The Catskill Escarpment, often referred to locally as just the Escarpment or the Great Wall of Manitou, and known as the Catskill Front to geologists, is the range forming the northeastern corner of the Catskill Mountains in Greene and Ulster counties in the U.S. state of New York. It rises very abruptly from the Hudson Valley to summits above in elevation, including three of the Catskill High Peaks, with almost no foothills. The plateau to the south and west averages above sea level.
The Escarpment was the first area of the Catskills to attract the interest of European settlers. Botanist John Bartram wrote a widely read account of an expedition there prior to independence, and a century later the North-South Lake area he had visited became home to a number of exclusive resorts, including the Catskill Mountain House. Views of it inspired Thomas Cole and other painters of the Hudson River School, the first art movement in the United States. Today much of it is New York State Forest Preserve within the Catskill Park, and a popular place for hiking, camping and other outdoor recreation.
Geography The Catskill Escarpment begins in the south at Overlook Mountain, just north of Woodstock. The graded trail to the summit and the 360-degree unobstructed view from the fire tower is a popular destination. The next mountain in the chain, directly to the north-northeast, is Plattekill Mountain, at dwarfed by its western neighbor, Indian Head Mountain, eastern end of the Devil's Path. To the north of Plattekill the ridge is broken by deep and narrow Platte Clove, the first of three breaks in the Escarpment. Just north of it the range crosses the Greene County line.. This definition of the Escarpment extends further to the northwest than that commonly used.
It rises again quickly to a high area around Kaaterskill High Peak, the easternmost Catskill High Peak and the first of three along the Escarpment. North of it the Escarpment is again breached by Kaaterskill Clove, the largest of its three breaks. It carries NY 23A through the Escarpment to the towns of Haines Falls, Tannersville and Hunter. Along its northern side is Kaaterskill Falls, one of the Catskills' oldest tourist attractions.
Above Kaaterskill Clove rises South Mountain, after which the ridge levels to North-South Lake, the former locale of the Catskill Mountain House and other resorts of the late 19th century. Today it is a busy public campground. North of it the ridge rises again to North Mountain, with the open views from North Point to its south one of the Catskills' most popular hikes.
Beyond North Point the Escarpment turns to the northwest. The land drops off slightly, then rises once again to Stoppel Point, in elevation. Then the Escarpment is broken once again by Dutcher or East Kill Notch, traversed only by an old road now used as a hiking trail. Another sharp rise leads up again to a ridge almost as high as Stoppel Point known unofficially as Arizona due to its dryness.
North of it rises Blackhead Mountain, the easternmost peak of the Blackhead Range and fifth highest in the Catskills overall. Its summit is the highest point along the Escarpment, visible with its neighbors from as far north as Albany. After its steep northern slope the range curves more sharply to the west. Minor peaks Burnt Knob and Acra Point form the northern wall of Big Hollow along with Windham High Peak, the last of the three High Peaks along the Escarpment and the mountain traditionally considered its northern end, as the lesser ranges to its west divide and do not rise as drastically as the Escarpment itself does from the nearby land.
Hydrologically, the entire Escarpment is within the Hudson River's drainage basin. To the east, Plattekill and Kaaterskill creeks drain the two cloves that share their names, and runoff from the ridge feeds Catskill Creek and other smaller tributaries of the Hudson in that area. To the west, with the exception of Kaaterskill High Peak, runoff feeds the headwaters and upper tributaries of Schoharie Creek, which rises at the height of land between Plattekill and Indian Head mountains. This makes them part of New York City's water supply due to the creek's impoundment at Schoharie Reservoir. Beyond there the Schoharie drains into the Mohawk and then back into the Hudson at Cohoes.
The Escarpment is considered the only place in the Catskills where the region's boundary is distinct and unambiguous. In other directions the slow descent of the mountains into the hills of the Allegheny Plateau leads to arbitrary delineations of the range's extent.
Due to its prominence, the Escarpment can be seen from a long distance around. It is a constant sight from not only the New York State Thruway in Greene County and the river but the Taconic State Parkway across the river and the mountains of western Connecticut and Massachusetts. From the Escarpment it is possible to see all those areas, plus Vermont, on a clear day. An overlook along Route 23 as it climbs the northern Escarpment is called Five State Lookout since New Hampshire's White Mountains are also visible.
Along the lower slopes, it forms part of the border between Ulster and Greene counties at its southern end. Within Greene County, it separates the towns of Catskill, Cairo and Durham on the lowland side from Hunter, Jewett and Windham in the mountains. The Catskill Park Blue Line also follows an irregular path along old property lines along its slopes from its southern end to the Route 23 junction, the northernmost point in the park.
Natural history
The Escarpment owes its formation to three phases in different geological epochs. Two different processes shaped the range into what it is today.
