Harlan and I finally made it to The Gunks this weekend. We had been planning for going on several weeks, and the weather was just too perfect to pass up. i jumped on mapquest really quickly and snagged our route. Driving Directions from Hoboken to New Paltz, NY

The drive covered about 80 miles, and took a little more than an hour. Once you jump off of the NY Thruway, its a quick jaunt through New Paltz and a few miles more to the boulder fields. New Paltz is a bit of a hippie town. Being that it was the first sunny day of spring, all of the crunchy granola heads were out in their dreaded glory. Just kidding… it was a great place with tie died shirts and skirts on sale. Harlan and I found a natural food store to grab some supplies. We snagged a loaf of bread, some cheese, jelly and sun butter. Sun butter sounded like ordinary peanut butter just with a 70’s color scheme and a cool container. (Should have read the fine print, and more on this crap later).

After that we headed up, parked, paid, and hiked our way to the rocks. After about an hour detour in the wrong direction, we once again consulted our guidebook, Bouldering the Shawangunks , and corrected our mistake.

You’ll find a slideshow below. Just a quick bunch of pictures, not well setup or planned. I guess neither of us really wanted to quit climbing long enough to snap shots.

After a few hours of climbing, we decided to stop for lunch. Out came the supplies that I had smashed into the bottom of my trusty Right Media bag. Jelly looked great, Sun Butter was a little like goopy gray brown ooze. We thought it might have just warmed a bit in the sun. Who cares, lets just spread it on our peasant bread and get lunch over with. I took one bite and realizes something wasnt quite right. I took another look at the jar. Sun Butter… natural sunflower seed butter. Now I dont mind a good sunflower seed or 200 every now and then. They remind me of my little league baseball days. But slathered on a sandwich with blueberry jelly, they taste like ass. Thats right I said it! Ass. Anyways we struggled through a few sandwiches and got back to climbing.

If you need more info on the gunks, or climbing in general, I suggest you check out my earlier post titled Some Useful Climbing Links. You can search the live archives for it, or just click here.