With sunset creeping towards 6:00PM and barely 10.5 hours of daylight to play with, a thru-hiker closing in on the end of an Appalachian Trail journey is learning that autumn hiking is a maths problem as much as a physical one. Writing from the trail in late October 2026, the blogger behind The Trek's 'Going Greenwood' journal logged a 20.8-mile day from a rocky outcrop at mile 1,355.7 down to Route 17A in New York — roughly 46,735 steps, much of it on the ankle-breaking terrain the Empire State is famous for.
The day's headline feature was the Stairway to Heaven, a steep, rocky climb out of Vernon Valley in New Jersey, reached after a flat two-mile stretch and a boardwalk over marshland. Crossing it in the uphill direction turned out far easier than descending, since you can keep your weight over your feet and skip the sketchy spots. From the top viewpoint, it was a quick turnaround — photo taken, no lingering — before pushing on towards Greenwood Lake under a gloomy, overcast sky, with small planes buzzing overhead every few minutes.
The short days have changed the rhythm of trail life entirely. In camp by dark, asleep in a quilt with a podcast playing, up around 6:30AM — a pattern of six-hour nights offset by nine-hour catch-up sessions. The numbers are stark: the hiker started in Georgia on February 27th with 11 hours 18 minutes of daylight and now has 45 minutes less per day, with nearly a month of hiking still to go.
There was trail-people magic too. A surprise reunion with 'Pebbles' of the group Flintstones — last seen at the Connecticut/Massachusetts border — who'd detoured to New York City and was now hiking solo, regaling the author with a tale of startling a bear so badly it dropped its fish (which it later sheepishly reclaimed). Both agreed the one thing they dread ahead: Pennsylvania's nickname among hikers, 'Rocksylvania', says it all.
Why should a regular traveller care? This stretch of the AT is one of the most accessible sections of the entire trail for a weekend trip. The Stairway to Heaven is a popular day hike with a proper viewpoint payoff, and the trail threads past Greenwood Lake and the pleasant town of Warwick, New York, where the hiker wrapped the day with groceries and blog-writing in a supermarket seating area. You don't need 2,000 miles or six months — a couple of days on this leg gives you boardwalks, ridgeline views and that classic NY-NJ rock scramble, all within reach of the city. Just pack the poncho, even at 0% forecast: late-October slippery rock is no joke, as this hiker's tender ankle can attest. — The Trek
