When We biked to Millbrook

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Around here, where we now live, there are many smaller roads. Roads that will take you past farms and horses. A month or so ago we took our bikes and went to Millbrook. It’s about 6 miles, one way to get there.

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We biked past bunnies, turtles, goats, cows and horses. We really live on the countryside now. 190 people live in the nearest hamlet, and in Millbrook about 1500 people reside.

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It still feels pretty weird that this is our home now, and that we are able to do all of this directly from our house. Life changes, and isn’t that great. This general area will be our permanent home now. We’ve been moving every second year the past 4 years so it will be nice to finally settle down.

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Millbrook is just like any other little village around the countryside in the US, although the villages here on the east coast are older than elsewhere. This general area houses many rich people, and you can clearly see that while biking or driving around. There are large mansions that you can buy for 13 million dollars here, if you can afford it. Many of these places you can’t necessarily see from the road, but the stone walls and fancy entrances to the driveways are telling those stories. But just like any other place there are houses that barely stands around here too.

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Once we got to Millbrook we didn’t really spend too much time there. We bought a coffee and something to eat and went to the park. After maybe an hour we got on our bikes and biked home again. You could clearly tell that we were going slightly downhill now, which probably explains why I felt like I was dying biking there.

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Life in NYC during the Pandemic and a New Chapter

We’ve never really been any big city people, and maybe that has been pretty clear from the start? But when the opportunity came to live in NYC and to experience everything that everyone are talking about, how could we possibly say no? Even though I started to feel a knot forming in my stomach when we sat on that bus in Madison that rainy afternoon telling all of our friends about it. That knot persisted for quite some time, especially since I didn’t have a job at first. And how do you survive with a rent that is close to 3,000$ with only one income? Well, everything is possible right, and eventually I too had a job within Academia that I could go to. After that happened that knot in my stomach was finally gone, and now we were planning on what restaurant to go to next, or what museum to explore. But we aren’t any night owls and the amount of time leftover for stuff like that was limited, and then life just happened. When January arrived we went to Sweden AGAIN!! can’t believe it since I think I have gone to Sweden less than 10 times in 10 years, and here we were casually traveling to Sweden for a second time in one year. We talked about Covid-19 there, with my friends, and the reality about it. What we thought was true or not.

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And then the Virus hit NYC, and not in any easy way. To live in NYC right then and there is hard to explain to anyone who did not go through the same thing. It wasn’t like anything I have ever experienced (of course). Our university closed down, and then everything else. Everyone who could (yeah we were pretty privileged) stayed home. For once we hadn’t gone to the grocery store in a while, and if you should ever have gone to the grocery store ahead of time, it would probably be before a pandemic and the restrictions that comes with it hit. The sirens kept going constantly, all through the day and night, and at that point it started to get scary. We went for weekly walks, and one day over at Randall Island we saw the refrigerator trucks, those trucks that would become the backup morgue for the hospitals when too many people were dying. That was a pretty rough reality. To see and hear all this first hand takes a toll on you. We were fine, and have been fine, but It still takes a toll on you. Around that time our governor mandated masks, and the 6 feet social distancing. And since then the number of cases and deaths have drastically dereased. .

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The streets were mostly empty by now, maybe not in East Harlem but around the Columbia University. All the “rich” people fled the city, and the people who were left were people who didn’t have anywhere else to go. It’s been a quite stark contrast between the areas that are “richer” vs “poorer” during this pandemic. And that too has made us upset on all sorts of different levels. We went to the store every second week, walked with our big hiking backpacks to fill them up with 2 weeks supplies. After a while we started to get out more on the weekends, we did a couple of longer bike excursions. After that we transitioned to buy food online, like many other people, and ordering local beer from different breweries in Brooklyn. We even ordered oysters a couple of times, because you need some fun in your life, even during a pandemic. I started investing in rye sourdough early on, and that got me occupied for a couple of weeks. W got invested in pasta making. Of course, our story is very different from many others, and we are very very privileged and have not been struggling as much as other. Part due to the secure jobs we have had, and because of our emergency savings we saved up through the last months, for situations like this. We were still wondering if we would ever get out of this pandemic, well I guess we still are.

