Five women who have each lived six or seven decades on this Earth are in the midst of a remarkable journey.

Together they have trekked hundreds of miles on the Long Path, one piece at a time, with a plan to hike the last piece, in the Catskills, this spring.

Marilyn Hellwig credits Karol Harlow with the start of the project.

Harlow is a goal-setter. When she retired from being a high school principal she wanted to kayak the length of the Hudson River — she has completed that journey, right to the Statue of Liberty — and to hike the Long Path.

The 358-mile Long Path runs from near the George Washington Bridge in New York City to High Point on the Helderberg escarpment above Altamont.

The hiker’s path was originally envisioned in the 1920s by Vincent Schaeffer, a chemist and meteorologist who developed cloud-seeding while working at General Electric in Schenectady, to be an unmarked trail that stretched from New York City to the Adirondacks. 

Schaeffer chose the name from words written by Walt Whitman in the opening stanza of his “Song of the Open Road”:
 

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
 

As the five women gathered in the Enterprise newsroom this week to talk about their own journey, Hellwig began by recalling her husband’s death a decade ago.

“I’ve known Karol since our girls were in preschool together in Knox,” she said.

After her husband’s death, Hellwig’s daughter, Angela, told Harlow “to keep in touch with me because I’d need a friend,” recalled Hellwig. “We started walking together once in a while … One day Karol asked, ‘How about doing the Long Path?’”

It was in the midst of the pandemic and the project would end isolation with healthy outdoor activity.

Two others soon joined in. Debra Barnes Breitenbach, who had retired from her job as a clinical social worker, loves the woods and nature and wanted to know more about botany.

She joined the Thursday Naturalists, a group started in the 1970s by Ruth Adler Schottman that still meets on Thursdays.

Lauren Swift, a botanist and ecologist who had also retired, is a member of the Thursday Naturalists and became in charge of mapping for the group hiking the Long Path.

Swift had grown up hiking with her family as well as canoeing and skiing. While those are each individual sports, she noted, “They are way more fun to do as a group.”

The women met their fifth hiking partner, Tess Garner, at the Winn Preserve in Knox. 

“I came to the Winn Preserve to hunt,” said Garner but she learned hunting wasn’t allowed in the preserve. She had started as an archer and became a hunter and fisher.

The other women said that Garner, because of her hunting acumen, could point out things along the trail they otherwise wouldn’t have seen, like turkey scratching or places where deer had bedded. Garner also likes to bushwhack, hiking where there is no trail.

The women, who live in and around the Helderbergs, started out close to home doing what they now see as short hikes at Thacher Park, which the Long Path wends through. They now hike, including climbing up and down mountains, at a pace of about a mile an hour.

So for their final hike in the Catskills they need the spring daylight for 12 hours for a 12-mile hike.

Five is the perfect number of hiking partners, the women said, because they can fit in one car. When they drive for far-flung hikes, they leave one car at their end point and then drive back to their starting point, often having to park a mile or two from the trail.

When they hike sections of the Long Path far from their homes, they book rooms in clean serviceable inns, doing a day’s hike on either side of their overnight stay.

“We hike very similarly, looking at things,” said Swift.

“We’re like the Marines — no woman left behind,” said Barnes Breitenbach.

“Our strength is we accommodate every person’s needs,” said Harlow.

The women each carry a backpack that includes all 10 items deemed essential by state forest rangers: a map, compass and GPS system to navigate; extra wool socks, a hat, gloves, and a water and windproof jacket for insulation; flashlights with extra batteries; first-aid supplies; an emergency kit with a whistle, signal mirror, duct tape and pocket knife; matches to start a fire; high-protein food; water; sun and insect protection; and a tarp for emergency shelter.

They note that their doctors have commented on their increased bone density because of carrying the weight while still being slim.

“We’ve never had an injury,”said Harlow.

They’ve hiked in all seasons in all sorts of weather, even snow.

Young hikers on the Long Path frequently make comments like, “You ladies are killing it.”

“One man said, ‘It’s not the miles, it’s the smiles,’” recalled Hellwig.

