Walking From Manhattan to the Catskills on the ‘Long Path’

On the first day of summer, I stepped out into the blistering heat from my apartment building in Alphabet City and headed west on 4th Street, bound for my home in the Catskills, some 130 miles north. I carried a 35-pound backpack filled with camping gear and little idea of what lay ahead.

I had learned about the route I was taking, called the Long Path, from a trail marker I’d seen on a hike behind my house in Edgewood, N.Y. Since then, I’d wondered if I could make use of it to trek between my two homes with only a handful of turns: north onto Broadway, west across the George Washington Bridge, and north again until I reached the Catskills.

The Long Path is a 358-mile hiking trail that begins at the 175th Street subway station in Manhattan and runs to Thacher State Park, just south of the Adirondack Mountains. Conceived around 1930 by Vincent Schaefer, a chemist and meteorologist, and named after a line from a Walt Whitman poem, the Long Path initially had no fixed route and was essentially a sequence of waypoints that led toward the Adirondack High Peaks. In the 1930s, the up-and-coming trail was championed by an influential hiking columnist, Raymond H. Torrey, but its development soon stalled during the war effort.

Interest in the trail was revived in the 1960s, when the Long Path was re-envisioned as a long-distance hiking trail with a fixed route. Today, it remains a work in progress. Mary Ann Nissley is credited with completing the first through-hike — it took her 25 days — in 1998. The trail has since been rerouted to minimize the stretches along public roads. In 2019, Jeffrey Adams ran the entire trail in a record seven and a half days.

Uninterested in breaking any records, or even hiking the trail to completion, I had my own hyperspecific hill to climb and intended to take my time doing so.