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Time passed and before we knew it 4 whole months had passed of us working from home. It’s crazy to think that a pandemic hit, and that we are still within the pandemic and probably will be for the foreseeable future. But before all this happened we knew we were about to embark on a new journey, W got a job north of the city and we were moving in December. But back in April we started to get a bit panicked about our situation in the city, and now we just wanted to leave. Because what is the point of living in the city when you can’t enjoy any of its perks? We came for the culture and social life, and that will not be the same any time soon. We emailed, called an talked to people and finally got an agreement to be able to move sooner rather than later. And all of a sudden those last months were a bit easier to go through. We biked some more and tried to explore some more parts we hadn’t really experienced during the weekends, and we even got a raised bed at a community garden nearby. That probably saved us, mentally. Even now we aren’t back to 0 cases in New York State, but very very close. 4 months after our job closed down, it finally started to open again for people like me, who need to go into work to get work done. And in the midst of all this we also had the BLM movement coming through. These past month will be historical and what happened in the US and NYC during these months will probably be written about in history books.

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August 1st we embarked of yet a new, and maybe a final chapter of our lives, well, moving wise. We moved to Hudson Valley. Just north of NYC, so we can always take the train back whenever it opens up again. Nearest Hamlet has about 190 ppl in it, and the nearest village has about 1500ppl. It is still unclear which one we are included into, if any. Either way we are surrounded by fields and forest, and one or two roads. It reminds me about where we lived in Alaska, but here there are even fewer houses. A couple of mornings ago I could see the light change outside the window, and I could just put my shoes on and walk out the door and across the road to take some amazingly beautiful photos. Just like I could in Alaska. I was walking down the road, whistling to myself because there are blackies around here. The only attention I sparked though was a deer I saw in the distance. It was just standing there staring at me with the misty morning sun in the background. That is when I knew that I finally found my home, again. The last picture below is taken from our balcony.

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When we Hiked through Lamar Valley - Summertime in Yellowstone National Park

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Adventure Tuesday

Adventures in Yellowstone

May 25-27th 2014

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We had just managed to snag the last available campsite outside Gardiner and went to bed under a clear sky in the Rocky Mountains. The next morning I woke up by a strange noise, something was eating outside the tent, and it brought back memories from a different morning in Alaska when the same thing had happened. As I opened up the tent I was greeted by a bunch of elk. The following years I learned that this area, just up the hill from Gardiner is a prime spot for elk. Other than the noise from the elk it was very quiet around camp. People had been up partying into the wee hours last night, but we had major plans this morning and went to bed early. I was as excited I could possible be as I glanced over Yellowstone National Park while I had my coffee. I could not believe that I finally would get to hike in the mountains in Yellowstone. We were going to have a long day ahead of us, but first we had to get to the park and reserve a backcountry camping spot! These are first come first serve so we didn’t want to risk loosing our plan.

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Up until this trip I’d only seen Yellowstone in a blanket of deep snow so I was stoked to finally get to see this beauty dressed in green. It was late May and even though spring is on the way in many places in the US at this point it can be slower here because of the high elevation.

We’d been checking a couple of different short routes we could do, but after having to remove our top choice due to a late spring and too much water (that hike had a stream crossing without a bridge) we dialed in on a fairly decent hike into the Lamar Valley. If you’ve followed my blog for a while you have probably seen Lamar Valley, a huge valley blanketed in snow in the wintertime where you can spot wolf and bison. There are plenty of bison in this area in the summertime too, something we would soon find out.

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I usually don’t take as many pictures during the actual hike, it would take forever to reach our main destination if I did. And especially when we are hiking in a new area you never quite know how long it will take. Sometimes I wish we had more time to stop and take more photos. This time i managed to take a couple of photos right before our bison incident…

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W basically grew up with Yellowstone in his backyard and both of us had been living in Alaska for a few years when we embarked on this hike. In the deep forests of Montana and Alaska you are taught to make noise and spaek loudly, so that you do not accidentally surprise a bear. So we did what we have always done, talking loudly, clapping our hands until we rounded this tiny little hill and were greeted by a loud humpf. Before we knew it a huge bison that had been laying down, resting, turned his head towards us started to get up. We slowly walked away but somehow we were now inside a whole herd of bison. I don’t know how we managed to get into this situation. But, to clarify, we felt as if we were inside a herd of bison, but herds a very spread out. We were definitely too close to be comfortable. I closed my eyes and wished that I could stick my head in the ground. In the same manner as we somehow had gotten us into this situation we managed to get out of it. I always view bison as somewhat stupid creatures, that in combination with the fact that they are very large makes them extremely dangerous.

