Climbing at the Shawangunks

Ask any climber who lives in the Northeast about the "Gunks" and most will speak fondly of it, they might even "wax poetic" about it. This area, since it's discovery in the 1930s by the German Fritz Wiessner and Austrian Hans Kraus, has thousands of developed routes. One might compare it to Yosemite in California, indeed its cliffs are not near as tall, but the complexity of the rock and exclusive traditional routes make it just as challenging.

Of course all this was on top of my mind when I knew I would be working in the Catskill mountains, immediately northwest of the gunks. I underestimated my commitment to work up here, so an opportunity to climb did not present itself until recently. I enlisted my colleague and friend, Dave, to come with me. He currently lives in Idaho and as I write this he is getting happily married in his home state of Tennessee, congratulations! We spent the labor day holiday at the gunks, with near perfect weather, albeit a bit on the humid side. It was a real bummer to pay to climb though, $15. Most of the climbing areas at the gunks exist on private land, I am of the opinion that one should never have to pay to recreate, I will gladly pay higher taxes if it means that money is allocated properly to conservation and management of public lands.

We did perhaps 4-5 different climbs, and from the first to the last I was impressed by the quality of the rock. Dave climbs at a lower ability than me, but that was ok because we were there for climbs rated 5.fun, not anything else. In a landscape as beautiful as the gunks, it was hard not to smile at the top of the climbs.


It was a real pleasure to climb with someone who was as happy to be there as me. I lead all the pitches and Dave followed, pulling gear and gaining valuable experience for his future climbing career.

Climbing is such a novel experience for beginners, I couldn't wipe the smile off Dave's face even if I tried.


Our nice day off ended with us having to return to the motel, to get ready another week spent in the forest doing stand exams. It was beautiful to be paid for our day climbing at the gunks, another perk of working for the feds!

Catskill Mountain Keeper

On my daily commute into the New York state Catskill mountains I encounter any number of adopt-a-highway signs. One that sticks out along the cluttered curbside is the Catskill Mountain Keeper. I am always happy to notice a local citizen group that is striving to preserve the beauty of the mountains. Far too often these days land is developed willy-nilly, with little regard for long-term effects on the landscape. Such an alarmingly large amount of America looks very homogenized with shopping strip centers and cookie-cutter communities. We must look longer term and preserve existing natural areas, areas reclaimed by (new) forests after our previous couple of pillages. Anyway, that is neither here nor there, this blog is about the awesomeness of my new job working for the USDA Forest Service.

TEAMS Enterprise Unit, the entity in the FS that employs me, was granted the contract to conduct a forest inventory for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection watershed land holdings. The NYC DEP wants to know the health of their forests, most parcels were purchased very recently. An assessment of the health of the forests is necessary to evaluate the filtering capability of them for the water which wins awards and eventually ends up in Manhattan. After conducting the inventory, the bright folks working for TEAMS in CA will write a management plan to try to best preserve the status of NYC DEP forested lands as excellent natural water filters.

We do our work by watershed, or more specifically, by reservoir. Each reservoir is divided into areas, areas by stand and each stand is then finally subdivided into plots. The GIS techs in CA delineated the stands to identify where to put in the plots in the most statistically un-biased manner. At each plot I am doing an overall vegetation survey; the understory, overstory and plot invasives. To get to my plots, I use a GPS field navigator, but this merely points me in a straight line towards the plot I'm aiming for. What most regular people, and even some nature lovers don't realize, is how unbelievably rugged it is to walk when there are no trails. Sometimes I get lucky and can walk a road, like this one:


Other times, like yesterday, I am walking through a recently felled even-aged stand of oaks:

Honestly though, I really have no reason to complain. What other job do you know pays you to walk around in the woods and observe nature at its best? And yet, the previous day, I am in paradise with my plot "perched on a pedestal" like this one:

Unbeknown to the reader though, this rock perch was more than a half mile of bushwhacking up 600 feet of elevation gain. I think that will safely thwart any unsuspecting people from discovering my hangout spot.

Of course days when it is rainy, cold and miserable, I wish I had an office to escape to. These days I can't really ask for more perfect weather though; blue-bird days and temps of 70-75 and nighttime in the upper 40s, the weatherman on the radio calls it "seasonably mild."

A quick word about the USDA FS TEAMS EU, they are an entity that provides consulting services to other government agencies (the NYC DEP for instance). Since TEAMS is conducting studies all over the USA, the personnel are always on the move to the different job sites. This is unique in how it allows the people who for TEAMS to be exceptionally well-rounded, simply because they have had opportunities to be exposed to forests all over the country.