State-of-the-art hiking guide, complete with newly drawn maps and GPS coordinates, to America's first recreational mountain trails. These trails surrounded the Catskill Mountain House (est. 1824) on the northeastern escarpment of the Catskill Mountains and inspired America's Romantic-era painters & writers, including William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and the other artists of the Hudson River School. Includes 19th-century maps and rare period photos, drawings and descriptions.

A man who sleeps for twenty years in the Catskill Mountains wakes to a much-changed world.

30 HIKES INCLUDE -- Starks Knob & Schuylerville Champlain Canal Towpath -- Saratoga National Historic Park -- Geyser Park -- Vischer Ferry Nature & Historic Preserve -- Peebles Island State Park -- Oakwood Cemetery -- Burden Pond Environmental Park -- Ann Lee Pond -- Indian Ladder -- Bennett Hill Preserve -- Clarksville Cave Preserve -- Edmund Niles Huyck Preserve -- Balanced Rocks -- Shaker Mountain -- No Bottom Pond -- Tyringham Cobble -- Ice Glen & Laura's Tower -- Ashintully Estate & McLennan Preserve -- Vroman's Nose -- Pratt Rock -- Lindenwald & Martin Van Buren Nature Trail -- Rogers Island -- Olana -- Montgomery Place -- Ravena Falls -- Hudson River School Art Trail -- Catskill Mountain House Escarpment -- Saugerties Lighthouse -- Overlook Mountain -- Sky Top & Mohonk Lake

The Catskills (“Cat Creek” in Dutch), America’s original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties—Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; America’s first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels . . . Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudson’s first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention, resulting in New York’s own Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its own constitution, causing the ire of the invading British army . . . the Catskills as a popular attraction in the 1800s, with the construction of the Catskill Mountain House and its rugged imitators that offered WASP guests “one-hundred percent restricted” accommodations (“Hebrews will knock vainly for admission”), a policy that remained until the Catskills became the curative for tubercular patients, sending real-estate prices plummeting and the WASP enclave on to richer pastures . . . Here are the gangsters (Jack “Legs” Diamond and Dutch Schultz, among them) who sought refuge in the Catskill Mountains, and the resorts that after World War II catered to upwardly mobile Jewish families, giving rise to hundreds of hotels inspired by Grossinger’s, the original “Disneyland with knishes”—the Concord, Brown’s Hotel, Kutsher’s Hotel, and others—in what became known as the Borscht Belt and Sour Cream Alps, with their headliners from movies and radio (Phil Silvers, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, et al.), and others who learned their trade there, among them Moss Hart (who got his start organizing summer theatricals), Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Joan Rivers. Here is a nineteenth-century America turning away from England for its literary and artistic inspiration, finding it instead in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and his childhood recollections (set in the Catskills) . . . in James Fenimore Cooper’s adventure-romances, which provided a pastoral history, describing the shift from a colonial to a nationalist mentality . . . and in the canvases of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederick Church, and others that caught the grandeur of the wilderness and that gave texture, color, and form to Irving’s and Cooper’s imaginings. Here are the entrepreneurs and financiers who saw the Catskills as a way to strike it rich, plundering the resources that had been likened to “creation,” the Catskills’ tanneries that supplied the boots and saddles for Union troops in the Civil War . . . and the bluestone quarries whose excavated rock became the curbs and streets of the fast-growing Eastern Seaboard. Here are the Catskills brought fully to life in all of their intensity, beauty, vastness, and lunacy.

The bestselling and most complete guide to the gorgeous Hudson Valley is back in a new, totally revised edition. Rich with historical and cultural attractions and natural beauty, the Hudson Valley has become a choice getaway. Local author Joanne Michaels guides you through its treasure trove of restaurants, cozy inns, galleries, antiques shops, and wineries, and to its many outdoor activities. Completely revised; from the most respected travel writer in the region.