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Welcome to Wild Earth Adventures!
On most Saturdays and Sundays throughout the year we offer one-day hiking trips -- in NY, NJ, CT, PA and MA. Day hikes make up the vast majority of the approximately 90 trips we offer each year, and they range in difficulty from easy to strenuous. Along with day trips, from May through October our schedule also features wilderness camping and backpacking trips, from 3 to 8 days, an average of once a month -- peaceful and memorable wilderness vacations (with a good measure of adventure available as well) that include extensive hiking options -- and which take us to some truly spectacular wilderness areas in New York (and some years, Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine). Plus we offer one-day cross country skiing and snowshoeing trips during the winter months when there’s enough snow for these activities.
Transportation from NYC is available on all of our outings for those who live in the New York City metropolitan area or who choose to meet us in NYC. Participants who live elsewhere -- and our trips attract substantial numbers of people from upstate New York, northern New Jersey, western & central Connecticut, eastern Pennsylvania, and other nearby states -- drive directly and meet us at our destinations. (We were headquartered in New York City until 1990, and since then have been been located in Rockland County and Putnam County. We're currently based in Suffern, New York, about 30 miles northwest of NYC). Beginners are welcome on the trips, as are experienced hikers and other outdoor/nature-enthusiasts, including wilderness campers, backpackers, cross country skiers, and snowshoers. Instruction and additional assistance are always available for those who need it.
If you’re interested in hiking near NYC or elsewhere in New York and nearby states (whether you live in New York City, New York’s Hudson Valley, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or elsewhere), and want to explore some of the region’s most scenic natural areas, under the expert guidance of “hiking guru” Charlie Cook -- and share a memorable time with a diverse, interesting, and often delightful group of people (who comprise the membership of our hiking club, and from whom we receive a steady stream of gratifyingly positive feedback) -- consider joining and reserving for some trips today. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions about our hiking trips and other outings, or about memberships and how to join, or to get on our e-mail list to receive regular trip Updates. Many thanks, and we hope to see you soon! Please email us with your questions or telephone us at (845)357-3380. Spring Calendar(You'll Find Our Trip Schedule Here)
Spring is here once again... it’s time to get ready for warmer temperatures, brighter skies, gorgeous new foliage, fragrant wildflowers, and hyperactive birdlife and wildlife -- which can fill our senses to overflowing when we enter the natural world. Is spring’s arrival a problem for you? (Doubtful!) Spring does tend to arrive in fits and starts, often with brief bouts of wintry weather interspersed, but sunny and mild days should be more and more common in the coming weeks, as the days get longer and the natural environment becomes an increasingly luxuriant and radiant green realm. It’s time to reconnect with nature as it comes into full bloom. Time to prepare to enjoy the myriad pleasures, fulfillments and adventures of the wilder places. Time to make this season a memorable one! Wild Earth Adventures was founded by Charlie Cook on July 10, 1980, and we’ve been offering hiking and walking trips, wilderness camping trips, backpacking trips, cross country ski trips, and other guided trips and tours almost continuously ever since. A sizable number of our members as well as non-members join us regularly on outings, but we also hear from many others who say they wish they could find more time for outdoor activities and enjoying nature in general -- which isn’t the easiest thing to accomplish when you’re leading a busy life. How are your priorities lining up these days? Can you imagine how devoting more of your weekends to exploring the splendid mountain scenery of the Northeast might enrich your life? You'll find much more about our hikes and other trips here. Why join a hiking club?
Hiking clubs, hiking groups, and other outdoor organizations are widespread in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and other northeastern states (and the rest of the country). The New York City metropolitan area alone is actually home to dozens of hiking clubs. Some are small and don’t have websites or advertise, and quite a few cater to or are associated with particular groups (some clubs in NYC, upstate NY, NJ & CT are affiliated with colleges, religious institutions, or ethnic organizations). But the majority of hiking clubs welcome anyone who wants to join and participate. Most hiking clubs are run by volunteers, and their hikes are guided by volunteers. Some clubs and hiking groups are extremely casual and loosely-run, while others are well-organized and offer an extensive hike schedule. Wild Earth Adventures is different in a number of ways from other hiking clubs, outdoor organizations, and outdoor businesses (you can read much more about us on this website) -- including the fact that all of our huge repertory of hikes and wilderness trips are led by a single person, well-known hiking and wilderness author/expert/guide Charlie Cook. However you found your way to our website, chances are you’re someone who loves hiking or who would like to become a hiker, and you’re probably looking for others to share it with. In our busy world it isn’t always easy to find friends or companions to hike with. If you become a member of Wild Earth Adventures you’ll be joining what people frequently tell us is one of the best and most interesting hiking clubs in this part of the country, with an endless array of hikes to choose from on weekends year-round, and hundreds of fellow-members to meet and share memorable times with while hiking in the most scenic natural areas of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and other northeastern states.
