Hiking Club

Ever since my parents used to drive up to Bear Mountain for one of our Saturday outings, I wanted to get off the road and explore the woods and rugged terrain beyond old Route 17. The Ramapo Hills looked high to me. I called them mountains and I wasn't incorrect since they form one of the lower ranges of the Appalachian chain that passes through downstate New York. Nevertheless, they filled my ten-year-old imagination with wonder and a desire to climb them. That time finally arrived when I joined my high school's hiking club six years later.

An avid outdoors man, Brother Keane organized a group of boys on a trip to Harriman-Bear Mountain State Park where we climbed Bear Mountain from whose summit you can see the Manhattan sky line rising like spikes at the end of a long winding tail that is the Hudson River. Brother Keane also taught eleventh grade English and Freshman Religion at Power memorial Academy, my all boys Catholic high school on Amsterdam Avenue and 61st Street in New York City.

The first obstacle in getting to the mountains was convincing my parents to let me go on a hiking trip. I negotiated that challenge by convincing them  that we didn't need oxygen masks, ropes and sophisticated climbing gear. I assured them that I wouldn't die of asthma in the "thin" mountain air.

The euphoria of my first hiking trip had scarcely diminished when Br. Keane  took us on an adventure that would keep me addicted for a lifetime.  Not a half mile from the traffic circle at the west approach to the Bear Mountain Bridge lay a trailhead sign pointing us towards the Popolopen Gorge Trail. The unassuming passageway led us through the grassy sedge of the shoulder littered with beer cans and potato chip bags towards a row of low tree branches crossing overhead like a natural tunnel opening to another world, a world dominated by tall hardwoods, steep embankments, and steam of serious white water insisting its way to the Hudson River a thousand yards away.

We followed this trail to a destination only our fearless English teacher knew about. A few miles in and at a higher elevation, the rushing stream became a gentle flowing brook which led us to a confluence of another brook that we followed to its source. Tired, sweating, and dying of thirst, the bunch of us took refuge in a clearing where, up ahead, lay something odd looking yet quite at home in the woods. Our hike took us outside the state park boundary and into West Point's Military Reservation now closed to the public. And there it stood. A yellow stone structure shaped like a a beehive  with a huge arched opening to the side of it. It was overgrown with weeds.  No sign identified it. It stood there for nearly two centuries, Br. Keane told us, unmolested by anyone except time and nature.  The Queensboro Furnace was built during the Revolutionary War to make ammunition for the Continental Army that now held West Point, a fort a few miles north of here. With my fingers and closed eyes, I touched history. I imagined men stoking the fire with large bellows as others poured molten lead into molds forming the musket and cannon balls that secured our independence from Great Britain.

Two worlds opened for me that trip: the discovery of the wonders of the lower Appalachians just an hour form New York City, and the discovery of history in the markings left on nature by people in their struggles to carve out a space for themselves. No plaques commemorate the deeds accomplished here. Today one cannot visit the furnace because it is on restricted land, but like the land that has swallowed it, it remains off the road for me ever to wonder about while these ancient mountains and the lordly Hudson that cuts through them remain.






















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