Bull Pond

We should have posted these pics and a few words a couple of weeks ago. Sorry. We spent the weekend of 23-24 June at Bull Pond located on land owned by West Point Military Academy. Our friend’s Jen and Bridget invited us to join them at a cabin located on Bull Pond. Our understanding is that the cabin can only be rented out by West Point personnel. The cabin is the only structure on the pond/lake and is nestled on military property somewhere near Long Mountain, NY – about 35 miles of NYC.
So we took the New Jersey Transit train on Saturday morning from Penn Station to Harriman. As a daily commuter on NJ Transit, we knew we would have much better luck with our bikes compared to our Vermont fiasco covered in a previous post. It also turned out this happened to be Elizabeth’s first long and hilly ride on her newly converted fixed-gear. Other than having to walk our bikes up a couple of pretty steep mountain roads on the way to the cabin, the ride was a blast. Once at the cabin we discovered that US Army makes a solid effort to encourage serious R&R when using their facilities. We had our choice of 3 different types of boats to use on the lake. And aside from a few local fishermen we had this body of water to ourselves. So, we took the paddle boat for a spin around the lake to scout out possible bouldering sites and to go for a dip in the cool waters after our warm ride 7 mile ride to the cabin. The weekend pretty much went according to plan – get out of the warm city and relax next to a lake in the hills to the north. At some point on Saturday night, after several rounds of horsehsoes, Jen wanted to show us The Squat. Apparently this position is used by much of the world when waiting for anything, anywhere, anytime. We look forward to seeing it being used, first hand, away from a beer-fueled campfire semi-circle. I think if we tried to use this waiting for the subway in NYC, people would have fecal expectations – unfortunately such “movements” are not as uncommon as one would think in NYC’s subways.Again, the point of the weekend was to relax, so Sunday started kind of late but was started off with an easy jog in the morning which was followed up by using one of the boats to access a small boulder field we had spied on Saturday.
After climbing around Elizabeth had to work Monday so we had to row back across the lake and race back to the train station. We didn’t stay at the cabin nearly as long as we would have liked, but we are thankful Jen and Bridget invited us up to share the little slice of Hudson Highlands heaven. And yes, I took John Kim’s advice and cut my hair. The stress of getting close to finishing grad school must be causing my hair to recede a bit… either that or I’m getting old.