The Long Path is a long-distance hiking trail beginning in New York City, at the West 175th Street subway station near the George Washington Bridge and ending at Altamont, New York, in the Albany area. While not yet a continuous trail, relying on road walks in some areas, it nevertheless takes in many of the popular hiking attractions west of the Hudson River, such as the New Jersey Palisades, Harriman State Park, the Shawangunk Ridge and the Catskill Mountains. It offers hikers a diversity of environments to pass through, from suburbia and sea-level salt marshes along the Hudson to wilderness and boreal forest on Catskill summits in elevation.
When conceived in the 1930s, it was to be the antithesis of a hiking trail, with neither a designated route nor blazes, simply a list of points of interest hikers could find their own routes to. However, increasing development after World War II in Orange and Rockland counties made that less workable, and it was revived in the 1960s as a standard trail. Work to extend the trail into the Adirondacks is currently underway.
History
Conception Vincent Joseph Schaefer, a scientist who worked in Schenectady for General Electric, began to imagine a "hiker's route" from New York City to the Adirondacks shortly after helping to found the Mohawk Valley Hiking Club in 1929. He was very clear on one thing: that it not be marked as a trail.
"Schaefer envisioned resourceful hikers making use of what they found along the way," say historians Guy and Laura Waterman — whether hikers' trails, back roads, abandoned wood roads, tow paths, creek beds, game trails, plus occasional bushwhacks where that appeared to offer the most interesting route." They quote him describing the Long Path as:
...[A] route that a person having good "woods" sense could use to move across a region using compass and "topo" map, and that in a meandering way would lead such persons to most of the interesting scenic vistas, rock formations, choice or unique vegetation, historical sites and similar items that a certain type of outdoors person enjoys. He wrote to an official at Harriman that: There would be no cutting or blazing, for this trail would be a truly wild walk that wouldn't erode the land or scar the solitude ... and each found site would be an adventure in orienteering.
Implementation He named his idea the Long Path after Walt Whitman's line about "the long brown path that leads wherever I choose" from his poem "Song of the Open Road". Since that was also where Raymond H. Torrey, the New York Post influential hiking columnist, had gotten the name for his column, it was a smart public relations choice. Torrey, who had done much to get the Appalachian Trail built, both physically and in print, in the New York metropolitan area the previous decade, announced the idea in a column in 1933. Another strong advocate in the early days was a transplanted Coloradan, W. W. Cady, who came to be identified with the Long Path almost as much as Schaefer.
He and Torrey, who devoted a series of columns to it the next year, scouted a "trail" from the city to the Catskills, while Schaefer and his brother did the same for the northern half. Several alternative endpoints were envisioned: the "History" chapter of the Guide to the Long Path places the end at Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondack High Peaks, but Torrey's column of August 21, 1934 places the terminus at the Adirondak Loj at Lake Clear of Heart (now called Heart Lake). The column further discusses possible extensions: a route over Wallface Mountain to join the Northville-Placid Trail by way of Henderson Lake and the Preston Ponds; a climb over Mount Van Hoevenberg and traverse of the Sentinel Range Wilderness Area to emerge at Jay, New York; and possible routes to the Canadian border, either to the Thousand Islands to the west or along the Chateaugay River to the north. Curiously, Schaefer's account in Torrey's column never mentions Whiteface as a possible ending point.
To Schaefer, once this route was scouted, it was finished, per his concept ... "(it) exist(s) as soon as the route had been field explored and then marked on a topo map, and so had become available to the person who appreciates such things." However, very few of these people could be counted among the hiking community of the day, to whom a trail was something to follow, and they had difficulty grasping the concept that the trail was open. Schaefer and hiking club pal Al Getz followed the Long Path from Schenectady to Edward's Hill in the southern Adirondacks, near Bakers Mills, New York, in the late 1930s, but as Schaefer and Cady became involved in the war effort and drifted away from the hiking community, the idea of the Long Path as originally conceived quickly became part of history.
Resurrection In 1960, Robert Jessen of the Ramapo Ramblers hiking club, and another city-based hiker, Michael Warren, revived the idea. Since Rockland and Orange counties had become more developed even then, they abandoned the original concept of an unmarked route and pushed instead a conventional trail, although it had to make use of road routes. Over the next two decades they were successful in establishing a continuous trail from the George Washington Bridge to the southern Catskills, helped by a major relocation of the trail up Peekamoose Mountain and its continuation over Peekamoose's neighbor, Table Mountain (which previously had no established trails), crossing the east branch of the Neversink River and enabling a link with the existing Catskill trail system.
The Catskill route was finally completed in 1987 when a trail was built connecting the snowmobile loop around Kaaterskill High Peak to Palenville. A further missing link, from the Sam's Point Preserve in the Shawangunks to VerKeerderkill Falls, was cut a decade later.
