Poets’ Walk Park at 25: Getting the Story Right
Poets’ Walk Park remains one of the Hudson Valley’s most popular destinations for enjoying spectacular views of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains — a place where landscape becomes poetry. Yet it turns out the story we’ve been telling about...
Take a Field Trip into the World’s Prehistoric Past
Humans have existed for fewer than 200,000 years, which means a lot of interesting stuff happened on Earth in the billions of years before our arrival. You don’t have to drive far from the Hudson Valley to explore that natural...
What the Blazes? Remembering the Great Ramapo Trail War
Normally, people who build hiking trails are a fun, collegial bunch — nature lovers united to blaze a path so others can share their enthusiasm for the outdoors. But in the 1920s and ’30s, the competition to create new trails...
Who Built Those Stone Walls in the Middle of the Woods?
Walk through many forests in the mid- and lower Hudson Valley — including those at Scenic Hudson’s Shaupeneak Ridge, Esopus Meadows and Black Creek preserves — and you’ll notice many kinds of stone walls snaking through the trees. Who erected...
Exploring the Palisades’ 200 Million Years of History
The Palisades — without doubt the Hudson Valley’s most unique geological feature — weathered a lot, literally and figuratively, over the years until a group of women stepped forward to save them. Though best known for the spectacular vertical walls...
Hudson River Ghost Fleet Lives on in Hazy Memories
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the Hudson River National Defense Reserve Fleet — sometimes called the Mothball Fleet or the Ghost Fleet — which took up a big chunk of the estuary between Stony Point...
Explore More: The Hudson Valley’s Indigenous Heritage
The region we call the Hudson Valley has a deep Indigenous heritage. Early Native American inhabitants of the valley — often referred to as the Lenape Tribe to the south and the Mohican Tribe to the north — are both...
From a Troy Orphanage to a Pioneering Medical Career: Pathbreaker Dorothy Lavinia Brown
“Dreams can be made to come true,” said Dorothy Lavinia Brown, who achieved her aspirations by becoming the first African American female surgeon in the South, among other important accomplishments. While Brown spent her adult life in Tennessee, the Hudson...