The Great Outdoors

By Jimmy Buff

The brightly colored balloons—a long row of blues and reds and yellows bobbing up and down in a light breeze in front of a car dealer in Catskill—match the lightness of my mood on a warm sunny Saturday afternoon in early September. I’m making my way to Mountain Buddies, an outdoor gear and clothing store on Main Street, to pick up a kayak. Jim Halla, the proprietor of the shop, has agreed to sponsor me for an upcoming kayak/bike/run race. Which mostly means Halla is lending me a kayak and the assorted accessories I’ll need to paddle it safely: a personal flotation device or PFD, a paddle and spray skirt to keep water out of the cockpit of the boat. The ride through this part of town—in addition to the car dealership, the fast food places and the supermarket, there is now a Walmart and Lowe’s—belies the beauty of the mighty Hudson River just a couple of miles east. The Catskill Creek, too, flows nearby, sending its water to mingle with the Hudson. It is a perfect place to have a kayak-centric outdoor store, and I am glad that Mountain Buddies made the move from its former location in a landlocked part of Hudson. The new shop is a stone’s throw from the Catskill Creek and a kayak (and canoe) put in spot is only minutes away on West Main Street.

Orange flags designate an open business on Main Street and many of them are flying on this postcard perfect day. The resurgence of Main Street has been led by a number of places, many of them art galleries of a sort or another. A Muddy Cup coffee house has opened there too. With locations in Hudson, Beacon, New Paltz, Poughkeepsie, Albany and Kingston, the arrival of Muddy Cup in Catskill lends visible proof to the belief many people have in the viability of Catskill as a destination town. Jim Halla believes that too, though his belief is that the area can be made a destination town for folks interested equally in arts and antiques as they are in outdoor pursuits. After all, the Hudson River and its tributaries and the Catskill Mountains and its miles of trails for hiking, biking and running all are within a few miles and minutes of Main Street. I bring Jim a large black coffee from the Muddy Cup and when I enter Mountain Buddies my pulse quickens. Arrayed on the walls are backpacks and sleeping bags, rock climbing rope and trail running shoes and kayaks of several makes and models, and all as brightly colored as the balloons I had passed moments before. Jim greets me and while he finishes up with a customer, I browse the clearance rack for anything that may catch my eye. A few minutes later we are in the parking lot behind the store unloading a bright yellow Boreal Design kayak. It is the Fjord model: plastic (some kayaks are fiberglass composite or Kevlar), 16 feet and 7 inches long and 22 and a half inches wide. The boat weighs in at a touch over 60 pounds and is rated for the intermediate paddler.

I had paddled the boat once before. A week earlier, my wife and I went out on the Catskill Creek for an easy paddle. It was also the first time my wife had been in a kayak solo and she was excited—and a bit nervous—to try out the activity. Jim lent us the Fjord for me and a smaller, wider (and thus more stable) boat for my wife. The surprise for many people kayaking for the first time is how tippy the thing feels when you first get in. We launched from West Main Street, having strapped the boats, sans rack, to the roof of my wife’s Saturn station wagon. The trip was only a few blocks but it illustrated another attractive aspect of kayaking: loading and unloading the boats and transporting them to water is not really that big of a deal. Of course, a kayak rack is recommended for anyone with a long term commitment to paddling, but those racks aren’t cost prohibitive and unless you are loading boats onto an SUV—whose height presents a challenge—the process is quite easy, even solo. With two of us though, it took only a few minutes to secure the boats to the roof and an equally few minutes to unload them. I snugged up my wife’s PFD—an improperly worn vest can actually be a danger in a crisis situation—and did the same myself. With her boat most of the way, bow first, into the water, my wife slipped into the cockpit, paddle in hand. We had set the adjustable foot pegs in her boat while it was still on solid ground and once she was comfortable, I gently nudged her boat into the placid waters of the creek. She drifted a few feet from shore while I scrambled into my boat and followed her out onto the creek.

Paddling a kayak is not like paddling other paddle-type boats, like a canoe. Many people naturally assume that you dip the paddle into the water and pull back with your arms, as you do in a canoe. You can do that and it will move the kayak, but the proper technique is arms bent at the elbow in a 90 degree angle with your hands shoulder wide. The paddle goes into the water at your toes (your legs are in the boat, knees slightly bent) and comes out at your hip, with the pull of the paddle in the water generated by a slight twisting of your torso. Your core stomach muscles—bigger, stronger and longer-lasting than your shoulder or bicep muscles—are thusly engaged, and you have more power and endurance. This process is all easier said than done: when you can move the boat by paddling in any fashion, you tend to do that, and my wife, tentatively at first as she got used to the motion of boat in the water, did just that. After a few minutes, I paddled over to her and pulled up side to side. With ample warning, I reached over to her boat and gently rocked it back and forth to prove how safe she was. Her look of mild alarm passed quickly though, as she realized just how stable kayaks really are (certainly, kayaks are capable of capsizing; the low center of gravity of the boat, however, makes for a fairly stable platform).

