The Mohonk House Preserve

Two weekends ago Patrick and I went for a bike ride in NY. I got the idea from a mountain biking book that ended up being so outdated that the visitors center it told us to go to was closed (10 years ago) and the ride it suggested was now illegal. We had to wing it and we did a fine job. Since our camera was still at Olympus being fixed (we finally got it back last week. YEA!) and the camera phones don't do so well with the landscape shots there aren't many pictures of the great views. The cliffs in the background of this photo are the Shawangunk mountains (there is still some debate as to how you pronounce that. Most of the people I've asked have never heard of these mountains and the few that have say they don't know. I read in the mountain biking book that you are supposed to say it Shongum but I don't really trust that book. We pretty much just say it differently every time). This is where Easterners claim is the best rock climbing in the country.

We biked over to a place called the Mohonk house that you can see in the back ground here. It's this old house built right on this cool lake that is apparently now a 5 star resort. We weren't supposed to be biking down here so we were walking our bikes along hoping to not get yelled at.

Then we saw a trail that was called "The Labyrinth" and couldn't resist checking it out. We threw our bikes behind some trees and hoped an employee didn't see them while we were gone. The trail wound around in the fallen rocks squeezing between and going under and climbing over. Of course the camera phone couldn't handle the low light of the coolest parts of the trail so you'll have to take my word for it. Sometimes there were wooden ladders or bridges to make the trail a bit more managable for the less-adept-than-Meghann-and-Patrick types. It was really fun.


Patrick is perched on the tip of this rock.

At the top there is another trail that takes you along the edge of the cliff and has a number of bridges out to island rocks where they built little sitting areas where you can admire the view.

And of course Patrick had to do some jumping around and wanted me to get a video of it.