As the Catskill Mountain House Trail Guide illustrates, it is hard to overstate the importance of the vistas and sites surrounding the Kaaterskill Clove/North-South Lake area to America’s cultural scene of the nineteenth century. Not only did the scenery of the Mountain House trails inspire writers and poets like James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, and all of the major Hudson River School painters including Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, and Sanford Gifford, but the trails around North and South mountains, as Mr. Gildersleeve points out, also inspired America’s pioneer landscape designers—Andrew Jackson Downing, Calvert Vaux, and Frederic Law Olmsted—the architects of many of America’s city parks including Central Park in New York City.
Francis R. Kowsky, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Art History, Buffalo State College, and author of Country, Park and City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux wrote: “We owe Bob Gildersleeve a debt of gratitude for sharing with us his extensive knowledge of the Catskill Mountain House and for showing us how much we can still enjoy of the scenery that aroused the admiration of America’s Romantic writers, poets, painters, and landscape architects.” Robert Titus, Professor of Geology, Hartwick College, and author of The Catskills: A Geological Guide and The Catskills in the Ice Age adds his endorsement: “All the old trails of North and South mountains are still there, although many have suffered from age and are sometimes hard to follow. To hike any of these, and then to go off of them and enter the forest primeval itself, is indeed to journey into Middle Earth. … The area is in fact haunted, haunted by the people who came here and were affected by what they saw and what they experienced. … It is good that we have just the right guidebook, to once again wander the old trails and see the forests through nineteenth-century eyes, exactly as they should be seen.”
(Catskill Mountain House Trail Guide:In the Footsteps of the Hudson River School, paperback, 6 x 9, 224 pages, maps, illustrations, GPS points, isbn 1883789-45-1, $16.95, available from Black Dome Press, 1-800-513-9013, www.blackdomepress.com)
About the Author
Robert A. Gildersleeve moved to the Catskill Mountains in 1972 when he started teaching at Hunter–Tannersville Central School. Soon after moving to the Catskills, Mr. Gildersleeve became involved with the Mountain Top Historical Society, serving first as treasurer, then as vice president. He has worked on the historical society’s publications, including the book Kaaterskill: From the Catskill Mountain House to the Hudson River School, for which he wrote the introduction, and he has been a leader of the society’s hiking program since the mid-1970s. Now retired from teaching, Mr. Gildersleeve and his wife Maria live in Maplecrest, New York, near a system of hiking trails that interconnect with the historic trails that are the subject of his book.
