[Journal entry for October 3, 2014; Green Pond, Harriman State Park, NY] It’s a beautiful fall morning. I drive west along Route 106, past Lake Welch, Spring Pond, Lake Kanawauke and Little Long Pond. The woods surrounding them are now in fall colors, which while still a little short of the peak, are very striking. The blueberry bushes growing right along the shores of the lakes are rusty red, and the maples behind them are brighter reds and oranges.

I park at the Island Pond Road trailhead, located on the north side of the road a few miles west of Little Long Pond, and take that unpaved road into the woods. The yellow leaves of the beech trees and orange leaves of the maples are glowing in the sun. I turn left onto the Nurian Trail (blazed in white) and then connect with the Dunning Trail (blazed in yellow) after a few hundred yards. I follow it westward until it passes the shore of Green Pond.

I have walked all the trails of Harriman State Park, yet I have no recollection of ever having viewed Green Pond. The trail follows its edge, but the pond is ringed by a wide band of vegetation, so I suppose that I didn’t notice the open water set perhaps twenty-five yards in. Much of the vegetation beside the trail is tall Phragmites, so the pond is easy to mistake for yet another of the park’s many Phragmites marshes. My colleague Dorothy Peteet, who leads fieldtrips to the pond, says that the Phragmites has moved in just in the past few years; that once the vegetation was much more varied.

I picked a spot were the screen of Phragmites appeared to be relative thin and bushwhacked to the lakeshore. I kept my feet fairly dry by some very careful footwork, stepping from Phragmites hummock to Phragmites hummock. I have no compunction against trampling it a bit; the stuff is indestructible. The effort was well worthwhile, for the pond itself is very beautiful. The vegetation on the far shore has not gone to Phragmites (yet). The bushes were a dull red color. A few brighter orange and red swamp maples stood above them. The water of the pond was very still, and the vegetation, hills and clouds were reflected in their mirror surface.

I retraced my way back to the Dunning trail and took it to a hill on the west side of the lake, where a broad rock ledge gave a good view of the pond. A beaver swam across the pond, its wake sparkling in the morning sun. The eastern end of the pond is swampy and mostly free of Phragmites, with many colorful bushes and trees.

After admiring the pond for a while, I walked up to the top of the hill. The ridge crest is fairly open, with a few solitary trees, beautiful in their fall colors, set among red blueberry bushes and grey rock ledges. I wandered around for a few minutes, seeing the sights. The ridge looks west to the hills by Route 17, but the view is partially obscured by vegetation and is not particularly dramatic.

I retraced my path, discovering a small animal skull near the side of the trail, though I guess I should say “rediscoverd”, for I found it atop a rock where I suppose some other hiker had put it. I crossed a shallow U-shaped valley of a form that is quite common in the park. Perhaps it is a glacial furrow created during the Ice Age, for its axis is roughly north-south. I rejoined Island Pond Road and took it as far as the informal trail that leads to Stahahe High Peak.

When seen from Lake Stathahe, the High Peak appears as a tall conical knob that rises well above the other hills that ring that lake. However, when approached from Island Pond Road, its western flank is just an unremarkable hillside. Only upon reaching the top can one see that the eastern side, though wooded, is close to being a cliff and that the land drops off into a deep and narrow valley that holds Lake Stahahe. The summit area is broad a flat – a great place for a picnic -with several wide rock ledges that provide excellent view to the west. Its several fire rings point to its being a popular spot for (illicit) campouts.

Lake Stahahe is one of the Park’s larger lakes, and though narrow is about a mile long. It is actually an impoundment, as are most of the lakes and ponds in Harriman State Park, having been created by the dam at its north end. The hills around it were very bright and colorful in their fall foliage. Except for a few camp buildings on the lakeshore, very few signs of human activity are visible, even though several rows of hills are visible in the south. This viewpoint is one of the best in the Park for fall foliage; only the view from Bald Mountain, which looks up the Hudson River valley, is comparable in its beauty. I stayed at the overlook for about fifteen minutes and then retracted my path back to Island Pond Road and my car. I continued west on Route 106 and connected with Route 17, stopping in the town of Sloatsburg for coffee. About two and a half hours.