Sullivan County High Point Trip Report

Beech Mtn

Date: July 3, 2001
Author: David Galvin

The hardest part of this outing was the drive down from my home in Delaware County. Dan Case says that it's hard to get to Mongaup Road from the south, but from the north it's a nightmare. I actually had to get over, around or under blown-down trees with my car on one stretch of what are laughingly called roads in the area. Climbing Beech Mountain itself was complicated by knee to waist high expanses of ferns growing most of the way up the mountain. On the summit, they sometimes reached my chest. It has been a cool wet summer in the Northeast, which is probably ideal weather for these plants. Anyway, although I marched all over the summit, I was unable to find Mike Schwartz's X'ed rock. That would have involved dunking my head down under the thick tangle of fronds and crawling down in the dark with the ticks and other creepy-crawlies. I decided it wasn't worth it.