As Route 23A descends into Haines Falls, watch for a left onto North Lake Road/County Road 18, where you'll find the entrance to North-South Lake--a state beach, campground, and preserve. Hikers who follow the Escarpment Trail to landmark points like Artist's Rock and the site of the once-grand Catskill Mountain House--which counted three presidents among its elite guests between 1824 and 1941--will enjoy views committed to canvas by Hudson River School painters including Thomas Cole, father of this first American school of landscape painting.
Kaaterskill Falls, New York's highest two-tiered waterfall and another oft-painted scene, can be reached via a trail that diverges from the Escarpment Trail, or you can continue 1.3 miles past North Lake Road on Route 23A to a right-hand-side parking area. Exercise caution when you make your way along the road's slender shoulder to smaller Bastion Falls, located at the trailhead for the rocky and rooty, moderate half-mile climb to Kaaterskill Falls. The 260-foot double cascade is at its most awe-inspiring in the spring, when melting snow and ice increase the rush of water spilling over rocky ledges. Route 23A takes some exhilarating S-turns as you continue your descent toward Catskill. Before you follow Route 23 East across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, turn left onto Spring Street/Route 385. Tours of Cedar Grove, Cole's home and studio, offer insight into the remarkable career of this largely self-taught Englishman, whose first depictions of the Catskills, painted in 1825, took the New York City art world by storm. More than seventy other artists would follow Cole's lead, creating luminous and highly detailed paintings that engendered reverence for the beauty of uniquely American scenes.
After you cross to the east bank of the Hudson, visit the home of Frederic Edwin Church, Cole's student and one of the school's most accomplished painters. Known for his colossal canvases, Church's largest work was Olana, the estate he created with the help of designer Calvert Vaux. Influenced by the Moorish architecture he'd seen in the Middle East, Church fashioned a home rich in texture and color, and he constructed and expanded it between 1870 and 1890. He also devoted considerable energy to designing the property's roads so that spectacular scenes of the Hudson and Catskills were calculatingly revealed.
As you savor these vistas, blissfully little altered by the passage of time, you'll realize that even if old Rip had slumbered for one hundred years, he still would have descended from the mountains, stroking his beard in bewilderment, yet secure in the knowledge that "there stood the Kaatskill Mountains--there ran the silver Hudson."
Excerpted from Backroads of New York (Compare Prices), a coffee table and guide book featuring directions, narrative, maps and photography for 28 scenic drives in New York State. Text © 2007 by Kim Knox Beckius. Published by Voyageur Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
