We decided that with the gorgeous weather and possible crowds, we would head to the far end of the Nears.

The new descent trail was clearly marked with orange tape. As the blue trail begins to descend, it veers up and to the right. Keep following that blue trail over the rock and it heads down again and the orange tape is on a tree on the left. There's not much of a foot trail (yet).

As you head west and down, there's a section where the tape heads north, while the gully heads southeast; looking into the gully, you can see the orange tape about 30' below. This caused some confusion as to where the trail was going or if there were multiple trails. I think if they don't want people cutting their own trails, there should be a more direct path through that section, it doesn't make much sense to wind up and around.

After that, there's a relatively steep scramble down; not uncommon in other areas like Rumney, but a little unexpected at the Gunks. It's not too long, but could get slick if it's wet.

I lost track of the time, it might have taken us as much as an hour to get to the Williams wall, but we stopped a few times to shed layers as the sun roasted us on the ridge, tie shoelaces, apply bandaids to some little ones, try to reason out why the marked trail was leading away from the gully, the bottleneck in the gully (that we created), so really I don't know how long it takes.