We had some excitement here at the end of the valley on Saturday night. At 6:00 pm, as I was getting ready to get into the shower before going out for the evening, I heard a knock on my door. I opened it to find a young woman and man (in their early 20's) on my porch (one of my friends says that if I opened the door to two strangers on a dark Saturday night I have obviously not seen enough horror movies). It turned out that they, and their 3 other friends down on the road, were part of a University of Pennsylvania hiking club. They set out to do the Slide-Wittenberg-Cornell loop. Unfortunately, the leader of the group was under the impression that the hike was only 8 miles long when in reality it is almost twice that distance. The entire group was 14 people but these 5 had left later that the other nine and gone in the opposite direction. They had come up and over Giant Ledge and then gotten most of the way up Wittenberg Mountain when they realized that they wouldn't have enough time to get over both Cornell and Slide and get back down into the Slide parking lot before dark. So they came off the trail and knocked on my door. I gave them a ride back to the Slide parking lot and dropped them off. Since they were very confident that their fellow hikers, who had left much earlier that they had, would be back before them, I didn't wait to find out if that was true. I returned to my house, made some phone calls and then tried again to get ready to go out. Again, I heard a knock on my door. Part of the group had returned. It seemed that of the nine they were expecting to meet back at camp only 3 had gotten back. Those 3 had turned around on the top of Slide also realizing they weren't going to make it all the way around in the time they had allowed. But at this point, they didn't know where their other 6 friends were and it was now 9:00 pm. We called the Shandaken police who instructed us to call 911 which we did. The Town police, the State police, and the Shandken ambulance squad all arrived at the Woodland Valley campground parking lot in short order. Another police unit was sent to the Slide parking lot side. The officers spent a little over an hour beginning to organize a search. Happily, at about 10:15, the last 6 hikers emerged from the woods safe and unharmed. So all's well that ends well. I asked the hikers to send me a couple of photos so that I could tell the story on the blog and they graciously agreed. I am very happy that everyone came out of this experience in good shape and that this story has a happy ending!
These are the 2 hikers that originally knocked on my door.