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We continued our hike, walking through the valley and previously burned forest. We met a couple of other hikers and they had just been to the campspot we were going to. They told us, just like the previous group had told them, that a large grizzly walks by the camp up on the hill at about 5pm every night.

We continued walking, through brush and over logs. We took a lunchbreak in the shadow of an old Lodgepole Pine. We checked the map again to see how much farther we had to walk. We checked the GPS and realized we had already passed the campsite and could not understand how that was even possible. We started walking back, probably for a good 30 minutes until both of us were doubting what we had seen on the GPS. It turned out that there was an older campsite on the map in the GPS. We realized that once we took up the paper map and crossed checked. So we started walking back, into the valley again, walking the same path for the third time this day. During this time we also started seeing some lone bisons along the trail. Some of them were hanging out in the forest. I had up until now only viewed bison as creatures that love hanging out in large open spaces, but apparently that is not true. So now we had to be on our toes about bison in the forest too. We crossed small creeks and stepped over large boulders and logs. In some areas the logs looked like pickup sticks, very large pickup sticks.

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““A few minutes later W whispers
-There it is, there’s the bear “”

We finally arrived and were sitting down at our home for the night. It was beautiful. The mountains in front of us and two hillsides on either side of us. We were also right next to the Lamar River which was raging at this time. i looked at my watch, it was approaching 5pm. I told W that it would have been nice to know on what hillside the other campers saw the bear, on the hillside by us or on the other side of Lamar River. Not more than a few minutes later W whispers - There it is, there’s the bear.

I immediately flew up with one hand on the bear spray and whispering in a frantic tone WHERE WHERE?? But then I realized that the bear actually was pretty far away from us. And she, or he, must have known about our presence. The bear continued along the hillside and you could see that it was on a mission. It payed zero interest to us, as it continued forward before it disappeared behind a hill.

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After the bear viewing it was finally time for some food. W, as always, cooks the food and I took care of the fire, and water situation. If there is one good thing that I learned during my time studying in Alaska it is to find springs. Spring water you don’t need to filter, it is mostly clean and ice cold. And since we were on a hillside I quickly found some very active springs. We were watching the mountains and talking about this and that before we started to pack up the food and realized we’d forgotten the rope.When you are backcountry camping in Yellowstone (and many other National Parks in the US, especially in the Rocky Mountains) you have to hang your food up, to prevent bears from getting it. We decided to use one of the tent strings that was strong enough for the food. But we had wanted to hang our packs and clothes up too. Instead we placed them by the food storage area. We changed clothes and put the clothes we used for cooking into the backpacks and then we also put a plastic bag on top of the backapacks. We’d already got our tent set up far away from the food storage area.

Before we knew it we were watching the sunset in the mountains and soon after we went to bed. But what a night. We kept hearing noises all night, it was hard to tease apart if it was the river we heard, the trees or worse a bison or a bear walking around. At one point we herd a loud thump. I layed dead still and whispered did you hear that. W was also wide awake, and he had heard it too. W was convinced that a bear had gotten to our food, I kept thinking that a bison was walking around our campsite and was heading towards our tent. And that is how most of the night continued. At some point we must have fallen asleep completely though because in the morning we woke up by male elk calling for a couple of females. After some well needed coffee and breakfast we were finally ready to hit the trail again.

We packed up and started the hike back. Both of us were already feeling a bit stressed ove the first part of the hike which included all these large herds of bison. We met some new campers who were heading out to the campsite we just left. We told them about the bear and also asked them about the bison. They told us there were many bison covering the whole trail and made it hard to pass. Great. So once we approached that area we started to walk up up and up the hill. In this way we would be able to see where the bison were and maneuver in that way. We trecked through the sage brush that tore our legs up, cause we were of course wearing shorts. Once up the hill we didn’t see a single bison down below.

Do you want to read more posts about Yellowstone National Park? Click the link below:

Adventures in Yellowstone National Park

The park is maybe mostly known for its thermal hot springs like the Old Faithful. The hot springs create a specific microhabitat that allows certain species to thrive, but if you go up in elevation you will find the fragile alpine flora and a completely different microhabitat. Yellowstone is part of the Rocky Mountains, which extends all the way up through Canada. The park is one of the oldest National Parks in the US, and became the nations first National Park in 1872. Within the park you will find the Washburn Range and the Red Mountains Range. The northwest corner is covered by the Gallatin Range which starts north of the park, around Bozeman, MT. In the northeast corner you have the Absaroka Range that follows the Montana-Wyoming border and make up the eastern border of the park.