Catskill Park
The Catskill Park is the designation for a large area of eastern New York centered on the Catskill Mountains. Like Adirondack Park to the north, the area is unusual in the United States because, while the entire area is considered "parkland", as of 2005 about 54 percent of the land within the boundary consists of privately owned inholdings. Another 5 percent is owned by New York City to protect four of the city's reservoirs that either lie partially within the park or have watersheds encompassing parts of the park. The remaining 41 percent, or, is publicly owned by the state as part of the Forest Preserve.
Like Adirondack Park, the total acreage is defined by a Blue Line which encompasses all or part of four counties: Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, and Ulster, amounting to about.
There are bobcats, minks and fishers in the preserve, and coyotes are often heard. There are some 400 black bears living in the region. The state operates numerous campgrounds and there are over of multi-use trails. Hunting is permitted, in season, in much of the park. It has approximately 50,000 permanent residents, bolstered somewhat by second-home ownership on weekends and in the summer, and attracts about half a million visitors every year.
The park is governed by Article 14 of the state constitution, which stipulates that all land owned or acquired by the state within cannot be sold or otherwise transferred, may not be used for logging and must remain "forever wild."
Location
The park boundary stretches from near the Hudson River just west of the city of Kingston in the east to the East Branch of the Delaware River near Hancock at its westernmost. Its northern extreme is at Windham and its southernmost point is between the hamlet of Napanoch and Rondout Reservoir.In contrast to the Adirondack Park, the Catskill Park does not include all the land generally considered to be part of the Catskill Range. However, all but two of the 35 Catskill High Peaks are inside the Blue Line.
History
The area was used by the Mahican and Esopus Native Americans primarily for hunting. Later it was heavily exploited by the Dutch, English, Irish, and Germans; local industry included logging, bluestone quarrying, leather tanning, wintergreen and blueberry harvesting, trapping, fishing, and later, tourism. The old-growth hemlock and northern hardwood forests on the steep mountainsides and remote valleys were sufficiently inaccessible that they survived the logging, tanbarking and charcoal industries of the 18th and 19th centuries.Inhabitants of the region often tell visitors the Park was created to protect New York City's water resources. However, the park itself was created 30 years before the first reservoir was built, before the city had started looking north to fulfill its growing water needs.
In 1885, as the state legislature was considering the bill that created the Adirondack Park, Ulster County was trying to get out of paying delinquent property taxes that, under the law passed over its objections six years earlier, it owed the state. The lands, mostly around Slide Mountain had come into the county's possession when loggers looking to extract tannin for use in tanning leather from the bark of the many Eastern hemlocks growing there at the time, took the trees, made their money and then left the region without paying taxes.
The lands left behind were, if still good quality, often snapped up for use as private hunting and fishing clubs for wealthy businessmen from outside the region, whose determined enforcement of trespassing and poaching laws stirred resentment among the local populace long accustomed to the food provided by those lands; the lesser quality lands were wasted, producing nothing except destructive fires.
A team of forest experts, led by Harvard professor Charles Sprague Sargent, had visited the region when the original Forest Preserve bill was being studied and recommended against including the Catskills in its protections, as its forests "guard only streams of local influence," unlike the Adirondacks, whose preservation was motivated by a desire on the part of the state's businessmen to prevent the Erie Canal from silting up and thus becoming unnavigable.
At the same time Ulster had lost a lawsuit against the state and had been ordered to pay the back taxes. Two Assemblymen from the county who had been elected because of their firm stands against paying the taxes, lobbied their fellow legislators heavily to pass a second version of the Forest Preserve Act, one that not only forgave the county's tax debt in exchange for the lands at issue, but required that the state would henceforth pay whatever local property taxes were required on the land as if they were intended for commercial use. That provision was later applied to the Adirondacks as well; it remains in force today and makes the difference between survival and insolvency for many towns and other local governmental entities in both parks.
As the timber industry kept making determined efforts to undermine the bill, its original sponsors took the occasion of New York adopting a new constitution in 1894 to enshrine it in that document, with language that plugged all the loopholes that loggers and officials on the state's Forest Preserve Advisory Board had been using. Article 14 has survived several other major constitutional revisions.
Blue Line
The park's creation meant an increase in state resources focused on the region. First came fire protection, a move greatly welcomed by the local governments and one that was to make a long-lasting impact on the region, as fire towers were built on a number of summits and patrols were regularly made along railroad lines to catch cinder fires before they got too big.It also changed the way the region was seen by visitors. An era dominated by hotels such as the Catskill Mountain House at North-South Lake which catered to the well-to-do and socially prominent was passing its prime, and in its place outdoor recreationists were becoming interested in dry-fly fishing the trout streams, hunting and hiking the mountains.
