Pillsbury Mt Fire Tower: Bike and Hike

My guide books warned of bad road conditions between Rt 30 and the parking lot at the trail head. When it comes off-road driving with my car, a little Corolla, I am always afraid it's going to get stuck somewhere and that I will not be able to get it out. My husband and I had a bad experience driving it to a campground down in the Catskills last summer, I was in a state of hysteria and I wasn't even the one driving!

My dentist's assistant had mentioned that she rode her bike in when climbing Pillsbury, so we decided to do it that way. We probably could have safely driven in farther than we did but I assured Sister that biking in would be a lot less worse than being stuck in the car with hysterical me.


WOW. For the 3+ miles from where I parked to the trail head we had to alternate walking with biking, and we encountered a lot of unfriendly sand. There were parts where I said "I could have totally gotten my car in here" followed by.... "I am SO GLAD I didn't take my car in here." However, there were a few little sedans in parking lot that apparently made it in without harm. Nonetheless, it certainly added to the adventure. We would not have gotten to see the snake if we drove in. And we wouldn't have been able to say we did it!


For an easy 1.6 mile walk to the summit, the trail seemed to last forever! It probably had something to do with the 3 mile bike ride in, but after a while we began to have tower mirages, which is a phrase we made up for when you are so ready to see the tower that you actually start to think that trees and branches are the tower up ahead.

On the way up we saw toads, wild flowers which Sister can name, and a dead moth with a pattern on its underside that resembled two eyes staring up at us.



The tower is climbable but the cab is not accessible. The fierce wind forced us to hurry back down to the ground not giving us time to look for other mountains such as Snowy and Wakely which also have fire towers.


There is a nice little bench and a wooden ergonomically designed makeshift chair surrounding a fire pit where we enjoyed our lunch.



Round trip from the time we left the car on our bikes to the return to the car was about 4 hours. This included a total of 6 miles biking and 3.2 miles hiking. Not too bad.



Elevation change: 1337
Total Elevation: 3597
Round trip from trail head: 3.2 miles

Click here to see all the pictures.

Balloons

While summer is my favorite season, the fall is be a close second. I love the long warm sunny days of summer, going camping, and of course the drive-ins. Fall brings shorter, cooler days but a beautiful foliage in Upstate New York. It also brings thousands and thousands of people to my home town for the annual Adirondack Balloon Festival.


Thirty-five years ago, the first Balloon Fest was hosted at what was once known as the Warren County Airport. My grandmother lived close by, and woke up to the whooosh sound of the burners in the baskets. Not knowing what the noise was she looked out the window to see a hot air balloon above the yard picking leaves off the top of the tree.


I remember her taking me every year, right up until I was a sophomore in college. We'd get up at 4am and have a quick breakfast of muffins and cereal and rush off trying to beat the traffic to the airport. No matter how early we left, we would be backed up in traffic for miles. We'd talk about how smart the bike riders were, as they would get there well ahead of us, but we were much warmer in the car. She pulled me around the airport in a little red wagon for my first few years, buying me hot chocolate which was a special treat since I wasn't allowed caffeine at that age. Winter coats and mittens were necessary; even though it is held in mid September, the early morning is too brutally cold to walk around in.



It had been 8 years since I attended the event, so I found a group of friends including Sister to go bike riding to the evening balloon launch on Saturday. Though it was uphill both ways, we beat the traffic both in and out of what is now called the Floyd D Bennett Airport. It appeared as though the balloons were not going to launch, possibly due to the wind, but finally one crew inflated their balloon and many more were quick to follow. We returned to where we locked up our bikes to find that someone had cut our locks. Fortunately, our bikes and helmets were not taken. Lesson learned - you can't chain a bike to a fence at an airport apparently. Here is a video I created to summarize the event. Hope you like music from the Cold War era! This is the English version of Nena's "99 Red Balloons," with a video from the festival including the bike ride.

Check out my photo set on Flickr.