Walking and Hiking
Hiking IS walking, of course. But it couldn’t be more different from the everyday walking many of us do on sidewalks or city streets, or in shopping malls, or even along country roads. As we use it around here, the word "hiking" usually refers to walking at length in the natural world, far from the noise, buildings, highways, and other signs of civilization -- totally immersed in the beautiful and unspoiled world of wild nature. The hiking we do usually takes place on "unimproved" trails that often lead over rough ground. Hiking trails are frequently rocky and include exposed tree roots. Walking on such trails requires a degree of fitness and reasonably good balance (active people usually have no problem with this). Easy, soft-dirt hiking trails exist as well, and here in the mountainous northeastern U.S. they’re mainly found in valleys and low-elevation areas. We follow such trails on many of our easy hikes. But in local mountain ranges the majority of hiking trails are at least intermittently rough and rocky. While a hike can be short, most hiking, by definition, involves walking a minimum of a few miles. On our easy hikes, for example, the typical distance we walk during the day is 5-6 hilly miles. On our strenuous hikes, at the other extreme, we hike as much as 12-14 miles -- which often includes steep climbs, major elevation changes, and especially rugged trails. Almost anyone who enjoys walking is a good candidate for hiking. If you know someone who says they don’t like hiking, chances are they don’t like walking much either. Or they may have had a bad experience, perhaps being dragged too many miles by friends (anything can be spoiled by overdoing it). Or they may be allowing fears to color their choices (some people have been falsely led to believe, in part by our media and the movies, that the woods are full of dangers -- whereas experienced hikers know that civilization is a riskier place!). The human body couldn’t be better designed for walking or hiking, and this kind of physical activity couldn’t come more naturally to us. Most people find hiking or walking in nature to be a thoroughly pleasurable, fulfilling, and even exhilarating experience, one that’s capable of leaving us with a feeling of contentment and well-being that can last for days. If you’ve never hiked or spent much time walking in the woods, foregoing the flatness of sidewalks for the bumpiness of mountain trails may require a bit of adjusting. But the rewards come quickly: you’re soon immersed in wild and gorgeous mountain scenery of the sort you’ll never see from a sidewalk. As long as you’re sufficiently fit for the level of walking/hiking you’ll be doing, and don’t mind being stretched a little, and are up for a taste of adventure, it’s hard for you to go wrong.
Hiking Trips
Limits are likely to be imposed by your level of fitness, ambition, resources, and how much free time you have available. For some people, a hiking trip or hiking tour is an outing with a maximum timespan of a day -- to be followed by a relaxing evening at home. Millions of hikers limit themselves to day hikes: one-day hiking trips or hiking tours. And there’s no reason why "a day in the wild" can’t define the extent of your hiking ambition. It’s also very possible, while sticking to day hikes, to go hiking regularly and often. Some avid hikers hit the trails as frequently as once or twice (or more) each week. For others, longer hiking trips or extended hiking tours beckon. More than a few enthusiasts find that at some point, a single day no longer suffices. The idea of multiple days of hiking, camping, and wilderness exploration becomes irresistible. Overnight hiking trips that involve carrying everything in a full-size backpack so you’re completely self-sufficient -- and camping out at night, and typically hiking to other campsites along a trail -- are usually called backpacking trips. Overnight hiking trips that involve setting up a base camp in a wilderness area -- from which you can take day hikes -- are often called wilderness camping trips. And multi-day trips where hiking is your primary activity during the day, but you’re not camping out -- but rather staying in cabins, at lodges, country inns, bed and breakfasts, or other accommodations -- are commonly referred to as hiking vacations. In a sense, though, ALL hiking trips are hiking vacations -- since even a day hike is, in effect, a mini-vacation from the fray of everyday life. And like any vacation, a successful hiking trip is likely to leave you feeling refreshed, restored, and renewed. In the early years of Wild Earth Adventures (the 1980s) we regularly offered hiking vacations utilizing indoor accommodations, but since that time we’ve chosen to specialize in wilderness camping and backpacking trips for our overnight offerings. You’ll find our complete schedule of wilderness camping and backpacking trips and day hikes here. We’ll soon be adding a wilderness camping and backpacking page with extensive details about what such trips involve, including necessary gear.
