Hiked Wittenberg & Cornell from Woodland Valley

[mike]

My hiked started out around 9 AM from the woodland valley dec parking lot. Walked down the to new bridge crossing the Woodland Creek. The new bridge is sporting 3 new I-beams. It looks strong enough to support 100 hikers. They still have not finished the stairs on the campsite side.

Huffed up the hill to the DEC registration box, and signed in. Continued on up the hill. It leveled off after a short distance to an easy level hike. There was a new section of the trail, where everyone was getting lost. It is very poorly marked. The lost trails are more worn then the new trail. Then we crossed a number of nice small streams before coming to the Trail Junction to Wittenberg / Terrance.

Part of the purpose of this hike was to see if there was once a trail from this junction to Samual's Point. I do recall there being one, but I could be wrong. Very easy 3 mile hike to Samual's Point. Pretty much a flat hike to the base of Samual's Point. Then a small climb up the point. There are some nice ledges to overlook the Ashokan Reservoir. If I remember correctly, there is a small campground half way there. From the trail junction you can see Samual's Point very clearly. An easy bushwack for sure.

I then started my slog up the trail to Wittenberg Mtn. There some difficult climbs up the rocks in this section that rival the Devil's Path. The two hardest ones are encountered early. Then they just get interesting.

Once I reached the top, I was joined by about 25 other people, who sat there in the clouds with NO view. A real disappointment for everyone. We all waited a while hoping that the clouds would burn off. Didn't happen.

I decided to leave and head to Cornell. At first you have to go downhill to get onto Bruin's Causeway. It is a 10-50' wide narrow ridge that allows you go walk across it. When you get close to the peak of Cornell, you run into Cornell's Crack. Which is an unique scrabble/climb up a 25' rock wall with a wedge shaped crack in it. It is a hard as anything on the Devil's Path. Just very unique. Here is a picture:



And, of course the summit of Cornell was also in the clouds. The view point is now almost grown over. I look down the west side of the trail . Headed back. Shimmed down the Cornell Crack. When I was most of the way across the Bruin's Causeway, I looked at my topo gps map to see Moonhaw Road turn into Tonisgah Road. Google maps has this really messed up. Now this mess is also on my GPS. Swell!



When I got back to Wittenberg summit, it was more clouded up then before. A lost cause for sure. Headed down. While on my way back down, I ran into a guy who needed a ride back to Rt 28. No problem. Gave him door-to-door service.

The trip down was uneventful. Just tired and sore.Hit the bottom around 4 pm.

[mtnclimber]

Never been to the Cornell Crack. It doesn't look that bad, but it also looked like the camera is tilted up.

Samual's Point sounds like a real nice hike. Keep me in mind if you do it. Is is okay to do during hunting season?

Look forward to the full writeup under the Hiking Section.

That map is really screwed up. I looked at it on Google. Wow.

[mike]

Yeah, the camera is actually tilted up to get the whole thing into the frame. It is steeper then it looks in the picture.

Samual's Point should be easy, except for the 10 miles of hiking. It should be safe for hiking during hunting season. Too hard to get up to the level range. Most hunters like to stay close to their car. I will let you know when we get ready to do it. There are a lot of bees nest on this section of mountain, so it would only be done without leaves on the trees. You can actually see Samual's Point from the trail junction. Just look and go. Very easy bushwack.

I think they should have the write-up on this hike done shortly. I did get a lot of good pictures.

Yeah, the Google map is a mess.

[dave]

We now have the hike posted in the hiking section, so check it out. If you see any mistakes, let me know.

[Jon]

Just a note about your GPS, I have seen some weird "woods roads" on some of the maps I have for my Garmin.
When I load NE USA Topo Part 1, you can see that it looks like Moon Haw road was extended (somehow) all the way up the col between Cornell and witt, and then down Wittenberg to Woodland Valley. Maybe at one point 50 years ago this road existed? I mean I know some of the trails are on old logging roads, but this seems too steep to get horse and carriages up.

witt2.jpg

witt1.jpg

You can see same waypoints, but with a different map overlay and there's no moonhaw rd on top of Wittenberg.
Also the contours are in slightly different places. Makes me wonder which is more accurate.

There is also a road that goes over panther on my GPS, but I don't see how a road could make this trip. It seems that different map overlays have different woods roads in different spot. Also I sometimes see "trails" that are marked on the map, but aren't complete and the wrong color. For some reason there is a "blue trail" that goes over plateau mountain from the mink hollow to Devil's tombstone. I'm pretty sure that DP is red the whole way, I don't know why it's called the blue trail. This is why I never trust the GPS, it seems like it lies a lot. Also the waypoints I have entered or downloaded don't seem to line up with maps I've downloaded.

[kennykb]

I came upon this post because I was just browsing old trip reports to prepare for the weekend. But the remarks about GPS and the phantom roads are worth a comment.

Essentially everyone that's producing these maps uses one of only a few sources for the US street grid:
(1) The Census Bureau's TIGER files. These flow into Google Maps, but also into Garmin and a few others.
(2) OpenStreetMap. A lot of people use this, including MapInfo. A lot of its street layout information was imported from an older version of TIGER.
(3) The USGS National Map - but this, too, appears to eventually be tied into TIGER.

In the Catskills, it appears that the TIGER maps show a fair number of roads that existed only in the fervid imagination of some census worker. (What's generally happened, it appears, is that an existing road connected to a trail, or paralleled a stream, or followed a contour line - and a bleary-eyed census worker traced a line too far.) As I come across the problems in OpenStreetMap and field-verify that the phantoms don't exist, I'm cleaning them out. Unfortunately, there's no way to get that information back to the Census Bureau. In the TIGER system, it appears that the **** just accumulates.

On my phone-GPS, my custom map then winds up showing multiple alignments for roads and trails, with subtly different symbols: OpenStreetMap, TIGER, NYS DEC Roads&Trails, and my own GPS tracks. I happen to think this "cubist" approach actually provides useful information. If everything aligns perfectly, it probably predicts that the trail is easy to follow. If the various tracks all wander from each other, it means that the trail has been relocated multiple times, or that it's difficult to follow, or that GPS is wonky because of terrain features (e.g., heavy tree cover, a cliff to the south, a deep ravine). In any of those cases, it means that I have to be careful hiking there.

For what it's worth, the New York Long Path guide says that there's an abandoned trail from the col between Cornell and Wittenberg leading down into Maltby Hollow. It is reported to be very faint, damaged by land movement in spots, and difficult to follow. So there may have been a line on a map that someone traced as "Moon Haw Road." Similarly, the Tonisgah trail (the former routing of the Burroughs Range trail before it was rerouted to the Woodland Valley trailhead) could easily have been traced as the continuation of a road. I've never tried to follow the trail past Terrace Mountain, because the NYNJTC maps announce that the trailhead is on private land and show a "KEEP OUT" symbol.

So my "cubist" phone map for the relevant area looks like http://kbk.is-a-geek.net/catskills/test2.html?lo=-74.347&la=42.017&z=14. It shows several incorrect trail alignments, and promotes some of the trails inappropriately to woods roads. It copies incorrect locations for the peaks from OpenStreetMap. Once I've gone through it in the field, I'll clean up the locations, upload to OpenStreetMap, and then at some point update my phone map.