USA Vacations

New York Vacations

Adirondack Park

Albany

Appalachian Trail

Binghampton

Buffalo

Catskill Park

Ellis Island

Ithaca

Lake Placid

Long Island

Montauk Point State Park

Mount Vernon

New York City

Niagara Falls

Rochester

Saratoga

Schenectady

Ski Resorts

Syracuse

The Hamptons

Thousand Islands Region

Troy

Utica

Yonkers

Catskill Park Vacations, Experiential Tours and Travel Packages

View to central Catskills from Twin Mountain

The Catskill Park is in the Catskill Mountains in New York in the United States. It consists of 700,000 acres (2,800 km²) of land inside a Blue Line in four counties: Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, and Ulster. As of 2005 there are 287,514 acres (1,150 km²), or 41 percent of the land within, owned by the state as part of the Forest Preserve; it is managed by the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Another 5% is owned by New York City to protect four of the city’s reservoirs in the region that lie partially within the park and their respective watersheds.

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 300 miles (480 km) 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 acquired within cannot be sold or otherwise transferred (absent amending the constitution, which has been done on several occasions), may not be used for logging and must remain "forever wild."

Being the smaller and less well-known of New York’s two Forest Preserves, residents of and advocates for the Park often feel that it gets neglected by the state government in Albany. A popular saying in the region is that the DEC Commissioner's chair faces north (i.e., toward the Adirondacks). In recent years DEC has been working to change that. Despite that perception, however, some key innovations in how New York manages its Forest Preserve have come from the Catskills.

This remains unresolved at the moment. DEC missed its target date of 2004, to coincide with the park's centennial celebrations, for the release of the final version.

The Catskill Park Management

Under the Master Plan, all state land in the Catskills is organized into contiguous management units falling under one of four categories: Wilderness, Wild Forest, Intensive Use or Administrative.

The Catskill Park Wilderness

The pending Master Plan update would add much more land to this classification, the most restrictive, although slightly less so than those on federal lands.

New York's wilderness areas must be composed of 10,000 acres (40 km²) of contiguous land, twice the federal standard. Land is to be left as "untrammeled by man" and as close to its natural state as possible, offering outstanding opportunities for solitude. No artificially-powerered devices are permitted to be used in wilderness areas — chainsaws may only be used to clear trails with express written authorization from the DEC commissioner, and vehicle usage is forbidden in all save dire emergency circumstances. Most trails are single-track, avoiding old logging roads except at the lowest elevations. Designated campsites are kept to a minimum.

The goal of wilderness is to minimize human impact on the land as much as possible. Passive recreation such as hiking, hunting and birding is the main use of these lands.

Under the current Master Plan, many of the remaining tracts of first-growth forest, and many of the higher summits, are within wilderness areas.

Currently there are four: the Slide Mountain and Big Indian-Beaverkill wildernesses in Ulster County, and the Indian Head and West Kill wildernesses in Greene County. The updated Master Plan would add more wilderness in Greene County, most notably the Blackhead Range and Escarpment.

It has also been informal DEC policy to treat all lands in its possession in the Catskill Park above 3,100 feet (944 m) in elevation as de facto wilderness. The proposed update would not only make that rule official, it would extend it as much as possible to all land 2,700 feet (823 m) and higher.

The Catskill Park Wild Forest

While still covered by the strictures of Article 14, Wild Forest areas are often lower in elevation and contain forest that has been more recently and historically disturbed, sometimes having been logged just prior to state acquisition. It is thus not as easy to avoid evidence of human impact as it is in wilderness, and consequently a higher impact is tolerated.

In Wild Forest areas, vehicles may be used as DEC designates. This has made them popular places for snowmobilers, cross-country skiers, and (in one area) mountain bikers. (all-terrain-vehicles remain banned, however). Hunters also find them desirable as the second- and third-growth forests in the area are more likely to contain deer and the carcass of the taken animal can be driven out of the woods instead of being walked out.

Some Wild Forest units exist with rather forced boundaries to allow for a use otherwise incompatible with a surrounding wilderness, such as the Overlook Mountain Wild Forest a corridor through the Indian Head Wilderness Area which contains the popular and still driveable dirt road to the fire tower atop the summit near Woodstock. A similar solution has been proposed under the new Master Plan to continue to allow more active use of the Hunter Mountain fire tower and the road leading up to it.

The Halcott Mountain Wild Forest is so designated only because it lacks enough contiguous area to qualify as wilderness.

Current Wild Forest areas besides those mentioned above include the Long Pond-Willowemoc in Sullivan County; the Touch-Me-Not, Cherry Ridge-Campbell Mountain and Dry Brook Ridge in Delaware County; the Balsam Lake,Bluestone, Lundy, Peekamoose Valley and Phoenicia-Mt. Tremper, Shandaken and Sundown in Ulster and the Blackhead, Colgate Lake, Hunter Mountain, Kaaterskill, North Point and Windham High Peak Wild Forests.

In addition to redesignating a good portion of those areas as wilderness, the proposed update would consolidate some into larger units (all the Delaware County properties, for instance).

The Catskill Park Intensive Use

Most of these areas save one, Belleayre Mountain Ski Center, are state campgrounds, meant for heavier, higher-impact use.

The campgrounds are generally far smaller units, with many sites and basic facilities available, sometimes abutting wilderness and wild forest areas, and paved roads offering easy vehicle access. North-South Lake, however, is a vast area (New York's largest public campground) including not only many sites but swimming areas at both lakes, the former Catskill Mountain House site at Pine Orchard and many of the historic trails around it.

Similarly, Belleayre's property extends well east of its ski trails and includes some of the hiking trails in the region as well.

Other campgrounds include Beaverkill, Devil's Tombstone, Kenneth L. Wilson, Mongaup Pond and Woodland Valley.

There are at least two Day Use Areas, within the park, one near Belleayre and the other at the Catskill Interpretive Center site. These are small tracts with picnic tables and sites where camping is forbidden, much as one would find in a small local park.

www.wikipedia.com

Expert Catskill Park Vacation Planners

Book your Catskill Park Vacation or Tour Here