Harding Trail to Hotel Kaaterskill site

[Deb]

Palenville is a different place these days, now that the road through the clove is closed. There are few cars but during the day construction trucks rumble up and down. You can still drive up to the DEC parking area on Rt. 23A though.

This was the first time on this trail for me, and this was a quick after-work getaway. The road leading from the parking area has been freshly widened and bulldozed; a rough job. The new road continued on up the hill after I took a left onto the red-blazed Harding Trail.

This road was built in 1880 to transport guests to George W. Harding's 1,000 room Hotel Kaaterskill. Harding's own railroad engineers decided the project was impossible, leaving Harding to turn to locals familiar with the construction of tanning and quarrying roads.
It's a marvelous road, still in good shape. Following a low contour, it uses only two switchbacks to attain nearly all its elevation. The grade is 2-4 percent and there are no steep sections.
Above the road and below it the terrain is very steep, leaving me to wonder at the tremendous amount of work done to clear the treadway.
Down below in the clove the DOT is working overtime to tame the same slopes...

About a mile up the trail there is a trail register, a hitching post and a lookout. Ten minutes further the trail crosses a trouble spot known as the Gulf, a washed-out rubble pile on a dry tributary. Old foundations reveal that the road was reconstructed and re-routed after wash-outs.

It took about 2 hours, with a side excursion down the Layman Mounument Trail, for me to reach the old hotel site. It was 7 pm. I found a place to set up the tent on the edge of a small clearing well to the west of the large open area where the hotel once stood.
Few people camp over that way; there were no paths and no signs of campsites. Old pieces of rusty metal were here and there in the woods and I found a piece of crockery. I also found a rusty cauldron buried in the dirt, surrounded by a pile of bluestone; if this were an old fireplace, it hadn't been used in decades.

Once the katydids stopped cricking it was absolutely silent and it stayed that way all night, until jets started flying high above at 4:30 am.

I fluffed up the grass and was back to the car at 9 am. Never saw anyone.

[Mark Schaefer]

:tup: Nice history hike and report. That is a an excellent, lightly travelled approach to a very heavily used area which is just a short distance from North Lake State Park campground. I have often come across old 19th century artifacts around the hotel site. And I have admired the Harding Trail (old road) construction.

The Hotel Kaaterskill was built as a result of the "Fried Chicken" war. George Harding had been a frequent guest of the Catskill Mountain House. One year his daughter was on a strict diet prescribed by her doctor. The Catskill Mountain House dining room only offered a set menu, and when the owner denied Mr. Harding's request for fried chicken for his daughter he left in a huff. He started construction of the Hotel Kaaterskill soon after. The hotels were great rivals. Each built its own access road, and later their own railroads. That is the reason for the two parallel railroad beds only a few yards apart between Tannersville and South Lake. There is a short description of the Harding Road construction in Pioneer Days in the Catskill High Peaks by Leah Showers Wiltse, p. 93:
Mr. Harding brought a surveyor from Philadelphia to build a private road up the mountain from Palenville, but after a thorough examination the surveyor declared it could not be done, so wild and so steep was the mountainside. Then George Harding put the matter into the hands of two creative, skilled local men, Edward Dibble and Collins Hyser of Platte Clove. Despite the difficulty they succeeded. They built one of the safest and finest roads, from an engineers' point of view, on any mountain in the world.
Aside: Dibble is a name familiar to hikers of the Pecoy Notch trail per Dibble's Quarry.

[Deb]

Thanks for the information, Mark. When I got home I did a search, but got very little.
I agree, it's an incredible road. Instead of making their job easier by making the way steeper and shorter, the two local men went for the long traverse lines. The effect is striking and beautiful.
Whenever I hike on old Catskill mountain roads I think about the horses, mules and oxen that toiled up and down on them; at least the animals that worked the Harding Road had an easier time of it.

On another completely different note: my tiny cheap FM Walkman picked up six! NPR stations, one next to the other, from the hotel vantage point. In addition to NPR and AMC from the Capital District there was PK(R?) from Bridgeport, another with various call-letters from CT and I never learned about the last two, both of which were playing classical music.
Each station came in perfectly, all in a tiny band just before the Christian station. I must have really been in a sweet spot.