| |
April 19, 2004 |
|
Pine Hill Railroad Tracks
|
It feels great and is very rewarding to finally go and do something that's been talked about for so long. That was the story last Sunday when we decided to hike along the old railroad bed from Pine Hill to Highmount. After reading and hearing so much over the last year about the old railroads in the Catskills we wanted to see some of the sites firsthand.
We started by parking the car outside the Pine Hill Lake Day Use Area, walking over the covered bridge and in to the main parking lot. The only other people we saw were two Trout Unlimited members with a video camera trying to film spawning rainbow trout in the Birch Creek. We entered the woods, immediately going uphill only a few hundred feet until reaching the railroad tracks. We walked along this flat terrace through the forest, with the lake below us on one side, and the steep, rocky mountainside riddled with mossy seeps and intermittent streams on the other.
Here the tracks are at 1,550' elevation, and are straight as an arrow for nearly three-quarters of a mile (until just before Woodchuck Hollow Rd). Along this stretch, the rail bed was quite open - only a few small saplings encroached from the sides and sprouted up between the tracks. The bridge over Woodchuck Hollow is very dilapidated but we didn't have trouble crossing it. We walked down to the road and back up the other side on the way back.
From here, (Depot or Station Road) the rail bed now serves to connect two hiking trails that climb up to Belleayre's summit. We passed by the foundation of the old railroad depot, and soon came to the Belleayre Ski Center snowmaking pond at Cathedral Glen.
Just after the pond, the tracks made a sharp bend to the right (northeast) and crossed the Bonnie View stream on a high berm built specifically for the tracks to cross the deep and narrow valley. Soon after, there was another huge turn in the tracks, this time to the southeast. We were heading back towards Pine Hill - the complete opposite direction of Highmount!
Through the leaf-less trees we looked up at the snow-covered ski slopes. There were an abundance of oak leaves around and some tall white pines and the healthy hemlock trees along the way. As we had expected, one last big bend to the left (north), above a residential area known as Chelsea Park, brought us back in the direction of Highmount. Along this last straightaway, we looked out over the Birch Creek Valley and new and old Route 28 in the distance below us.
On a map, these two huge turns in the railroad tracks look like horseshoes, hence that section's name as the "double horseshoe curves". Because the incline was so steep, this design was necessary for the train to retain enough speed and momentum to reach the top. Many times an additional locomotive was used to help pull the train up to Highmount. We realized how strategic and brilliant this design was. In the 2.0-mile hike to Highmount, the grade was so slight we could hardly tell we were going uphill, but we climbed nearly 400' in elevation!
As we approached the summit, the tracks became too overgrown with saplings to fight through and pretty muddy. We were determined to stay on the tracks as long as possible, but quit just shy of Highmount.
We saw many old stonewalls, foundations, ditches and stone railway markers throughout the route giving us a sense of what it must have been like in the past. It was fun to think about. The tracks seemed in surprisingly good shape. There were places where banks had failed and earth had now covered some of the tracks, or where water was running alongside or under them. Only two downed trees forced us to climb over them. It would be so amazing to see people ride and enjoy these tracks once again. We hope our friends at Catskill Mountain Rail Road and Delaware and Ulster Rail Ride can make it a reality some day, and we thank them for giving us the opportunity to relive this piece of history that helped shape our Catskill Mountains.
- Aaron and Chris
|
|
