Now a small part of the Appalachian chain, the Catskills Mountains once were giant kings. The Appalachian Mountains were as jagged and grand as the Rocky Mountains or the Alps. They soared above what would become the North American continent. Across an enormous span of time constant erosion has dulled their sharp ridges. Wind, rain, glacial advance-and-retreat, have filed the rough crags and smoothed their peaks like hands over wet clay. Today’s mountains are not the dramatic summits found in the West, but are the rolling barrow mounds of royalty. The glaciers have melted away, leaving rushing creeks shouldered by dense forest and fertile farmland in their wake.
These streams, once a constant flow fed by glacial melt, are now beholden to whims of the seasons. They shrink and swell according to the patterns of precipitation. The Schoharie Creek in the northern Catskills is one day a stream and the next a torrent. In the increasingly violent storms of the last few years, it is at times a raging monster. In the bone-dry heat of early summer it is a stream again, more river rocks than river.
The bucolic Schoharie Valley— often referred to as the “breadbasket of the revolution,” for its agricultural output during the Revolutionary War— is subject to the moods of its fickle creek. In the lower valley, through the towns of Middleburgh, Schoharie and Fulton, the creek runs much as it always has. Surrounded by flat, fertile fields, it heads north out of the Catskills, destined to feed the mighty Hudson River. The Schoharie runs past several former villages of the First People in the valley, the Mohawks. It runs beneath the dramatic, geologic promontory of Vroman’s Nose, named for an early Dutch settler who must have been among the first European immigrants to stare out across the valley in wonder. If you follow the view back toward the origin of the creek, you would make your way through the town of Blenheim, where a massive hydroelectric dam looms. This is a New York state facility, one that helps power the region. Here we also find Mine Kill State Park, which overlooks the manmade lake behind the dam and is home to the magnificent 19th-century Lansing Manor.
On a day when the lake level is kept artificially high, it is possible to kayak from the boat launch at Mine Kill up the Schoharie. Immediately you are alone, just a speck on the surface of the water, passing between rocky bluffs beneath an audience of trees. Bald eagles circle above, noting your progress. In early autumn, the deciduous forest will have started to turn the color of flame, its flickering reflection blinking red and gold in the water. You might take time to explore the inlets along the way, the mouths of tributary streams that pour in from springs and hidden dales. It is easy to forget you are on a dammed creek, wandering back in time, until a modern reminder shocks you into the present—the tattered remains of a mattress hanging in the low branches of a pine, its stuffing pulled out long ago. It is hard to know exactly how old it is, but it is easy to guess how it came to rest there. The Schoharie can be a monster.
In 2011, Hurricane Irene was forecast to hit New York City. The city prepared. People taped Xs across their windowpanes, hoping to blunt the danger of shattering glass. The clouds roiled over the city but the storm never came. Instead, the hurricane passed north, up to the Catskill Mountains where between five and thirteen inches of rain fell within 24 hours.
The Schoharie Valley was dealt a massive blow. The river rose 17 feet, inundating many towns in the area, but none harder hit than Prattsville. Houses were crushed beneath the seething force of the torrent; at its peak the volume of water surpassed that of Niagara Falls. Some homes destroyed, pushed off their foundations, others gutted in the aftermath of Irene’s wrath. The memory of generations were swept downstream. It is hard not to think of that day when floating by that desiccated mattress.
Paddling further up the creek, you’d find the end of the Blenheim Dam’s reach. The Schoharie returns for a time to its natural wandering path, babbling between smooth boulders and tumbling over small cascades. If you pulled your kayak ashore and leapt upstream from rock to rock, you would pass a tranquil campground on the right and a handful of idyllic farms. At one point, in an undisclosed location, an old quarry makes for an ideal swimming hole, where the creek bed was mined for stone. Great hewn cubes still jut out along the banks, cut at right angles to the glassy surface of the stream.
Sitting on a large block of granite in high summer, hot beneath the sun, the senses are filled with the shrill pulse of unseen insects, the lurid green of massively fat oak trees and the pungent heat of water evaporating on rock. Water skeeters skip lightly over shallow pools. Swarms of tadpoles flee like sparks as a body plunges into the cold surface of the water, sending up a high crystalline plume, the heat of the day washed away in a nerve-searing, icy flash.