“There are people who just book it,” said Barnes Breitenbach, like hikers who are trying to climb all the fire towers.

“For them, it’s an athletic event,” said Swift. “For us, it’s experiential.”

“Being retired, you get to explore …. There’s so much to learn in the world,” said Barnes Breitenbach.

The women have learned about botany and biology, geology and geography, and history and varying cultures.

Reminiscing

All five lively women sat in a circle this week, talking to The Enterprise about their Long Path adventures as stories of favorite places or experiences came tumbling out.

Hellwig loves the sound of waterfalls.

Barnes Breitenbach was moved by a monument built in 1929 to look like a small stone castle to honor the Women’s Federation of New Jersey.

“The Palisades were being quarried … These women lobbied to stop the quarrying. I was touched these women had stopped that,” she said, so that the parkland was preserved.

All of the women were moved by what they saw of Letchworth Village, an institution built near the start of the 20th Century in Rockland County to house the physically and mentally disabled.

“The cemetery of unknown children is right by the trail,” said Harlow, noting their graves have just numbers. Harlow serves as a scribe for the group, writing of their treks.

Barnes Breitenbach noted a news documentary from the 1970s that included Letchworth and started the movement away from institutions towards group homes.

“My favorite thing was the next hike coming up,” said Garner.

Garner donated fossils she had found while fishing to a museum along the path in Gilboa.

“There were so many things you would only see if you were walking,” said Swift.

She recalled how in Goshen a woman invited the five hikers into her church, which had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, helping people escape slavery.

Garner recalled the stories spun by a man who had a candy store that featured old-time nostalgic candies like buttons on paper.

They walked by houses with lawns that had collections of gnomes, or of whirligigs, or of stone heads.

“There are cultural differences from here to New York City,” said Swift.

“We walked by the house of the first president of Cuba,” she said.

They also walked by the sites of two plane crashes.

Harlow recalled how, as they walked on the outskirts of Kiryas Joel, a settlement of Hasidic Jews in Orange County, she asked a man dressed all in black for directions — and got no reply. Garner said, when she got home from that hike, she read about the culture and traditions of the Hasidic Jews.

Barnes Breitenback recalled many of the different kinds of geologic features they had observed on their hikes.

She also recalled the tulip trees in the George Harriman State Park. “They were all gold yellow and the maples were red. My eyes ached,” she said.

“We’d hear a bird and get the Merlin Bird app out,” she said, to identify it. 

The Long Path, through woods and meadows, parks and streets, is marked with blue blazes. “We were in communities with blue blazes on the street and they didn’t know there was a Long Path,” said Barnes Breitenbach.

“There are lots of interesting surprises along the way,” said Garner.

Barnes Breitenbach recalled coming across acres and acres of yellow trout lilies and said, “It helped lift you up when you were tired.”

When the New York City skyline came into sight, the women did not need a map. “It looked like the Emerald City,” said Barnes Breitenbach as she started humming a song from “The Wizard of Oz.”

Beyond norms

As the women prepare for the final leg of their long journey — which will total 442 miles since they also hiked 84 miles of the Northville-Placid Trail — they say the trek has changed their everyday lives.

“My kids say, ‘Go, Mom!’ They’re proud of what we’re doing,” said Hellwig.

Harlow noted that, when one of the women missed a hike with the group, she would make up that portion separately. She asked her son, as a Mother’s Day gift, to hike a portion of the Long Path in the Catskills that she had missed.

Her son, who is in his 40s, was impressed with her prowess on the seven-mile trek. 

“We all stay active and are quicker to take the next challenge,” said Garner.

“I had a major cancer challenge,” said Barnes Breitenbach, and the physical challenge of a trek helps her endure.

In the process of hiking the Long Path, Harlow has overcome her fear of heights. “These guys have talked me up cliffs,” she said.

Hellwig recalled how she once stepped on a rock that slid downhill and her boot ended up underneath.

“They didn’t have to call a helicopter,” she said, indicating that overcoming adversity had strengthened her.

“I’ve done things I didn’t think I was capable of,” said Hellwig. “My life was filled with making quilts.”

The women are now deciding what their next challenge will be.