In 1991, Vince Schaefer prepared a guide to the Long Path north (LPN) section, consisting of a set of five sets of short descriptions of 80+ "Landmarks" with accompanying topographic map locations. The guide was crafted as a hiker's pocket-sized book, entitled Field Guide to the Landmarks of the Long Path of New York: Northern Section -- Gilboa to Whiteface Mt., prepared by Vincent J Schaefer 1931-1991 with the original route and philosophy.
Schaefer's son, James M. Schaefer, joined the Long Path North Hiking Club Trail Committee, sharing sets of letters, sketches and plans from his father's files to push the Long Path into the 21st century. With members of the club, a route was set, landmarks were located by Global Positioning System, and digital photos were established for 80-plus places that Schaefer reckoned to be worthy of attention.
On the ground, a low-volume road walk was located through Albany, Schenectady and Saratoga counties, crossing the Helderbergs and the Rotterdam Hills to the Mohawk River. The LPN connected to county and state parks whenever possible and had a goal of relocating sections "off-road". Across the Mohawk the Long Path coursed into the Glenville Hills, with a major off-road section atop Wolf Hollow.
As it reached the (southern) Adirondack Blue Line, just north of Lake Desolation, the Long Path took on a "Forever-Wild" character, becoming a bushwhack, a landmark-to-landmark trek through the southern and central park into the High Peaks, following log roads, existing trails, and low volume roads to eventually reach the top of Whiteface Mountain, with its climate observation tower — SUNY's "Schaefer Observatory" of 1980 Olympic fame — as the last cached location of the Long Path.
In summary, the Long Path has become a hybrid trail. A 70-year-old first: an ecologically sensitive "path" from high density urban centers, across the Eastern New York high country, to remote wilderness. The blazed of the LP are suitable for the traditional blazed-trail hiker, the low-volume road-walk affords the physically challenged with a way to appreciate semi-wild places accompanied by culturally, geologically and historic way-side landmarks. And for the woods savvy hiker, the bushwhacks through the last of the Long Path capture Vince Schaefer's original vision — a tramp across short distances using 'dead-reckoning, modern point-to-point "geocaching" and sheer map reading, orienteering skills'. 75 years after the thought, a "Long Brown Path" exists.
Expansion As the lower trail neared completion to the northern boundary of Catskill Park at Route 23 in Windham in 1985, H. Neil Zimmerman of the New York–New Jersey Trail Conference renewed interest in the Adirondack connection. The Long Path North Hiking Club was formed, and after some negotiations with area landowners of trail were opened in 1990. By the middle of the decade, it would extend north of its former terminus, to the Indian Ladder in John Boyd Thacher State Park. In the early 2000s, a further were opened and blazed to Route 146, and informal road blazes existed from there to the Mohawk and the Adirondack Park Blue Line.
Today
Perhaps reflecting its origins as a trail that wasn't really a trail, the Long Path in the early 21st century is a work in progress, continually evolving even in those places where it has long been a presence. Relocations continue to be made and new sections opened.
The central Catskills have seen the greatest activity. In 1999, trail crews completed work on a section starting at the Willow Trail near the summit of Mount Tremper near Phoenicia, descending down into the neighboring valley and then over "Edgewood Mountain" into Silver Hollow Notch, where it follows an old road down to Route 214. This section eliminated a lengthy road walk to Willow, albeit at the price of a road walk into Stony Clove Notch. However, this added Plateau Mountain to the trail route, and pending future approval from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and an amendment to the Unit Management Plan for the Indian Head Wilderness Area, a new section will be built to follow a ridge from Silver Hollow Notch to the Devil's Path on Plateau and eliminate that road walk.
Not long afterwards, the state purchased the former Lundy estate in the vicinity of Kerhonkson, straddling the Catskill Park Blue Line near the southern tip of the park. The new property, once occupied by an owner of Lundy's Restaurant, is to become a state forest outside the park and a new Wild Forest within it. It will also allow for the relocation of the Long Path off roads to follow the Vernooy Kill. The relocation would rejoin the present Long Path route at Vernooy Falls west of Riggsville in the Ulster County township of Rochester.
In late 2001, the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development allowed the construction of a new trail across its Platte Clove Preserve. It was added to the Long Path, and allowed for a rerouting of the route along existing trails to take in Indian Head Mountain and its views of the Hudson Valley, as well as eliminating a road walk that previously existed.
In 2007 the road walk on Route 214 was eliminated. Volunteers extended the Warner Creek Trail with a direct connection between Silver hollow Notch and Plateau Mountain. This created a section of trail between Phoenicia and Platte Clove without any road crossings.
To the south of Phoenicia, from the Burroughs Range Trail near Wittenberg Mountain, a new section of trail has been constructed for the Long Path. This route crosses Cross Mountain, Mount Pleasant and Romer Mountain. It comes out on Lane Street in Phoenicia. This section opened on Trails Day June 7, 2014. This has eliminated the more than road walk out of Woodland Valley State Campground.
All these changes have combined or will to make the of Long Path in the Catskill Park almost entirely off-road.
In the Shawangunks, new agreements with landowners and/or changes in ownership have also made eliminations of road walks possible.