“It’s gorgeous. It’s vast. You can get lost in there,” said Joan Burroughs, treasurer and executive board member of the JBA, who is John Burroughs’ great-granddaughter. One of the new trails leads to a road dating back to the Revolutionary War and the remains of a gristmill and bridge at Black Creek. The waterway was much explored and beloved by Burroughs, who “called it Shattega, which we think is Native American,” Burroughs said. “Black Creek is named from the hemlock needles in the water.” The path continues past Chodikee Lake down to Route 299.
The new trails will officially open on October 6 at 12 noon, with a ribbon-cutting (actually, a branch of bittersweet), refreshments and a talk by Edward Kanze, an Adirondack guide, well-known naturalist and author of The World of John Burroughs. At presstime, Walsh was putting up the new trailhead signs. The trail markers are simple white squares, which blend in with the natural setting.
Walsh described the land as “abundantly featured. There’s all sorts of interesting nooks and crannies, rock ledges, a fern valley – just a wealth of features. In some ways it was really easy to design the trails. It’s really about linking a set of experiences. We do that by trying to surprise the user” – for example, by showcasing a dramatic rock formation just around a bend. But the rockiness of the Esopus terrain also posed a challenge, he added. “It was very hard to place a trail that would be relatively used and not too difficult to build, because of all the ledges and cliffs.”
Walsh said that some sections of trail are easier to traverse than others; he and his crew of four, aided by 80 volunteers, also crafted a beautiful scramble up a cliff beyond the abandoned caretaker’s house, consisting of a series of stone steps protruding from the rock. The steps mimic the layering of the rock and seem to emerge magically out of the cliff. Walsh said that another challenge was the thin soils, which required him to lay flat bluestone paving stones in some areas to create a level surface. He also laid pairs of boards through the Celery Swamp – a swampy grotto where Burroughs planned to grow celery to supplement the income from his nearby fruit farm – to keep feet dry. “We put the trail in places where the water would run as easy as possible, so when the rains come, there is not much mud,” he said.
The process started with walking the land, so that “we get to know every square foot,” followed by mapping. “We identify interesting features, such as cliffs, boulders, vistas and interesting trees; then we look at the challenges, such as the steep slopes and wet terrain, and balance it all out,” Walsh said.
One of the trails takes in a full view of a waterfall, noted Burroughs, who said that another outstanding feature of the land is the abundance of ponds and creeks, home to beaver, many birds and a fisher. A SUNY-New Paltz Biology professor frequently takes his students on field trips to the Sanctuary to study the plant life and amphibians, Burroughs said.
Walsh said that he and his crew took out “as few trees as possible,” most with trunks measuring only five to six inches in diameter. After laying out the trail, the route was refined “here and there,” working with archaeologists, botanists and Burroughs. The help from volunteers was crucial, he added. “Some worked almost every weekend and could do the most technically challenging aspects of the job, while others groomed the trail.”
Walsh’s company, which is based in High Falls, builds trails across the Northeast and just finished a big project at Niagara Falls, which had a different set of challenges; “Fortunately, Slabsides does not attract eight million visitors a year,” he said. He is also is designing a trail for Joppenberg Mountain in Rosendale. Walsh has been working on trails since he was a teenager volunteering for the New York/New Jersey Trail Conference and for organizations in the Adirondacks, such as the Adirondack Mountain Club. He said that trail design has evolved conceptually in recent decades from “getting from Point A to Point B the quickest way possible, often resulting in the steepest way possible” to “more user-friendly trails. There’s a place for steep, challenging trails; but if more people had more opportunities for an easier trail into the forest, you’d get more people out.”
Walsh said that he hoped that the new trails would draw more attention to Slabsides. “Very few people know about the Sanctuary, and developing trails is one of the things the association wants to do to get more people out there using it.”