The Catskill Creek was at low tide—the waters near the mouth of the creek are influenced by the Hudson which itself is influenced by the Atlantic Ocean 110 miles away—and our going was bumpy at first as we skimmed the low, flat rocks on the bottom of the creek. We paddled under the old Catskill Mountain Railway bridge, long devoid of train traffic. Further up the creek, we paddled under the active railroad bridge and then under the Route 9W bridge. The creek was still draining slightly into the Hudson and a few ripples of white water appeared. We managed to find a small channel through the bumpy water and were rewarded on the other side with a wide open section of creek, deep and flat and easily to paddle on. My wife, in the meantime, was practicing the proper paddling technique and indeed had a sweet rhythm going. A wide smile—and her smile is a thing to behold—spread across her face and we slipped easily up the creek. Kayaking is an amazing way to experience water. From basically not much higher than water level itself, you glide smoothly (on flat water, anyhow) along, taking in the landscape and wildlife in a way not possible by any other means. After an hour or so we turned back. We ran the short stretch of white water with glee and were soon at the small beach where we had put the boats in the water. When we pulled up to Mountain Buddies, Jim came out to lend us hand with the boats. “How was it?,” he asked my wife. Without hesitation she replied enthusiastically: “I loved it!”

To rent kayaks at Mountain Buddies, call 518 943 7422 or visit www.MountainBuddies.com.

Hudson Highlands Greenway Triathlon
Race morning for the Hudson Highlands Greenway Triathlon was a chilly 43 degrees. The kayak was securely strapped to the roof racks on my Volvo wagon; long curved and yellow, it bore more than a passing resemblance to an upside down banana. Next to the boat on the roof was my neglected, though sleek and slick, racing bicycle. With my focus lately on ultra-distance running, the bike had not seen much duty in the past year or so. In fact, the day before the race was the first time I had been on the bike in a race in almost two years. I had pumped the tires up and dusted it off a bit and now it held a place on the roof rack next to the kayak. I stood back and looked at the car and thought, “Now, that is how a car of mine should look.” The Hudson Highlands Greenway triathlon was a second year event and featured an opening six-mile kayak leg, followed by a 25-mile bike leg and finished with an eight-mile mostly-trail run up and over the top of Breakneck Ridge. The purpose of the race for the organizers was to promote the regional aspects of the Greenway corridor, a series of trails in New York State. The purpose of the race for many of the participants was to survive each of the very different legs of the event. Registration was in Dockside Park in Cold Spring and a chilly breeze blew off the Hudson River. A long line of multi-colored kayaks lay in two rows on the grass facing Storm King Mountain on the far bank of the river. I looked for some of the usual triathlon suspects as I prepped the kayak and set up my bike and running stuff in the nearby transition area; however, most of the faces were unfamiliar to me.

One face that did stand out was that of Keith Strudler, a communications professor at Marist College and one of the elite endurance athletes in the Hudson Valley. One week earlier, Strudler had won the grueling Survival of the Shawangunk triathlon. That race consisted of a bike/run/swim/run/swim/run/swim/run (really) and Strudler had bested an impressive field there for his first S.O.S victory. We exchanged hellos and then Keith nervously told me he had never paddled a kayak before. He wondered how much time he could lose in that leg of the race and I told him not to worry: He could more than likely swim the kayak leg towing the boat behind him and still finish far in front of most of the competitors there. We walked over to his boat and I started to explain some paddling basics to him. I also suggested he set his foot pegs, a feature of the kayak he had rented that he did not know about. In fact, he figured he would just sit in his boat with his knees up, like you would in a bathtub, and paddle that way. He was surprised to find out that there was a more preferred way to sit in the boat (truth be told, sitting in the boat the way Strudler had planned would have made him top heavy and more prone to capsizing). My parting advice to Strudler was simple: Stay upright. The race went off in four waves and when I lined up with the other boats in my wave I was happy to see Strudler next to me. The horn blew and our wave took off, headed for Bannerman’s Island three miles north.

