September 2, 2023

Start: Woodland Valley Campground

End: Slide Mountain Trailhead, Oliverea Road

Peaks: Wittenberg (3,780'), Cornell (3,860'), Slide (4,180')

Elevation Gain/Loss: 3,930 ft / 2,865 ft

Point-to-Point Mileage: 9.24 mi

Duration: 6 hours, 31 minutes

Rock Difficulty: Class 1

Immediately after returning from the Canadian Rockies, where we vacationed for much of August, we went camping in the Catskills for Labor Day weekend. I figured it would be a good idea to take the opportunity to bag both Catskills 4,000ers. Future me, tying up the NE115 someday, would probably thank myself. Since we were staying at Woodland Valley Campground, I decided to ascend Slide directly from the campground and arrange to get picked up from the standard trailhead.

After arriving late the previous night, we woke up at a very late 9:00 AM the morning of, but because we camped fifty-odd steps from the trailhead we were still on the trail before 10:00. The trail wastes no time gaining elevation coming out of Woodland Valley, but it flattens out around 1.5 miles in. After a nearly-flat mile, the trail steepens once again for the final 1,000 vertical feet to the summit of Wittenberg. We summited just before 12:30 PM.

Wittenberg had the best views of the hike, but that's not saying much. We spent around a half hour on the summit before making our way over to Cornell. The descent from Wittenberg was nontechnical, but there were a couple of rocky bits on the northeast side of Cornell. I wouldn't exactly call it scrambling but it was a nice change of pace after a pretty monotonous hike so far. We gained the wooded summit of Cornell at 1:30.

We didn't stop more than a couple of minutes on Cornell before proceeding on towards Slide. The descent from Cornell was relatively gradual and quite a bit of the trail in the col between the two mountains was nearly flat. The trail abruptly steepens around 0.8 miles below the summit of Slide. There were a couple of rocky bits heading up Slide as well, but again, not exactly scrambling. There was one ladder to climb as well at around 3,900 ft. The trail flattened out again near the summit, and we summited just after 3:15.

The descent to the standard trailhead was rather straightforward, a steady gradual grade the whole way down. The stream crossing just before reaching the parking lot was perhaps the most notable part of the descent. We made it back to the trailhead at 4:45, and one of the two Catskills 4,000ers was in the books.