The 2024 Adventure: Hiking the Giraffe Path in Upper Manhattan - Part one & Part Deux - NaBloPoMo 14

Renya and I have been taking annual adventures. We pick a destination to hike to (always on the island of Manhattan) and make a lot of ado about footwear and packing snacks and planning the route. It is mostly all for show because, you know, we're in Manhattan. If we forget to pack a snack we can just stop at a deli and if we get lost, well, I'm sure an Uber driver could geolocate us. But I digress. Mostly the hard part is finding a day where both of us are free to galavant.

Last year we hiked up to the Little Red Lighthouse right under the GWB. It was definitely a thing so our adventure this year had a high bar.  

Little Red Lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge

Thankfully, one of us stumbled across:

"Hike the Heights promotes the use of the Giraffe Path, an urban trail that connects the Cloisters to Central Park through the escarpment parks of northern Manhattan. This giraffe-shaped trail takes its shape from existing trails and streets that connect Fort Tryon Park, Highbridge Park, Jackie Robinson Park, St. Nicholas Park, Morningside Park, and Central Park."

Lower part of the Giraffe Path

Done!

So in September, we set out from Central Park with full intentions of making it up to Fort Tyrone, the end of the path... but alas. Two things happened. One is we were trying to wayfind by triangulating a PDF on the phone with a combo of Google Maps and kind of looking around. 

The looking around part was essential because, I don't know if many people realize this, but the trails in most parks do not have names or signage. They just willy nilly go places. Anyway, we had some challenges. We kept wandering off the path, not realizing it, backtracking, and after a whole lot of that, it started to get really late.

The second thing that happened soon after the "it started to get really late" was we realized on East 155th that the path took a sort of sketchy left turn through the back hedges of a project. It was either bushwhack in the dark, or walk along the FDR for a stretch so yeah. We bailed. We trudged back the way we had come and decided to make the adventure a two part affair.

So this past Sunday afternoon, Renya and I met up on 157th Street by the 1 station on the other side of bushwhack stretch. I was feeling a lot of confidence because I remembered we have the AllTrails app and because I'm a super genius, I checked whether the Giraffe Path is listed and. It was. So:

So much easier to just
follow a damn GPS!

OMG, GPS is a gamechanger. You just keep your little blue dot on the green line and Viola, you successfully make it a lot further than you did going old school with a map. 

Oh, except that one time early on where we walked down about 900 stairs down a cliff and turns out, yeah. We had to walk back up 900 stairs back up the cliff because that was an error. So, I have very stiff legs today and possibly our way-finding skills are unsalvageable.

Or are they? Here's a quiz: 

Did we f* up so badly we wound up needing to Uber back to the city? Did we encounter a magic portal involving some sort of forest teleportation? Inspect these photos and you be the judge.

Answer: There's whole little forest hiking paths along that Giraffe Hike the Heights Path!! Blew my mind. 

In the end, we made it the whole way up to the end of the hike, which is at the Cloisters. Of course we went in and took a look at the unicorn tapestry, because it's always great to see her. Then I snapped some pics of medieval ironwork because I'm powerless to stop myself:

I took many more photos of medieval
ironwork but I will spare you.

We, the intrepid hikers, having completed our annual adventure, then took the 1 train home. Well ok, we stopped for ice tea on Dyckman Street before getting on the train because we know how to take advantage of train-side amenities for the long journey back to civilization. Or downtown.