Wilderness Camping and Backpacking Trips
Not everyone is interested in camping in the wild, but many of us love overnight trips that involve hiking and camping in beautiful or spectacular wilderness areas. To the general public, camping often means car camping at campgrounds, where you’re sharing a bit of the outdoors with dozens or even hundreds of other people. Wilderness camping, in contrast, usually means tenting in a truly wild and often remote area where you might see a few people in a day, and sometimes not a soul. Wilderness camping trips offer almost unlimited peace, quiet, and solitude -- among the scarcest of all commodities in today’s noisy, hectic, and stressful world. Camping in the wild can also offer great fun and camaraderie when shared with a group. We can really BE with others and enjoy their company, interruption-free. But it’s also possible to enjoy as much alone time as we want away from the group. A wilderness camping trip, by definition, is likely to entail a measure of adventure. We can never predict exactly what we’ll experience. Are there risks? No more than at home, many of us believe, if you go with a responsible, safety-minded group. A backpacking trip involves carrying everything you need in a full-size backpack and camping out for one or several nights. Backpacking can either mean hiking each day to a new campsite, or setting up a base camp for the duration of the trip. On all Wild Earth Adventures overnight trips we use backpacks to carry our gear and food into the wilderness areas where we’ll be camping, usually for 3-4 nights. On most trips we offer optional day hikes each day from our base camp. Each year we also offer a week-long backpacking trip that involves hiking through a large wilderness area and camping at a different spot each night. Most trips are in New York’s 6,000,000-acre Adirondack Park, which has more wilderness than any other park in the East. Feedback from most participants on our overnight trips tends to be strongly positive (it’s common to see words like “wonderful” and “memorable” used), and occasionally someone says they found a trip to be a truly life-changing experience. People usually return home in high spirits, feeling much more relaxed and contented than when they departed. Whether you’re experienced or not, does the idea of camping in the wild appeal to you? Will you be joining us on one or more trips this season?
Would You Like To Be On Our E-mail List?We send out weekly e-mail Updates that feature hiking news and commentary, photos from recent trips, announcements about any schedule changes, and short selections of nature writing and poetry. Many of our members and others tell us they like or love receiving them. To get on our list, e-mail us at WildEarthAdventures@gmail.com (and be assured that we will never sell, rent, or give your e-mail address to anyone).
Visit Our Facebook PageIf you're on Facebook, visit our Wild Earth Adventures Facebook page here, where you'll find photos from recent hikes, comments, and recommendations from members and others. If you like what we do, please consider clicking "Like" at the top. For several years we had a Facebook group page with around 1400 members, but Facebook discontinued many of the best features of group pages and started discouraging their use for large groups, so we recently took down that page and replaced it with a new "regular" Facebook page.
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We offer guided hiking and walking trips year-round -- as well as wilderness camping, backpacking, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing trips -- visiting some of the wildest and most beautiful parks and natural areas in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and other northeastern states. We have a huge repertory of locations and often unique New York hiking trip itineraries (and many scenic New Jersey and Connecticut destinations as well) that include little-known areas that are off-the-beaten-path, and we also hike on famous trails like the Appalachian Trail. On our hikes, walks, and other excursions we explore many of the region’s most spectacular mountain ranges, enjoying (and letting ourselves be inspired by) lovely scenery that includes splendid mountain vistas, pristine lakes, rushing streams, wild rivers, and roaring waterfalls.
Wild Earth Adventures is not only a business but also a long-standing (33-year-old) hiking club, currently with around 350 members, many of whom join us regularly (and enthusiastically) -- as often as weekly or biweekly -- on our day hikes and in other activities including backpacking, wilderness camping, and cross country skiing. We get a great (congenial, fun & interesting) group of people on the trips, both members and non-members. While you don’t have to be a member to participate, fees are lower and additional discounts are available to members. For more about memberships and fees, and how to join our hiking club and group, go to 
Our founder and director is Charles Cook -- a New York
State Licensed Guide, the author of 
Hiking and wilderness activities clubs provide a great way to connect with others who enjoy hiking and communing with nature (or who are interested in getting involved in hiking for the first time). Most hiking clubs offer a schedule of guided hikes in a variety of natural locations on trails that you might not always find on your own. Granted there’s a breed of experienced hiker who is independent-minded and adventurous, who enjoys discovering and exploring natural areas alone or with a friend. But hiking clubs meet the needs of many of us who have limited free time and may not be inclined to venture out by ourselves (because of safety considerations, and/or a preference for sharing with others the pleasures and fun of a nature-based activity like hiking). 
Beginners sometimes ask about the difference between
hiking and walking.
Hiking trips can last as little as a few hours, or as
long as you want or can imagine -- days, weeks, or
(for the most adventurous among us) even months.
Website: Susan Dansker Design © 1999-2013 Wild Earth Adventures. Phone: (845)357-3380 All rights reserved.