Nature at your doorstep – Thompson Pond Preserve
On my recent spring walk at Thompson Pond, at the foot of Stissing Mountain in Pine Plains, I was able to savor all of the elements and qualities that I associate with the word “preserve.” Primary among these perhaps is tranquility. As I rounded the marshy shoreline, past reflections of swamp maples broken up by...
Nature at your doorstep – Dickie Barre
What does one make of a hike that begins at a graveyard? Only that the human lives, and deaths, that transpired here cannot be disentangled from the life of the place we enjoy on a perfect spring day, with the forest awakening around us. The graveyard is a small family plot, surrounded by hand-laid stone...
Nature at your Doorstep – The Comeau Estate
Every town, large or small, needs green refuges within its boundaries, places to walk in any season that offer the possibility of solitude. Residents of New Paltz are fortunate in having a variety of refuges within walking or biking distance. Sometimes one needs, without embarking on a long car drive, to simply check in with...
Nature at your Doorstep – Vernooy Kill Falls
The trail to Vernooy Kill Falls leaves the road to enter a moist hemlock forest. As we traversed the rock-strewn, stream-braided terrain on a perfect spring day, we felt we were entering a world apart. And so we were, for we would cross two creeks and climb a moderate slope on an old jeep road...
Nature at your doorstep – Ferncliff Forest
Spring is a kind of kaleidoscope. Its array of delicate colors — lavender, white and pink in early forest flowers, red in the tops of swamp maples, and gold-green in budding trees — shifts with the turning earth. The eye wants to focus close, at the ground underfoot, then far, at the greening landscape and...
Nature at your Doorstep – Guyot Hill
To climb a crag like Bonticou is an exciting outdoor experience, but to view the same crag from a nearby hill offers its own, quieter rewards. I discovered the latter on my recent ascent of Guyot Hill. Jack Fagan says of Guyot Hill, in his superb Scenes and Walks in the Northern Shawangunks, that it...
Sesame Street’s stolen thunder now belongs to DJ Lance
Recently, I’ve had occasion to watch a little too much children’s television. And by “too much,” I mean I suddenly burst into song to describe household objects, letters of the alphabet and everyday occurrences. Partially, I blame Netflix whose instant streaming comes with an evil, evil default setting of playing episode, after episode, after episode...
Nature at your doorstep – Gateway and Foothills
On Sunday night I went out in the rain to witness a ritual far older than Easter, or even the pagan rites that were held at this time of year for untold millennia before the Christian era. I’m speaking of the annual migration of amphibians to the seasonal, or vernal, pools where they breed. Wood...
Nature at your doorstep – Spring Farm
To walk along one of the hedgerows of red cedar trees that separate the rolling meadows of Spring Farm is to experience the dominant landscape of our recent agricultural past. Yet the fields here are maintained not for pasture, hay or other crops, as they were in the 19th century, but rather to provide habitat...
Nature at your doorstep – Sam’s Point
To climb in elevation is equivalent, at least in terms of the plants, animals and even the weather one is likely to encounter, to going north. So we decided to visit Sam’s Point, at 2,255 feet in elevation the highest point in the northern Shawangunks, not to greet spring, which had teased us with signs...
Nature at your doorstep – D&H Canal Park
High Falls is a place of two trails, and both have stories to tell. The trail that starts at the DePuy Canal House tells of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, which transformed this region when it was built in 1825. Several of the locks that raised and lowered barges carrying coal from Pennsylvania and local...
Nature at your doorstep – The winter march
Though it’s natural, in late February and early March, to anticipate the coming of spring, yet I relish the bracing quality of such truly wintry days as remain to us. “Winter comes to make walking possible where there was no walking in summer. Not till winter can we take possession of the whole of our...