had piled our clothes on a log.
We froze. There was no way to get to our clothes without exposing ourselves. While we were trying to figure out what to do, the older of the two men called out, “Are you naked?” When we replied (abashedly) in the affirmative, he continued: “Oh, then you won’t mind if I’m naked!” And he proceeded to undress and to enter the lake. He introduced himself as Claudio, and proceeded to tell us all about the best nude swimming holes in the Catskills and the Hudson Valley, and how they were being ruined by prudish city people.
I managed to let all of the gas out of the fuel canister so we went without a hot camp breakfast and stopped instead at a diner in Livingston Manor, and then at the Catskill Art Space to catch James Turrell’s Avaar and Francis Cape’s Utopian Benches exhibits.
🚲 August 31-September 2: Roundabout Brattleboro with Alex, Freely, Ben, and Alan
I have too much to say about this trip to say it here, and half a draft of a separate post that I hope to complete someday.
🚲 October 12-13: Wolf Brook with Josh and Jason
In New York State, the Department of Environmental Conservation owns a bunch of parcels of land designated as Multiple Use Areas. These are generally undeveloped with no facilities other than maybe a gravel parking area with a sign. As the name suggests, they are open to many uses: hiking, hunting, fishing, and, usually, camping.
One of my favorite activities is “find a random Multiple Use Area on the map that I’ve never been to, ride there, and try to camp.” Some of these areas have established campsites with fire rings, natural water sources, nice views, etc. Other times, you end up bushwacking through rocky terrain on the side of a hill looking for the least-bad spot to sleep. This trip to Wolf Brook MUA was more the latter than the former, and it didn’t help that we arrived in the dark. But we had a glorious long ride (85 miles!) through the Catskills to get there, with the foliage at near-peak.
🚗 October 19-20: Hannah’s Birthday with Maria
I credit that first date with Maria to the following paragraph in my online-dating profile:
I love to camp—mostly bike-camping with a little backpacking and car-camping thrown in. My idea of a peak experience: riding bikes with friends to a campsite by a lake and swimming by firelight someplace where it’s dark enough to see the Milky Way.
Maria’s interest in camping arose through her goddaughter, Hannah. Hannah is a big fan of the Outdoor Boys on Youtube, and so in 2023 for her sixth birthday she asked for a camping trip. This was Maria’s first time camping (like me, she grew up thinking of herself as a thoroughly indoor person), and she found she enjoyed it enough to think it might be fun to date a camping person.
So it was very nice to be invited to join Maria for Hannah’s seventh birthday at Hickory Run State Park in Pennsylvania. We made s’mores, ate over-the-top Korean campsite food prepared by Hannah’s grandmother, and hiked the Shades of Death trail.
🚲 November 16-17: Stewart Hollow Brook
A chilly trip to one of my favorite campsites, and the last of the year for me, because on December 14 we flew to Mexico to spend a month catsitting. This was a choose-your-own-adventure trip where a bunch of us took different routes of varying length and difficulty, meeting up in Kent, CT for a bougie restaurant dinner before riding the last five miles to camp in the dark by dynamo light. In the morning we rode some new roads up over the ridge to Dover Plains.
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RPH apparently stands for “Ralph’s Peak Hikers.” Huh? Even the name sucks. ↩