Above the swimming hole is the massive Gilboa Dam, built in the late 20’s to create the Schoharie Reservoir. Before setting off to kayak here, you must steam clean your boat and buy a permit from the Department of Environmental Protection. This is one of nineteen reservoirs created for the City of New York, 150 miles away, to ensure a steady fresh water supply. The brackish Hudson is a tidal river, and unsuitable for drinking. Since the dawn of the industrial age it has been too polluted to swim in, much less drink from. Whatever the short-term benefit of polluting that great river was, the cost was far too high. It will take generations to pay down.
To access the amount of fresh water a massive city needs, multiple valleys in the Catskills were requisitioned, dammed, and flooded. Small towns settled by the first European homesteaders and the remains of Mohawk villages were sacrificed for the thirsty city to the south. Beneath the massive Schoharie reservoir lies the ruins of the original town of Gilboa.
In an engineering feat that would have been unthinkable to the original people of New Netherland, these reservoirs came to sustain New York City, thanks to hundreds of miles of tunnels and canals. Few in the city appreciate this massive accomplishment when they turn on their taps. The nature of progress is that this resource was taken for granted soon after the water began flowing. This impossibly valuable resource of crisp, fresh water, filtered by layers of ancient stone, which is transported by gravity more than a hundred miles to the largest city in America, where it’s used to wash, to flush the toilet, and too often shunned in favor of bottled water.
New York City and State go through great trouble and expense to protect the reservoirs with independent agencies specifically created for the protection of this resource. It does not matter if the people of Gotham appreciate where it comes from or not, but they almost certainly would notice if the flow stopped or if the water became undrinkable. It’s especially egregious that just here, on the banks of the Schoharie Reservoir, the construction of an industrial scale waste processing factory is proposed—just a thousand feet from its feeder streams. The city and state agencies are mulling over the proposed site at this moment. Any potential harm to the nearby water supply is being balanced against a claim that this would be a “green” industrial facility, transforming garbage into a marketable product. Should there be an accident or oversight with the facility, once again, an invaluable resource would be spoiled. As always, the cost would be far too high.
Leaving the proposed site of this potentially hazardous factory, upstream we pass the Prattsville barrier dam, its bright liquid sheen sculpting an elegant curve over the weir. We pass acres of cornfields, sap-bushes and anglers casting lines for trout. We eventually reach the tiny town of Lexington. The empty hulks of two ancient hotels glare at each other, accusingly, from either side of an iron bridge. Blank-eyed and crumbling, wood carved ornamentation sloughing off by the year; they seem to blame each other for their current state. They are reminders of the boom and bust cycle of tourism in the Catskills, once the favorite summer refuge of city escapees, before the rise of plane travel. In the last two years, new generations of city visitors have returned to the Catskills, largely thanks to a rampant virus that feeds on proximity, so they have come to a place where close proximity is scarce. It would be easy to take this current cycle for granted. Easy to forget what makes this valley magnetic.
The walls of the upper Schoharie are now getting steeper as the shoulders of the old mountains regain a trace of their original stature. Here are the ski towns of Hunter and Tannersville. In winter, when the farms go dormant beneath a crush of cold and snow, these towns come alive, bustling and warm with visitors looking for a downhill thrill. Beyond the warm glow, winter frosts the sleeping trees a blinding white during the day, and a deep frozen blue beneath the stars. Winter is as cold and brutal in the Catskills as the summer is fertile and lush, and equally beautiful. Enormous frozen buttresses seem to hold up the cliff sides, massive ice falls that are the first and last great monuments to the longest season. During the steady pull between freeze and thaw, the melting snow trickles slowly and deep into the bedrock to feed the water table. The cycle of seepage and spring, of river and creek will begin in earnest after the thaw. The Schoharie will be fed a little and a lot, rising and falling with the seasons and the storms. Moreover, it will continue the work of the glaciers that carved its path, reducing the mountains a grain at a time with a patience that’s impossible to comprehend.
We are guests in this beautiful valley, temporary residents at the feet of sleeping giants, stewards of our own history here. No one knows our own tendency to squander resources essential to our survival better than we do—to make small changes that turn into big ones. Consequences that cannot be reversed in our lifetimes. We are here in service of the Schoharie and the other creeks of the Catskills, not the other way around. Please stand up to those who would threaten these resources, this rare place in a world, those that seek to extract what they can no matter the cost. Please stand with the Schoharie Valley and please, Don’t Trash the Catskills.
For more information about the proposed industrial pellet facility in Roxbury, on the banks of the Schoharie Resevoir, please visit: https://donttrashthecatskills.org
"Don't Trash the Catskills"-- I've seen them; now I feel as though I have finally met them.