The Catskills

Unlike other large expanses of wilderness area in America, the Catskills Park is not designated as a National Park or National Forest. On the whole this doesn’t matter, the area is still covered in a great network of well-maintained trails and trailhead parking lots, and is sufficiently protected to preserve vast areas of unspoilt beauty, but it doesn’t benefit from some of the things which come with ownership by the national parks or forest services. The main issue for visitors to the park, is that there are no visitor centres or rangers to whom you can go for information. Knowing that this would cause us problems when trying to find good places to hike and camp, we bought one of the excellent National Geographic maps of the area from an outdoor shop in Ithaca. The map, when combined with a look on the internet for good hikes in the Catskills, gave us a good idea of the areas with the best hiking and scenery.

There are huge areas of protected public land across the Catskills Park, but all of the five designated wilderness areas, and all of the tallest mountains are in the east side of the park. Unfortunately we were limited in how long we could spend in the area as we had to be in Albany in three days’ time so that Jamie could catch a flight back to Toronto, and so we drove straight through the west side of the Catskills area. We made our first stop at the Rider Hollow trailhead adjacent to the Big Indian Wilderness area, arriving late in the day after a slow but beautiful drive from Ithaca. The trailhead was not signposted at all from the main road, and it was only the marker on or map that told us that there was anything at the end of the narrow road that we crawled down from the tiny town of Hardenburgh. Grateful that we had a map to guide us, we parked in a tiny gravel parking lot nestled in a valley. After making some lunch we had only three hours of daylight left, but not wishing to waste our first day in the park, we started on a circular hike up one side of 1,100m high Balsam Mountain, and down the other.

It felt great to be back in the mountains again, giving our lungs a work-out, and despite the summit of Balsam Mountain being more than three times lower than many of the mountains that we had hiked up in Colorado, the view from the top was stunning, and the feeling of isolation just as strong. Thankfully the coloured trail markers were easy to find throughout our hike, as the sun was well below the horizon by the time we returned to the truck, and darkness was minutes away.

Tent camping is allowed throughout the Catskills wilderness areas, provided tents are pitched at least 150 feet from a trail, road or water source. However with no tents, and the temperatures at night getting close the freezing, we of course elected to sleep in Jim. The Catskills is not blessed with a network of logging or fire tracks like other expanses of wilderness in America, and so there were few places for us to park overnight where we would not be in the way. I suspect that sleeping overnight in a vehicle is not permitted at trailheads, but the parking lot we had stopped in was remote enough that we were not in any ones way, and so we spent our first night in the Catskills parked in the solitude of the Rider Hollow trailhead.
In the morning, we moved the truck to the Spruceton trailhead, located seven miles down a dead-end road, and giving access to a number of trails in the Hunter-West Kill Mountain Wilderness. The nearby Hunter Mountain is the tallest in the park at over 1,200m, and so when we arrived at the trailhead, the parking lot was already filled with cars. We managed to slot ourselves into the bushes without blocking anyone’s exit, and started on another circular hike, this time hiking up one side of Hunter Mountain, and down the other side, arriving back at the trailhead via Diamond Notch Falls.

The summit of Hunter Mountain is topped with a huge fire tower, presumably built to allow people to track wildfires in the forest. I’m not sure whether it still serves its original purpose, but it certainly gives hikers a chance to get a fantastic view of the area. The wind at the top of the tower is pretty fierce, and the experience of clinging to the flimsy garden shed, perched perilously at the top of the insubstantial structure, shaking violently, is enough to test anyone’s comfort at height.

We arrived back at the truck with a couple of hours of daylight left, and so we took the opportunity to move the truck to somewhere where we would less in the way. After a futile search for a decent free-camping opportunity, we settled on a paid for campsite in the north-east corner of the park, near the short hike that we had planned for the following day. We spent the night sitting around a fire, resting our legs after a long day of walking. On our final day in the Catskills we walked the short trail to the bottom of the Kaaterskill Falls. The height and context of the falls makes it an impressive sight, but I’ve no doubt that it would make more of a spectacle during spring, or after heavy rain.

With the need to be at Albany airport the following morning, we left the Catskills in the early afternoon, headed to New York States small state capital. We spent the afternoon exploring Albany’s centre, and after being moved on by a policewoman concerned at the interest that the truck was attracting, we spent the evening at a bowling alley a little way out of town. In the morning, we dropped Jamie at the airport, and hit the road again, headed for Boston.