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http://city-made.com/tag/greeting-card/ I climbed Giant Ledge with a friend yesterday, and we elected to go around the mountain and inspect the foot of the cliffs from below.  We found a little unexplored world, November moss on all the rocks, green against the coming winter – this is a steep East-facing slope, and stays cool and moist all year.  The absence of a trail or even any kind of even ground to walk on was quite striking.  One type of moss was perhaps not even a moss but a fern, so close did the two come to each other.  I have not seen it anywhere else in the Catskills.

Takhatpur It is pictured at right.  At the foot of the cliffs we found some trash, as you might expect from a hikers’ destination, but not as much as we would have thought.  The largest item was a tarp someone had brought up decades ago as a shelter, poles included.  It was in its stuff sack, quite rotted out.  We lugged this off the mountain.  There were other items – a Nalgene bottle, a camp stove.  But there was not much there.  Still we vowed to return with a backpack and stuff it full of whatever we could find.

The slope was far steeper than we thought.  The perspective from above tends to flatten out the topography, and you believe there is a steep cliffside falling into a flat valley.  In fact the valley walls are extremely steep, not much less steep than the cliffs themselves, which from below seem much smaller than from above.

When on top of the cliff-face we heard some noise down below, and saw a bear making its way from north to south in the valley.  I took some photos, but never quite caught it properly.  It’s the black smudge at the center of the photo below.  Oddly – again, the perspective – the top of the photo is downhill – and a steep downhill at that!