I haven't been out in a few months and I'm needing to get an easy start to the season, so I went out yesterday and did Wolf Hill (the Keleher Preserve) in Clarkesville (or is it Berne?). This is just about the newest preserve run by Mohawk-Hudson Land Conservancy, the same outfit that look after Bennett Hill. It wasn't on Open Street Map yet, so I went over there to walk the trails and get GPS tracks for the map.
Weather was pretty near perfect, about 70 degrees and partly cloudy. There was still patchy snow on the trails, even down at 1640 feet. Spring is sure taking its time this year! The snow shows that the ATVers are still using the preserve illegally.
They've turned one of the trails into an ocean of mud.
One bridge on the access trail in has a strange thing - a set of tuned PVC pipes that you can play a tune on by beating the tops with a flipflop. I tried a couple of bars and decided I liked the music of the babbling brook better.
When looking for the abandoned road that's on the preserve's trail map, I turned off on a different abandoned road. I wandered out of the preserve - I didn't see any posters or survey blazes, so I wasn't sure until I got to a clearcut that had the best views of the day. Well worth a little bit of accidental trespassing. I could see the Blackheads through the trees, and then on west at least as far as Huntersfield.
The overlook on the east side of the preserve has nice views of Albany and the Taconics.
With the backing and filling needed to get good GPS tracks on all the trails, and the wandering that resulted from turning off early on to a more obscure woods road, I put in about eight miles on easy trails. A nice afternoon in the woods.
