Backpacking on the Shawangunk Ridge

One of our favorite things to do during the spring and summer months was to head up to the Shawangunk Ridge with a group of guys and go backpacking. I recently got back into touch via Facebook with a good friend from high school, Joe Filip. His nickname was "foto" because he almost always had a camera with him, and now some 30 years later he's sitting on boxes packed full of old pictures of us in the prime of our adolescence, many of these taken on backpacking trips like this one. We would take whiskey because it was lighter and easier to carry up the mountain, and mostly we just camped, hiked, and partied our asses off. I remember several times especially during our senior year, as the winter melted into spring on a Friday morning we would simply say "screw this" to school, grab our backpacks and head for the hills. Most often we would hike up and camp out at the top of the VerKeerderkill Falls.