Catskillmountaineer.com Forum

I think there is some confusion on what used to be cleared. Back in the 1970's there was not a 360 degree view. At one time a great number of years ago when there was a fire tower, it was cleared.

The view that used to be cleared was the few trees in front of the John Burroughs Plaque. It gave a great view of the Ashokan Reservoir. Keeping those few trees cut would not cause land slides. The number of Bicknell Thrush back in the 70's is the same as today.

In recent years there has been a lot of complaints that the DEC crew in charge of clearing the views have not been doing there job. Some trail maintenance guys started to cut the views for them. This caused the DEC crew to get upset about it. The real issue is that the DEC crew in charge of keeping the views open are lazy.

I don't think that anyone is suggesting that we clear cut or burn the tops of mountains. At one time they did clear cut and burn many of the tops. And back in the 1800's they clear cut entire mountain ranges. The red clay from the Catskills would turn the Hudson River red all the way down to Manhattan. This fact, helped create the Forest Preserve that we have today.

I've really been enjoying the discussion on the view from Slide Mt. Since I've not had the chance to hike Slide yet I thought I'd do a google image search to see if there were any older pics of views from the summit. I was quite shocked to find very few available. I read on wikipedia that the fire tower on the summit was removed in 1965 and searches for pics of that came up empty as well. It seems like all other fire towers come up on the search but not Slide. I guess I'll have to keep looking. This postcard from 1913 is about the closest I've seen to a nice early image of the summit.

Scott

Mike, thanks for the information.

Scott, that is a nice picture you found. I'm guessing that is the original fire tower.

Does anyone know why the fire tower on Slide was taken down, while Hunter is still open? Was it just in that bad of shape, while Hunter was salvageable?

There were some pictures on the fire ranger web site. But, I think they removed most of them.

There have been quite a few fire towers over the years. A couple wooden ones. And, at least one metal one. It's been a long time since I have seen them.

Here are two that were list here before: