Windham (solo)

Timeline:

• 1:20 PM Start hiking
• 2:50 PM Summit
• 4:20 PM Back at the car

Alex and I moved out of our apartment in downtown Brooklyn and up to the northern Catskills at the end of April 2020. The pandemic was still raging in NYC at that point so we decided that a two-week quarantine would be the responsible thing to do, to avoid bringing the pandemic to our new upstate neighbors.

After two weeks, I was very ready to get outside! I took an afternoon off and set my sights on the nearest Catskills high peak, Windham. I didn’t realize at the time that I’d already hiked it once before in 2016.

It felt great to be outside and doing something after being cooped up for so long. I remember that pandemic hiking norms were still unclear – should I wear a mask on the hike? I wound up putting on one whenever I passed other people.

It was a beautiful hike. Spring was just arriving in the high peaks.

Are these ramps???

Entering this dense forest was also memorable:

And the view from the summit was spectacular. I could see the Blackhead range as well as some of the towers up in Albany.

My reviews were glowing enough that Alex wanted to do the hike, too. We repeated it a week later when it was noticeably more spring-like.

Looking back, this was a pretty speedy hike! Just over 3h for ~6.5mi. I also remember getting the idea for what would eventually become my tsconf 2021 talk (“TypeScript Types: The First 500 Years”) on this hike.