← Sleeping outside in 2025.
I spent only 15 nights outside in 2025–far fewer than in past years. I did more non-camping traveling (Mexico, New Mexico, Toronto, Morocco, San Francisco), and I was unemployed for most of the first half of the year (which seems like it would allow for more trips–but with constant interviewing and a limited budget, it didn’t work out that way).
🚲 January 25-26: Ninham Mountain
This was a cold one, with lows in the teens. I’d just come back from a month in Mexico and I worried I wouldn’t be sufficiently acclimated to the winter. But I was plenty warm, despite somehow managing to lose a single pogie just outside Croton Falls. (Josh and I retraced my steps multiple times, and I came back a week later when the snow had melted to check again, but it was gone without a trace.) The air was bone-dry and we had a roaring fire in the snow.
Day 1
(I didn’t record Day 2 for some reason, maybe my phone was dead?)
🚲 April 14-15: Lundy Road
Another trip with Josh over the Shawangunk Ridge (where we pushed our bikes through the late-season snow we hadn’t planned for). We ate steak at Aroma Thyme in Ellenville and camped up the hill off Lundy Road. Josh forgot one hammock strap so we used some doubled-up guy-line and it held through the night. In the morning somebody from Brooklyn at the Kerhonkson Diner clocked my Fairlight (this part of the Hudson Valley is full of city people these days).
🚲 May 10-11: California Hill
An old-school ADV spot with an old-school ADV crew: Josh, Annie, Shanit, Jason, and Isaac. Jason and Isaac were both training for some grueling ultra-endurance thing and took separate (and much harder) routes to camp. It wasn’t quite swimming weather yet, but we hung out on a rock on Waywayanda Lake and watched the stars come out.
🚗 May 26-27: Tolland State Forest
Maria and I rented a Zipcar and drove up to meet friends on the second night of their Memorial Day weekend trip, at a beautiful campsite overlooking the Otis Reservoir. It was strange to think that the previous year on the same weekend I’d done a bike trip in Central New York with many of the same people, recently divorced and feeling very, very single; I would end up meeting Maria only a few weeks later.
On the second day we had perfect weather, and rented a canoe on the Mad River in Connecticut.
🚲/🚗 June 7-8: Taconic State Park for Mimi’s and Michelle’s Birthdays
This was Maria’s first bike-camping trip–a (qualified) success. Jessica lent her a very good bike-camping bike with dynamos, etc., but the fit wasn’t quite right and Maria became less and less comfortable as the ride progressed. This was not helped by several factors:
- I forgot to warn her that she would need to eat and drink more than normal, and she was bonking hard
- She had gotten minimal sleep the night before because she was doomscrolling r/ladycyclists reading all kinds of horror stories about saddle sores, mechanicals, and getting dropped
- I kept reminding her about seeing bears on the very same rail trail we were riding
But she was a good sport and we made it to camp just at sunset. It was a big crowd for the joint birthday party, and a convivial night. In the morning we hiked to Bash Bish Falls, then borrowed Mimi’s car to head back to the train at Wassaic.
🚲 July 4-6: Lundy Road and Colgate Lake
This was classic Catskills summer riding with Josh and Jason: two nights, two swimming holes, fireworks, and lots of climbing. Maria had invited me to watch the NYC fireworks from her office in the Empire State Building, where the view would be spectacular, but I was itching for a real bike-camping trip, so I reluctantly turned her down.
After we set up camp along Lundy Road on the Fourth, we descended back into Warwarsing and then rode toward Ellenville until we found somebody with a well-situated yard with a clear view of the local fireworks. They were kind enough to let us set up our camp chairs to watch.
We spent the second night at a very-crowded Colgate Lake. I snagged a great campsite overlooking the lake–just in time, because soon a steady stream of would-be campers showed up there looking for the same spot.
In the morning Jason and I woke early. We packed our things. We made coffee. I enjoyed a leisurely swim. Josh was still sleeping soundly. Jason made a couple attempts to wake him up, but nothing worked. Finally, overcome by hunger, we left without him and descended to the diner on Route 23A. Josh found us there half an hour or so later, full of eggs and pancakes. He was none too happy with us.
