where the pavement ends.
words by sean hamilton
photos by ben rayner
there’s something perennial about runners from cities making that pilgrimage.
Heading out to where the pavement ends and water or woods begin. For New Yorkers, it’s “going upstate.” In Toronto, it’s “cottage country.” Out west, “heading to the hills.” That impulse to escape city zip codes for growing silence and space? It’s archetypal.
On a model summer day in July in New York City, the humidity is on par with the temperature by sunrise. So, Park, Aisha, Chloe, Zach and Matt made their way out of Brooklyn around 6 a.m., pointing north into Lower Hudson’s hush.
Forty minutes past the city, the group fueled up at a modest market on the cusp of Nyack and the Palisades. Nyack’s roots go deep. Once a wharf town on the Hudson, a stop on the old Northern Branch rail line that stretched to Jersey City.
today, there’s a quiet reverence in pulling off at a small roadside spot where local growers sell apples and cyclists pick up coffee.
From there, it was on to Nyack Beach State Park, 61 acres tucked at the foot of Hook Mountain, where cliffs rise 700 feet above the Hudson. The park joins a historic Palisades corridor protected since 1911, so runners and hikers can trace the same ridgeline once quarried relentlessly a century ago. There, on the waterfront mile path, the group wove along the river, viewing hawks nesting above and water stretching flat beyond.
Then came the forested offshoots: trails that split into lush shade, light dappled through leaves onto moss-covered rock.
a rhythm was found on both gravel beach paths and soil shaded by old growth, dry enough to push, soft enough to hear the natural world all around.
On the return, the path veered off the main course, trickling down to the water’s cusp, skipping stones at the Hudson’s edge, feeling the current pull across their fingers. That body of water feeds south, through New York Harbor and into the Atlantic. After a few skips, they all joined in, dipping, steaming, skin-tight from the chill, then running back through the forest, pacing faster toward the lot.
On the way home: a stop in Nyack’s Main Street for Boxer Donut & Espresso Bar, perched on Franklin Street. A nod to small-town charm just outside the city.
Days like this remind us that nature isn’t just geography.
it’s ritual, release, and the older tradition of finding sanctuary just beyond the city limits.
For as long as there have been metropolises, there has been the allure to momentarily leave them. To step out of the noise and remember what quiet sounds like. To trade crowded streets for river bends, and skyscrapers for cliffs that have stood longer than any building ever will.
these escapes matter.
not because they take us far, but because they take us closer.
To ourselves, to each other, to the simple rhythms that don’t require Wi-Fi or deadlines. Forty minutes north of Brooklyn, and the pace shifts. The air feels wider. The world feels bigger. It serves as a reminder.
sanctuary doesn't have to be distant or imagined.
featured on the trip -