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Sept 27, 2014: The ICO’s first Ellis High School outing of the fall season was greeted with bright sun, clear skies, and mid-80s temperatures with low humidity — perfect for a day of apple picking in upstate New York followed by a short hike in the Palisades. What made it even more special was that Michelle Brick led the trip to complete her fieldwork and become ICO’s newest certified leader—congrats Michelle!—and it was the first outing for several new volunteers picked up at the August 6th recruitment meeting in SoHo.
The day began with the usual gathering at Ellis and a bus crawl through Bronx traffic to pick up our colleagues and fellow attendees from the CatRock/Sierra Club Youth Leadership group, with whom we shared transportation and parallel activities. After that it was clear sailing, though, and it wasn’t long before we all arrived at Dr. Davies Farm in Congers, NY. The good Dr.’s apple orchard rests at the foot of a giant, rippled slab of brown vertical rock that picked up highlights in the late-morning sun, beckoning the mountain climbers in the group, and contrasting with the lush green grounds and trees to make a beautiful setting. We leisurely filled our bags with fresh-plucked Macintosh, Delicious, Granny Smith, and whatever else was within reach of the long picking poles. Plenty of fresh fruit never made it into the bags, however (yum!) and the lovely Eleanor, the charming two year-old daughter of an Ellis faculty member, was sometimes seen with one apple gripped in each tiny hand.
Eventually, after sharing a few cider donuts from the farmstand, our group made its way to State Line Lookout Park along the Palisades Parkway and the trail to Peanut Leap Cascade, a true hidden gem of a hike. Following a group word game during which one of the Ellis students learned the hard way that his heavily-applied cologne was more attractive to the local bees than the ladies (a good laugh was had and no harm done, thankfully), we started our hike. From the top of the cliffs, which offered stunning views of the mighty Hudson below and the pleasure craft dotting the river on a gorgeous autumn weekend, we made our way down (via sometimes arduous bouldering and a long stone staircase) to the waterfall and the river’s edge. What Ray described as a rushing cascade when he visited back in springtime was more like a carelessly left-open faucet in late September, but the beauty of the rock made us all want to return and see it in its glory. The quietly lapping river was exceptionally calm this day, and the smell of burnt wood, leftover from someone’s pitfire in the stone ruins of an “Italian Garden” that once stood on the site as a lunch spot for the New York artist community, filled the moist air. A few from our group partook of the tire and slat rope swings hanging from trees at the river’s edge.
What goes down must come up, of course, and the group endured its biggest challenge of the day climbing back to the cliff’s edge. It’s safe to say that along with learning the usual pack-it-in-pack-it-out and do-no-harm tenets attendent to being in the woods, the Ellis students, many just equipped with sneakers, came to know the value of good hiking shoes on what amounted to another typically rocky trail common to our region. Wildlife sightings for the day included a couple of black vultures that circled close enough to the edge of the cliffs to betray their massive wingspan, and an exceptionally long and scary-looking black snake spotted in the bushes alongside the trail as we were ending our hike. We learned later that it was a Black Rat Snake, a species of constrictor common to the area that often grows to 6 feet long and 1-1/2 inches thick—perfectly harmless unless you’re a hapless rodent that scurries across its path.
The bus ride back to the Bronx was quiet, with plenty of conked-out participants scattered about the seats. It was the fitting end to a great day for all and a good start to the new season for Ellis.