My fitness was very poor on this trip (my first “real” bike trip in two months) and I spent most of it off the back, but it was fine weather and good to be out in the mountains.
Day 1
Day 1 (fireworks excursion)
Day 2
Day 3
🚲 August 16-17: Emily’s Birthday
My Fairlight was in the shop for something like two months1. There is a long and tedious saga here about carbon failure risk, fork-pack mount design, internal dynamo routing, and SON’s proprietary coaxial wire, but I won’t bore you with all of it. The point is I didn’t have a camping-ready bike for most of the prime summer bikepacking months and it sucked.
But! for her birthday, Emily planned an overnight trip on flat Long Island, so I could manage without gears. And it was high summer so I could pack minimally. And so for the first time I went camping on my fixed-gear bike.
It has no affordances for racks so I strapped a dry bag to the saddle and overstuffed my handlebar bag and somehow that was enough for a summer overnight. We ate fancy Hamptons donuts and stopped at Hamptons wineries and rode past lavender farms and miles-long traffic jams and took the Shelter Island ferries. We camped by the beach and swam in questionable water. I didn’t pack a stove so in the morning I rode 10 minutes to a coffee shop and rode back to camp one-handed with a latte in my other hand.
Long Island’s charms (as others see them) are lost on me–too many memories of hours spent in traffic on the LIE going to my grandparents’ houses growing up. But I was very grateful to be able to go riding and camping with friends on my fixie.
🚗 August 21-23: Vermont
Maria wanted to show me her places and I wanted to show her mine, so we rented a car and drove to Vermont (where I’ve spent so many weeks riding and camping) and then to Boston (where she went to school).
The first night in Vermont we camped at the USFS campground at Grout Pond, where I’d never been. Due to a planning error (mine) we arrived with no reservations. Every site was reserved; every site had a tag indicating who had reserved it, and when. One site, though, had been reserved for an entire week, by someone named Kavanaugh. We were three days into that reservation, the sun was setting, and there was no sign of anyone at the campsite. We gambled that the odds were low that the Kavanaughs would show up after dark on the third night of a six-night reservation and set up our tent, prepared to swear to any inquisitive forest ranger that we were Mr. and Mrs. Kavanaugh. But nobody ever showed and we had a great time lazing around the fire and swimming in the clear lake.
The second night we camped at the USFS campground at Silver Lake, where I camped in 2018 on a rainy night in October when I had the whole place to myself. This time we weren’t alone, but it felt like it. Our site was secluded and spacious, with tall pines and a path down to the lake. We spent the evening swimming; in the morning, Maria slept in while I read for hours by the fire.
From Silver Lake we turned south again toward Boston, where we stayed a few days with her boarding-school roommate and where she showed me all of her formative places.
🚲 October 11-12: Macedonia Brook
Maria and I had planned to join by car but she got sick so I packed the bike and rode with the others. In the first few miles climbing out of Wassaic, Annie–several months pregnant–fell behind and was feeling bad about not it, until she realized she had been riding on a flat tire.
Mimi planned this one so you know we stopped at a winery. Zeno–on the later train–caught up with us there and rode with us for the next couple hours–but as the day wore on it grew a bit drizzly and cold, and he eventually decided to catch the train back instead of camping.
We were glad finally to arrive at our campsite, where Mimi’s boyfriend Mike was waiting for us and where Emily arrived shortly after we did, having taken a late train. We piled into Mike’s car for a ride into town for a fancy dinner at Kingsley Tavern.
Returning, the hammockers among us set up under cover of darkness because Mimi had learned from the ranger that hammocks are forbidden at Connecticut state campgrounds–although, he assured her, a possible loosening of the rules “already being discussed in Hartford.”
In the morning it was a quick ride to Dover Plains for a diner breakfast and the train.
🚲 October 18-19: Livingston State Forest
I picked this spot, where I’d camped years before in the pouring rain. It wasn’t a great spot then but I thought maybe with good weather and daylight we’d find a nicer campsite–but we didn’t. This forest is interesting and goes right up to the train tracks along the Hudson (if you don’t mind a lot of scrambling and bushwhacking), but there is a lot of traffic noise, it’s a bit swampy, and (we learned by the glinting of many eyes lit up by our headlamps after dark) it is infested with spiders.
