foliage | Aimee Knows

This hike has many good things going for it. Number one is the view. It is a great place to view the fall foliage, the freedom tower and even the Verrazano Bridge. It seems like it would be good in all seasons and is an easy hike with very few uphill sections. The only negative would be for people unsteady on their feet – several sections have loose rocks on the path, but if you use a walking stick, I would think you should be fine.

Yellow Trail

Red Trail

I should never say to myself “wow this trail has so many markers!” because I always jinx myself. The directions on the NY/NJ Trail Conference Site and the trail markers were great until I got to the blue trail. My first confusion was confirming that I was supposed to follow the trail at the last house. I don’t know why but that tripped me up (maybe it had to do with the off-leash dog attacking my leashed dog).

Check out this cool treehouse as you enter the blue trail

Once I started on the blue trail, I had very few problems (one downed tree made me search harder for the further marker) (switchbacks were also fine and clear) until I passed the stone bridge and ended up in a maze of trees where the trail bears left.

I felt so lost that I nearly started to panic (yes an overreaction, I could have just backtracked to the other trails or the street, but I wanted to continue on). In that area of mass trees, the trail is barely clear (at least in October with leaves everywhere) and there are several possible options of similar looking ground. There is no next blue marker in sight for a while. I made 4 wrong starts and needed to backtrack to the blue left turn marker to start over before I finally tredged ahead on the correct trail for a while (after pulling up Google maps and seeing that I would at least be heading towards a road) and I finally found the next blue marker. It was a very exciting moment for me. You may have heard me yell “BLUE!” 🙂

After that the trail was again obvious with markers on both trees and rocks to help you navigate your way uphill along large flat rocks to a clear intersection at the yellow trail.

I found the trail to be very clean with not much debris (if you see debris when hiking, how about you pick it up and throw it away!). The trails were rocky and I did turn my ankles a bit but I blame myself because I was only wearing sneakers (that I also used to hike Macchu Picchu) but I didn’t have them tied tightly. None of my minor stumbles were enough for me to bother bending down and tying them better, so the rocks must not be that bad!

On a Wednesday morning in October, there were not many people around and it was a peaceful and mostly enjoyable hike.

Also, the views from the 9/11 memorial area are amazing even on an overcast day. They did a very nice job with the memorial. I even saw a big buck hanging out there.