Outdoor enthusiasts can now enjoy 15 miles of uninterrupted, restored Victorian Era carriageways by foot, bike, skis, snowshoes or horse from the Minnewaska State Park Preserve Visitors’ Center to the Sam’s Point Visitors’ Center in Cragsmoor. Last week the Open Space Institute (OSI), in partnership with the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP) and the Palisades Interstate Parks Commission (PIPC), officially opened the newly renovated 2.8 miles of the High Point Carriage Road. It was the final section of a three-tiered restoration project that put all of the pieces together, allowing visitors to move on evenly graded and wide multiuse carriage roads from Lake Minnewaska to Lake Awosting onto Smiley Carriage Road to High Point and directly to Sam’s Point Visitors’ Center and the Ice Caves.
“This has been a long time coming,” said Peter Karis, vice president for parks and stewardship at OSI. “It’s been a dream in the making for 10 years.”
According to Karis, there were three stages to this project from 2016 to 2023, including several miles of the Smiley Carriage Road. Work on this last section, the High Point Carriage Road, began in 2019 but was delayed several times over by the Covid-19 pandemic and then the wildfires that hit the park in August. “We had our momentum stopped several times by things outside of our control,” said Karis.
He noted that all three phases were done by a local excavating and road restoration company, Mombaccus Excavating & Gravel, out of Accord. “They’ve done most of our carriage road restorations and we couldn’t be happier,” said Karis of the Mombaccus crew, led by owner Keith Kortright. “He’s a fan of this park and knows every type of rattler and snake and is out here himself day in and day out, rebuilding these century-old roads.”
These romantic Victorian Era carriage roads were mostly established by the Smiley family, who founded and continues to operate the Mohonk Mountain House Resort and Spa, beginning in 1870 through the early 1900s. “Smiley Carriage Road and High Point had not been touched in over 100 years,” said Karis. “They were in complete disrepair.”
The last phase cost approximately $1.3 million and was funded by both private and public support, including grants from the New York State Environmental Protection Agency.
While hikers and snowshoers still had access from Minnewaska to Sam’s Point, it was all on single-track trail that can be very rocky and wet in sections. While many people love the ruggedness and solitude of the trails, the carriage roads — originally created to take guests by horse and carriage from Mohonk Mountain House to the various scenic vistas, sky lakes, waterfalls and other existing mountain houses, two at Minnewaska and one at Sam’s Point that have long since closed — have ample width to allow for more uses and provide greater access for those who aren’t comfortable on the trails or would rather travel by bike, horse or ski.
The Smileys were visionaries when it came to carriageway design, hugging the roads into the ridgeline and curving them in ways that showcased the stunning views of the lakes, the conglomerate cliffs, the Catskill Mountain range, as well as the Hudson Valley. This section, coupled with the Smiley Carriage Road, creates various westward-facing viewpoints including Napanoch Point and the Catskills, as well as lush green (soon to be colored by fall foliage) swaths of the thousands of acres of the park that dip down from the ridgeline towards Ellenville and Wawarsing.
“The high elevation of this carriage road moves through the unique pitch-pine landscape and dwarf pines that are specific to Sam’s Point,” said Karis. “It then dips down into deep hemlock forest hollows and exposed cliffs and Napanoch Point. It’s stunning.”
The topography, the remoteness of the area and the rain all summer created several challenges. “Cragsmoor [the former arts colony where Sam’s Point is located] is a small hamlet that is sensitive to traffic, and we had some large, heavy vehicles moving through, as that was the access point,” he said. “But I think they knew it was temporary and support the park, so that was a help. It rained a lot this summer, which made it muddy and wet, and the crew had a lot of bridges to install; but everyone was so supportive of the project, and the park management and staff have been amazing. They were the ones that were dealing with the day-to-day logistics of the project, because it is such a remote area and they know it so well.”
According to Karis, the project achieves several things that are important to OSI, OPRHP and PIPC, which include “having very safe, very wide, multiuse carriage roads that allow for greater accessibility to that area of the park.” He noted that it’s a huge boon to gravel biking, which has become increasingly popular over recent years, wedging its way in between the sports of road cycling and mountain biking for off-road surfaces that are less technical but still challenging. “It opens up miles of carriage road for Nordic skiers that the park grooms the snow and trails for, and also provides more access for equestrians.”
Along with accessibility, what this linkage does is to unify the two parks. “While they’re one park, they’ve operated as two separate parks, because there was no internal road that connected them,” said Karis. “This provides the park management with emergency access from one end to another” of the 25,000-acre park, which includes Sam’s Point but falls under the umbrella of Minnewaska State Park Preserve.
After falling out of vogue due to the advent of cars and the reluctance of people to travel by horse and carriage, these passageways are now in high demand for those seeking active recreation. “These carriage roads are so magnificent that Acadia National Park modeled their trails after them,” said Karis. “You can now go from Minnewaska Visitors’ Center, travel up to Castle Point or Hamilton Point, wrap around Lake Awosting, get onto Smiley Carriage Road and to High Point and end up at Sam’s Point Visitors’ Center. That could be anywhere from 15 to 17 miles of pure carriage-road access.”
There’s hope that at the same time, this new connection might also help alleviate some of the crowding at Sam’s Point, as its parking lot is one-tenth the size of Minnewaska’s. “They’ve created a reservation system for Sam’s Point parking – which is helpful, and this won’t change that – but it might entice people to start at Minnewaska and make their way to Sam’s Point from that direction.”
Led by people like senior vice president Bob Anderberg, OSI has helped almost to double the size of the Minnewaska State Park Preserve, and has worked just as diligently to enhance, repair and restore the antique carriageways. Karis said that he would be remiss if he didn’t thank Erik Kulleseid, now the commissioner of New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historical Preservation. “Erik used to be the vice president of OSI before he became the Parks commissioner,” said Karis. “He’s been a huge supporter, and like us, Minnewaska State Park holds a special place in his heart.”
Next up: OSI, a not-for-profit land preservation organization with strong roots in the Hudson Valley, plans to turn the 1.8 miles of trail around the southern side of Lake Awosting into a wide carriage road. “That’s scheduled for 2024,” Karis said. Currently, one portion of the lake perimeter has a carriageway while the rest of it remains as a relatively roomy and somewhat rustic trail with spectacular views of the sky lake and Castle Point.
Minnewaska State Park Preserve status update
According to Erik Humphries, veteran superintendent of the Minnewaska State Park Preserve, despite the humidity and on-and-off rainy weather this summer, attendance experienced an uptick. “Attendance was up slightly, even with the wet weather we experienced,” he said. This year the park added paddleboarding to its list of uses at Lake Minnewaska as a pilot program to be “evaluated for any improvement” that might be made for next summer.
When asked how the landscape was healing from the August 22 fires sparked by a lightning strike, resulted in several hundreds of acres being burned, Humphries said, “The areas of the fire are rebounding, as the landscape is a fire-dependent ecosystem,” meaning that many of the trees, like pitch pine, and other flora require fire to reseed and regenerate. “We do have monitoring plots in the fire zone from last year, and preliminary data show good pitch-pine regeneration from seed.”
Because the area of the fire was in a remote and difficult-to-access section of the park, firefighters created extensive bulldozer damage in an effort to put out the blaze and to create a breakline to contain the fire. The Mine Hole Trail, which begins in the Town of Wawarsing and climbs steeply towards High Point Carriageway, has since been closed to the public. According to Humphries, the bulldozing created a need for stabilization work that is being done by the park with the support of the New York/New Jersey Trail Conference, volunteers and stewards of the land. He said that he anticipates it to be reopened this fall.
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