Catskill State Park

The Catskill State Park, also called Catskill Park, is in the Catskill Mountains in New York in the United States. It consists of 700,000 acres (2,800 km²) of land inside a Blue Line in four counties: Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, and Ulster. Roughly 280,000 acres (1,100 km²), or 41 percent of the land within is owned by the state and this part is called the Catskill Forest Preserve. Another 5 percent is owned by New York City to protect four of the city?s reservoirs in the region that lie partially within the park and their respective watersheds.

Related Topics:
Catskill Mountains - New York - United States - Delaware - Greene - Sullivan - Ulster - New York City

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It has approximately 50,000 permanent residents, bolstered somewhat by second-home ownership on weekends and in the summer, and attracts about half a million visitors every year.

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The park is governed by Article 14 of the state constitution, which stipulates that all land acquired within cannot be sold or otherwise transferred (absent amending the constitution, which has been done on several occasions), may not be used for logging and must remain "forever wild."

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As the lesser in size and the less well-known of New York?s two Forest Preserves, residents of and advocates for the Park often feel it gets neglected by the state government in Albany. A popular saying in the region is that the DEC (Department of Environmental Conversation, the state agency that manages the public lands in the Forest Preserve) Commissioner's chair faces north (i.e., toward the Adirondacks). In recent years DEC has been working to change that.

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Despite that perception, however, some key innovations in how New York manages its Forest Preserve have come from the Catskills.

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