Morning all! Hope you had a great 4th/extended weekend!
I certainly enjoyed mine, though as I mentioned, it turned out to be a little more epic than I had planned
Brief synopsis: Team met up Wednesday after work, packed into my wife's G37x (we barely fit 4 people and 4 packs) and headed to New York. Stayed in Westkill overnight.
Thursday, had transit arranged with a local service. We dropped the G at the end of the Devil's Path on Spruceton Rd, and took a shuttle to the start point on Prediger Rd. Started the hike by 9 am, hiked a bit over 10 miles to our first stopping point. My brother Joe is a diabetic, and typically his first few hours hiking are miserable - although he's very strong, very into weight lifting, his blood sugar goes all over the place and usually this means he vomits a lot until everything normalizes, takes about 3 hours, but I try not to overextend us on Day 1 as a result. We made camp around 4 pm.
We decided to hike the rest of the path Friday, instead of splitting it between Friday and Saturday. According to the map, it's about 14.8 miles remaining, albeit difficult miles (lots of steep ascents followed by precipitous descents). Got a solid start, we were on the trail before 7:30 am.
Turns out the map was a little bit off both in the mapping of distance and terrain. I know volunteer organizations are responsible for at least some of the trail maps in NJ/NY, but this is the 2nd time we've run into this kind of issue (I'm also somewhat spoiled because the White Mountains are mapped so much better by comparison). Distance was off by somewhere between 4 and 6 miles, based on separate GPS tools. As I'm sure most of you are aware, there's a sizeable difference in hiking 15 vs 19-20 miles, especially over really rough terrain. With my wife on the trip I would not have signed us up for that, had I known, but we did finish around 5:45 pm. No deaths! Pictures to follow.