I rode with Josh and Jason and Gerard. On the way back I made everyone stop at the Sheep and Wool Festival, an indescribable event in which 30,000 knitters and other wool enthusiasts flock to the Dutchess County fairgrounds in the village of Rhinebeck (population 2,700). My eye was turned by the sheepskins for sale and I contemplated strapping one to my saddlebag for the rest of the ride, but I lost my nerve–which I still regret.
🚗 October 25-26: Hannah’s Birthday
Once again, for Maria’s goddaughter’s birthday, we went camping at Hickory Run State Park in Pennsylvania. This year, the bathhouse was closed (unexpectedly for us) and so we had no water source, but we were still having a great time until Sunday when it was time to leave and our Zipcar Prius would not start. (I left my phone charging overnight which must have depleted the car battery–and it only charged my phone to 28%!)
It turns out that a Prius is very hard to jumpstart. We tried a friend’s jumpstart pack. We tried the park ranger’s more powerful jumpstart pack. We tried a campsite neighbor’s jumper cables. We tried connecting each of these in turn to the jumpstart points under the hood that Toyota tells you to use, and to the actual starter battery in the trunk. Nothing worked. We spent hours trying these things, and more hours waiting for the tow truck that Zipcar lied about sending, which never came. We had almost no signal at the campground, and the park office would not let us use their wifi, until Maria figured out how to join it by impersonating an employee of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and I tried to find an Uber back to the city. I didn’t expect much–this was rural Pennsylvania and the drive would be several hours. I was astonished when Juan almost immediately accepted our request, and more astonished when I texted him to make sure he understood that this would be a five-hour round trip for him and he was unfazed.
We left the Zipcar in the campground and I still don’t know whether the Zipcar tow truck or the state park tow truck got to it first.
🚲 December 6-7: New Forge State Forest
I’m not sure when I last camped alone, but it had been at least two years. Solo camping is uniquely restorative for me and I should not have let it go so long.
New Forge is a little off the radar of NYC cyclists (I don’t know anyone else who has camped there) but it’s quite lovely, at the end of a dirt road with a waterfall and a stand of tall pines just off the parking area. In the summer there is a swimming hole which DEC used to mark on their maps (now inexplicably removed). But on this trip it was very cold, with lows in the teens.
The route was light on services, and I stopped only at the store in Clinton Corners. In fact the store is not so much in as constitutive of Clinton Corners, where there is little else. My grandfather (who lived his whole life a few miles away in Pleasant Valley) wrote down a few recollections of his childhood later in life, and among them was his account of fearing a killer on the loose after the brutal 1930 quadruple murder in Clinton Corners. (Still unsolved!)
I arrived just at dusk, made dinner, drank a beer in my hammock, and was asleep by 8:30. In the morning I was woken by a hiker passing by. (It’s hard to see where the trails go sometimes when they’re under the snow.)
I’d planned on breakfast (and the chance to warm my toes) at the Ancram Little Store five miles away, but it was closed, so I rode a few miles on to Ancramdale where The Farmer’s Wife fed me a delicious breakfast of local bacon and eggs. The sun was bright all the way to the train at Wassaic.
🚲 December 30-31: Wassaic Multiple Use Area
I began composing this post sometime in December and in the process I realized how little camping I’d done this year. I determined to get at least one more trip in. I planned a route to the upper section of the Wassaic Multiple Use Area, which I thought looked promising (the lower section along route 22 was an overgrown disappointment in 2023 when I camped there at Halloween with Mimi and Herschel). I figured this would probably be another solo trip, but I put an open invitation to join and Jake decided to join. (He does multiple ultra-endurance bikepacking races every year and felt like an overnight would be more relaxing, even with lows around 20°F.)
The day was cold and windy but the site turned out to be nice, overlooking the road and the river. At the last gas station before camp I bought ice cream. Jake thought I was crazy but it was delicious even in the cold.
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The shop’s estimate for the work: one day. ↩