It was low tide and I hoped to cover a lot of water in the slack before the high tide started running upriver and against us on the downward leg back to the beach where our bikes were waiting. In a race like this, some hardcore paddlers were bound to show up and show off, and that is what happened as a few of the boats in our wave began to pull away. Strudler was more than holding his own and as we made our way to the turnaround at Bannerman’s he began to pull ahead of me. The wind was in our face and though it was still cool, I began to work up a good sweat. The river was fairly flat and the scene of 60 or so kayaks making a beeline for Bannerman’s was inspirational. Some of the paddlers ran up the center of the river while others opted for the calm, less current-affected water near the shore. I opted for a line somewhere between the two and made it to the turnaround—a large dory-type rowboat with a half a dozen people in it cheering us on—in about 45 minutes. Strudler was maybe a minute or two ahead of me and when we turned south the wind died and it got downright hot. The run downriver was much faster than up: apparently the wind in our face and now at out back was playing a bigger part in the kayak leg than we had anticipated. Far on the horizon, the kayak leaders were approaching the beach. Strudler had done well and would be out of his boat shortly after the leaders and then he could really let fly on the bike and run.

The bike leg headed south along Route 9D towards the Bear Mountain Bridge. We zig-zagged through the Village of Cold Spring and then out towards Garrison and soon my legs were pumping smoothly along. The experience of riding a racing bike in a race again was exhilarating, and despite the literal cobwebs I saw running from the front brakes to my handlebars, I felt comfortable and at ease and thought It’s just like a riding a bike. My joy at riding, however, would prove to be part of my undoing in the end: It felt so wonderful to ride hard and fast that I rode hard and fast. When I dismounted after an hour and 10 minutes of cycling and switched to running, well, there wasn’t much left there. We started out on pavement and headed to the Cold Spring Metro North station. In a fun twist to the race, we ran along the southbound platform, past startled Sunday commuters, and up the stairs to the pedestrian overpass. We continued down the northbound platform and onto a trail maintained by Scenic Hudson. In a mile we hit a long uphill as we made our way from sea level to almost 2000 feet higher and it was here that I was reduced to a slow walk. The summit view was worth the entire effort up to that point, as the Hudson Highlands glimmered in the early afternoon sun. The last part of the run was a series of switchbacks back down to sea level and a short finishing stretch through the sweet river town—now bustling with daytrippers—and back to river’s edge. A relaxed Keith Strudler greeted me shortly after I crossed the finish line. He had, of course, finished first, having taken the lead shortly into the run. He said he had enjoyed the kayak leg, though he professed amazement at the difficulty of it. For my part, coming out of the water just a couple of minutes behind him was a major achievement for me: it being probably the closest I will be to him after an hour of any sort of race.

Cooper’s Cave
After our paddle in the Catskill Creek, my wife I headed north to Albany. After a brief stop at the Crossgates Mall—talk about contrasts—we crossed the Hudson at Troy and headed north towards Fort Edward and Hudson Falls. Our destination was Glens Falls and Cooper’s Cave. I had been reading The Last of Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper and was surprised by a footnote the author inserted about a scene in the book. During a fight between Hawkeye and his party against enemies, they take refuge in a cave under a waterfall. Cooper’s footnote reads that the cave exists in Glens Falls, and sure enough a Google search brings up the City of Glens Falls Web site and on its list of attractions is Cooper’s Cave. So up the Hudson along Route 4 we traveled, following a river very different than the one that flows under the Rip Van Winkle and ends in New York Harbor. For one, the river here was actually a river; south of Albany, the Hudson is technically an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. It was also narrow and a far cry from the expanse of water that lay between Tarrytown and Nyack, its widest point.

American history laid heavy in this area. We passed Saratoga National Historic Park, the scene of victory for the American troops over the British in October of 1777. It was 230 years ago that American troops forced the surrender of General John Burgoyne. The victory gave hope to the colonial army and invited support from France, who now believed the upstart Americans might just win the war with England. Indeed, the Battles at Saratoga are considered the turning point in the American Revolution. We made it to Glens Falls slightly before dusk and after some searching found the overlook to Cooper’s Cave. The cave seemed more like a crevasse in some river rock and was inaccessible to people. That is because it sat in the middle of the dammed up Hudson River, with a paper mill on one side and a hydroelectric plant on the other. It was, sadly, less than inspiring. However, in the gloaming one could image the time when the wild Hudson flowed unimpeded over these rocks, sending spray everywhere and understood how it inspired Cooper to include it in his classic.

For more information on Cooper’s Cave, including its location, go to www.CityOfGlensFalls.com.