Photo from the Friends of the Kaaterskill Rail Trail's Facebook page.
The Greene County mountaintop region will be celebrating National Trails Day in style this year: With the opening of a new rail trail through the heart of the Catskills' grand old hotel country. The new Kaaterskill Rail Trail in Haines Falls opens to the public on Saturday, June 1 with a kickoff party that includes guided hikes and free barbecue.
Once a footpath that connected the legendary Catskill Mountain House to Haines Falls, later a rail corridor for the Ulster & Delaware Railroad, the completed Phase 1 of the Kaaterskill Rail Trail is a roughly 1.5-mile trail with views of Kaaterskill Falls and the remains of the once-great mountaintop hotels. Phase 2, still in the planning stage, will eventually connect the rail trail to the Escarpment Trail and North-South Lake campground.
The event kicks off at 10:30am at the Mountain Top Historical Society on Route 23A with a few words from the groups that have worked for years to make the trail a reality: the Historical Society, the Town of Hunter, the NY-NJ Trail Conference, the Greene County Soil and Water District, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Guided hikes start at 11am, 11:30am, and 2pm, and hungry hikers can return to the Historical Society's old railroad station for free barbecue from 1pm to 3:30pm.
Below: Detail from a map of the Kaaterskill Rail Trail produced by the NY-NJ Trail Conference. Full map available at this link (PDF).
