I first became excited about the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail this past February (2023) after getting breakfast at The Big Cheese in Rosendale, New York and walking from there to the Rosendale Trestle. The trestle is so high over the Rondout Creek that you can see the water curve away from you in both directions and you're pretty much at eye level with the rock face of Joppenbergh Mountain. There was a map that pointed out the trestle was part of the WVRT and that the entire rail trail was about 22 miles. I realized I'd run some portions of the trail before, but thought it would be fun to get to see the entire thing in one shot.
A couple of months later, I was planning to do a ~22 mi long run, so it seemed like a good opportunity to go for a point to point run on the WVRT. There was the slight complexity of how to get my body from the end of the trail back to where my car would be parked at the start and I considered a couple of options (bringing my phone and calling an Uber, or locking a bike at the end and then riding back to the car after), but eventually was lucky enough to have my friend Mark be willing to do the run with me.
After dropping Mark's car at the parking lot at the end of the trail, we drove together to the start in Gardiner (not Wallkill, to my surprise!) on Denniston Rd. The trailhead there was very minimalist. It was a small opening off the side of a narrow country road, with no parking lot. We parked off the side of the road, finished some Clif blocks, downed a gel, did a couple of band exercises, chugged a good amount of water, realized it was "Celebrate Trails Day" – which was apt timing – and began the run!
The first part of the trail was more grassy and less gravel-y than I was expecting, and I was concerned it would be hard to hit the workout I was hoping to do of alternating miles on/off. Serendipitously, just as we were about to start the first harder mile effort, the trail smoothed out into the nice dirt/fine gravel surface I'd experienced on it near New Paltz.
We got some really nice views of the Gunks to our left side, and ran through some sort of orchard (apple? cherry?) where the trees were very short and blooming with small, white flowers. We saw a few people out biking and jogging and kept rolling on toward the New Paltz section. This part was familiar and somehow the stars aligned so that we didn't end up having to stop for cars at any of the road crossings. I took another gel around here and some of the water with Skratch that Mark was carrying. Still felt relaxed and cheerful!
The main thing I remember once we had passed out of the orbit of New Paltz into unfamiliar-to-me-territory was seeing a fascinatingly strange structure off to the west side of the trail. It seemed like a circular house made out of stone with a very pointy roof. I think there was also a large tire swing on a tree near its entrance. Not to entirely blame the strange structure, but it was around this time that I started feeling a little less jaunty. I took another gel soon after, and that helped. We wondered if we'd cross through another town before getting to the Rosendale trestle, but I don't believe we did.
I'd been thinking (read: slightly worrying) about whether we'd need to climb from where we were on the trail up to the entry-point of the Rosendale trestle, but if we did, it was extremely gradual. We burst out from the trees onto the trestle and it coincided with an "off" mile, which was nice because it allowed us to look around and really soak up how cool the trestle is. The diagonal stripes on the floor of the trestle were sort of hypnotizing so I tried not to look down as we jogged. Once we got back onto solid ground, there were a bunch of caves off to our right and left sides and every time we went by one of those it felt like a blast of air conditioning. We finished Mark's Skratch water around this point I think. In hindsight, it probably would've helped the next few miles feel much better if we'd had more water with us, or if we'd drank more water earlier on in the run. What can you do.
The only real hill of the entire trail came somewhere around mile 16 or 17 I think, and unfortunately it happened to be right in the middle of what was already sure to be a difficult "on" interval. I don't think I personally fully recovered from this devastating moment. Even though the rest of the run went by quickly, the last few miles felt *very* difficult, and I certainly wouldn't have kept trying to stay somewhat near goal pace on the last mile if Mark hadn't been there.
We got to the end of the trail and I insisted upon crossing the road just to make sure the trail didn't go further – I didn't want to miss the last bit! Once we got to the road, it seemed clear that there really was no more trail, so we crossed back and stood around in the parking lot for a while. Extremely sweaty. Pretty tired. Already starting to cramp a bit. It has only now fully dawned on me just how funny and ridiculous it would have been to contemplate either a) hopping on a bike to ride all the way back to the car or b) calling an Uber and hoping they didn't mind that I was coated in salt and dripping sweat and and probably smelled terrible. We drove back to the start of the trail, stopping at a Stewart's gas station along the way for some of the best chocolate milk and a Gatorlyte or three.