Indian Head and Plattekill Falls Rest Day

Timeline:

• 12:35 PM Start hiking
• 2:06 PM At viewpoint
• 3:50 PM At upper waterfall on side trail
• 4:35 PM At top of waterfall
• 5:45 PM Back at car

This hike came in the middle of a long climbing weekend at the Gunks, very close to where I’d find myself living in another three and a half years. The trip started with three of us: me, Richard and Jamie. On the first day, Jamie took a big fall on Feast of Fools and hurt his leg badly enough that he decided to go back to NYC.

Richard and I felt tired enough and rattled enough from the day of climbing that we decided to do something else for the day. We’d heard that there were lots of waterfalls and swimming holes in upstate New York. Why not check one of those out?

I don’t have any recollection now (in 2023) of how we settled on Plattekill Falls or how we decided to hike Indian Head, but that’s what my photos and tracks say we did! It looks like it was a very warm day. We hiked off the main trail to check out Black Chasm Falls.

I had some GPS data for this hike from the Moves app, which I used back then to track my location in the background. That’s how I know we cross the summit. But I had trouble telling how we got from the trail to the waterfall. The GPS track made it look like we went over the waterfall! From the looks of it, we may have!

I remember seeing lots of local high school kids enjoying the swimming hole and thinking that this would be an interesting place to grow up. I also filed this waterfall away as a beautiful place that I wanted to go back to. I hadn’t met Alex yet at this point, but I’d take her there in 2018.

This was a fun one to rediscover in my backlog. At the same time I noticed that I may not have summited Indian Head in 2018, I found this hike in old photos. I’d missed it on my first pass since I’d dismissed it as a climbing trip. Nope! Climbing trip and hiking trip. A peak lost and a peak gained.