Its limestone bedrock began forming 400 mya, during the Silurian period, when the Catskill region was a river delta and the shallow sea it drained into. The river carried eroded material from the Taconic Mountains to the northeast, then reaching as high as over present-day sea level. Later, during the Acadian orogeny, the sea became the deeper Appalachian Basin, and the sand and clay from the newer mountains became the shale and sandstone found throughout the Catskills today.Titus, 49–50.
Eventually the sea floor itself began to drain and uplift. The area of today's Escarpment and northeastern Catskills had been the river's distributaries and had the thickest layer of Devonian sediments, leading it to uplift as a whole and become a plateau rather than fracturing into mountains. Gradually, the upper levels of the plateau began to erode and create stream basins, eventually becoming today's mountains and valleys
The Escarpment of that time was more gradually sloped than it is now, with much loose rock from its uplift. Sometime between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago, the Illinoian glaciation swept through the region. This had two impacts on the Escarpment. Not only did it scour and steepen its slopes, leaving the many bare cliffs found today, it carved out both Platte and Kaaterskill cloves from the narrower, shorter and shallower valleys of smaller streams.Titus, 132. In the latter, the gouge in the Escarpment was so deep it resulted in stream capture, as the outflow streams from North-South Lake, the headwaters of what would eventually be named Schoharie Creek instead flowed down into the new gorge. This both created Kaaterskill Falls, one of the Catskills' early tourist attractions, and relocated the source of the Schoharie to its present location.Titus, 136.
As the Escarpment began to revegetate in the wake of the retreat of the Wisconsin glaciation, its forests remained exposed to weather due to their location. Lightning in particular caused many forest fires. Catskill forest historian Michael Kudish believes that the southern Escarpment "has been burned over many times, perhaps hundreds of times, during the last several thousand years".Kudish, 134.
Human history
The history of the Escarpment is, in its early stages, the history of the Catskills, as the two were one and the same until modern surveying and science broadened the definition of the region in the late 19th century. No longer home to the Catskills' highest peak, the Escarpment became just the most visible of the Catskill ranges.
Native Americans and colonial era
The Munsee and Mahican tribes of Native Americans indigenous to the Hudson Valley did not live in the mountains, but settled heavily in the valley below.Kudish, 47-48. They went up the Escarpment only to hunt or start fires to nurture hunting grounds and provide defensive barriers against other tribes, or to follow trails to other communities on the far side of the mountains. While nothing has been recorded from the early years of contact with European settlers of what role the mountains above them played in their religious beliefs, it is very likely that they did, given their animistic traditions.Evers, 9–10. "The lower slopes of the outer Catskills were hunting grounds and not year-round residences through a thousand years and more of Indian life ... The Indian's physical connection with the Catskills was never great, yet the mountains loomed large in Indian life ... We have a right to assume that [Indian religious beliefs about the mountains] existed. Indians were animists."
In 1609 Henry Hudson's Half Moon sailed up the river later named for him in search of a route to China. Its sailors became the first Europeans to see the Escarpment, and thus the Catskills.Evers, 10. "Robert Juet, who was first mate of the Half Moon when it sailed up the Hudson in 1609, had the first word. 'At night', he wrote, 'we came to other Mountaines which lie from the Rivers side.' ... Juet's mountains were the Catskills. No one would explore them for a century, until Johannes Hardenbergh secured the 2 million-acre (810,000 ha) land grant that bore his name from colonial governor Lord Cornbury in 1708, a patent later affirmed by his cousin, Queen Anne. The language of the document specified that its northeastern corner was at a lake above the Escarpment believed to be the source of Kaaterskill Creek, later North-South Lake.Evers, 74–75. "...It was to make sure that the Kaaterskill and Kaaterskill Clove were included in his grant that Hardenbergh and Company gave as their northeast corner 'ye head of a certain small river commonly known by ye name of Cartwright's Kill' ... By these words Hardenbergh and Company established as their corner the point at which the Kaaterskill emerges from the more southern of the two lakes, the one known today as South Lake." The murky circumstances of the patent, likely involving official corruption,Evers, 36–39. compounded by litigation from a competing group of claimantsEvers, 49. "For more than fifteen years the lawsuit against Hardenberg and Company raged and languished by turns." and interference with the crews attempting to survey the propertyEvers, 59-64. limited efforts to explore or settle the Escarpment, much less the whole region.
That began to change in 1741 when early American naturalist John Bartram climbed up to a "shady vale" around North-South Lake, where he collected samples of the resin of the "Balm of Gilead" tree (balsam fir) to send to his English patron, Peter Collinson. He returned the next year for more.Evers, 79-80. Collinson regularly prevailed on Bartram over the next several years to return for some seeds of the tree, which the former hoped to grow in England, and in 1753 he did, accompanied by a guide and his son William. Despite being seriously ill, he returned to South Lake. He was unable to harvest any seeds, but in the process became the first person to record a visit to Kaaterskill Falls. His account, "To ye Cats Kill Mountains with Billy", illustrated by the boy, was the first scientific report on the Catskills. It listed most of the flora of the area and speculated on how the mountains might have been formed.Evers, 88–96.
Independence and 19th century