In 1892, the state spent $250 to build a trail up Slide Mountain, which had only recently been proven by Arnold Henry Guyot to be the range's highest peak and was thus attracting a great deal of tourist interest. It would be the first hiking trail built at public expense in New York's Forest Preserve, and is still the most heavily used route up the mountain today.
That year had also seen the delineation of the Adirondack Park to the north, as the state sought to focus its land-acquisition efforts, by designating particular towns for inclusion, drawing a line in blue ink around them, a custom that continues on all official state maps today.
Twelve years later, in 1904, it was decided to do the same with the Catskills. But this Blue Line used not existing municipal boundaries but the old Hardenbergh Patent survey lots, watercourses and railroad rights-of-way, creating a finer, more focused park that gave some of the towns on its periphery areas where they could be assured land would not be subject to Article 14. A similar revision would follow suit in the Adirondacks, and future expansions of both parks would follow this model.
In 1912 the law was again amended to say that the Catskill Park consisted of all lands within the Blue Line, not just those owned by the state.
Image:Ashokan Reservoir from Wittenberg.jpg|thumb|left|300px|The Ashokan Reservoir as seen from Wittenberg Mountain.
Construction of the reservoirs
Shortly afterwards, a new section was added to Article 14 to allow the construction of reservoirs on up to three percent of the total land in each park. The City of Greater New York, having merged in 1898, began looking for new water resources the very next year, and its existing system of reservoirs in the city and Westchester County would not be able to keep up with demand for much longer. The city at first turned to land in Rockland County now part of Harriman State Park, but found a group of speculators called the Ramapo Water Company had beaten them to the water rights. It was thus essential to go even further north, and only in the Catskill Park could it find the land to condemn around Esopus Creek and create the Ashokan Reservoir.In 1905 the state approved the creation of water supply commissions at various local governmental levels, as well as one at the state level to resolve disputes, like the one rapidly brewing between the city and the Catskill communities over its plan to condemn land for the construction of two reservoirs, Ashokan and what is now Schoharie Reservoir, plus the Shandaken Tunnel to connect the two.
The city prevailed, and construction of Ashokan began the next year, requiring the removal of several small hamlets and many residents in the process. The Esopus was dammed in 1913 and started sending water to the city two years later. Land claims continued to be resolved in area courts until 1940. It was the first of several city reservoirs in and around the park.
Mid-20th century
For the next 50 years, within the Blue Line, the state continued to acquire land. As time and money permitted, the state developed trails, lean-tos and towers in a piecemeal manner.Bond issues approved by voters in 1916 and 1924 for a total of $12.5 million led ultimately to the addition of to the state's holdings. The economic collapse of the late 1920s and 1930s made a lot of desirable land available at low prices, and with the notably aggressive Robert Moses in charge of the state parks, valuable properties like the Devil's Path Range, the summit of Slide Mountain and Windham High Peak became part of the Forest Preserve.
Image:North-South Lake.jpg|300px|right|thumb|North-South Lake in the Catskill Forest Preserve
From 1926 to 1931 the state opened its first four public campgrounds within the park. New Deal programs during the Great Depression such as the Civilian Conservation Corps made labor available to build trails and replant forests. The state's Conservation Commission was able to compile the first of a series of "Catskill Trails" booklets.
However, the trails built by the state rapidly fell into disuse, Raymond H. Torrey would note by the end of the decade as what hikers there were tended to bypass the Catskills in favor of the Adirondacks and higher peaks in northern New England. Unlike those regions, no lasting organizations of hikers and other passive outdoor recreationists were ever formed around the Catskills. The New York - New Jersey Trail Conference now updates and maintains many of the trails in Catskill Park, including many around Slide Mountain.
The most important change during this time period was the amending of Article 14, in 1948 to allow for the construction of Belleayre Mountain Ski Center and thus encourage skiers to come to the Catskills, following the lead taken in the Adirondacks by the creation of Whiteface and Gore ski areas. It remains in operation and several other private ski areas such as Hunter Mountain and Windham Mountain have followed its lead.
The construction of the Interstate 87 section of the New York State Thruway up the Hudson Valley, and the upgrading of Route 17 from a two-lane road into a freeway, along much of the park's southwestern border greatly increased access to the Park during the 1950s and '60s, although the latter encountered fierce opposition from trout fishermen over some of the original bridges along the Beaver Kill, which would have destroyed some favored holes.
New York City built three more reservoirs partially within the Park: Neversink, Rondout and Pepacton.
In 1957, the Blue Line had expanded to its present configuration, taking in not only the lands almost to the Kingston city limit and Thruway at the east, but more of Sullivan and Delaware counties in the west. Trails and other recreational resources remained underused, however. In 1966 the Catskill Mountain 3500 Club, a peak bagging organization, was formally incorporated after having existed informally for several years - the first organization devoted to, among other things, speaking for the Catskill hiking community. Three years later, in 1969, the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development was founded.