MTM Excursion: Bear Mountain, NY

According to Wikipedia, there are eleven peaks in New York State called Bear Mountain, but the one we spent about an hour driving to is the one for which Bear Mountain State Park is named.

From the summit, there's a tower from which you can see four states. From other vistas, you get spectacularly lovely views of the Hudson, which made it a strategic priority for British troops who would capture the area in 1777 in the Revloutionary Army's defeat at Fort Mortgomery. It's reported that we did eventually reclaim it.

In 1908, the state decided to relocate its notorious Sing Sing prison to the area and actually began construction. However, thanks to community resistance and motivated, wealthy philanthropists, the area was re-designated and opened as a state park instead in 1913. A year later, more than a million people were visiting the park annually, brought by the frequently arriving steamboats, and the place had become hugely popular with Boy Scouts who frolicked healthfully around such bucolic sites as the pictured Hessian Lake.

(The lake's right shoreline leads to the Trailside Museum complex, which we didn't manage before closing. There's a small colonial history museum and a nature study with mounted specimens of larger local fauna which were donated many years ago by NYC's famous natural history museum. They also have live habitats for local amphibians, reptiles, and fish, and a geology museum. Raise your hand if you knew that local Orange County yielded the largest number of mastodon skulls in the nation. Oh, you did not!)










By the 1920s, winter sports, including ski jumping, were added, as well as the very first section of the Appalachian Trail, going from the parks south end to the Delaware Water Gap. The carousel, in a house near the ice rink and across playing fields from the inn, is a very recent addition from 2001, and is populated with local critters such as rabbit, fox, bobcat, otter, turkey, goose, and even skunk.

It's easy to see how lovely the Bear Mountain Inn must've been, and still is, though it's obviously under renovation and badly behind schedule for reopening. By several years. It was originally raised by park employees in 1915. Not only is the exterior made from from stone quarried nearby and local chestnut timbers, but the interior is paneled and timbered in chestnut, the fireplaces are of the same stone, and the fixtures are of native birch and hand-hammered iron. Carpenters even crafted the inn's rustic furniture from local chestnut. It was once decorated with contemporary paintings of riverboats and native American textiles from the area, and I do hope to be able to stay there someday.





Travis Erwin, founder and proprietor of My Town Monday, hosts more tours here.