Balsam Lake Mountain - History

History

The Catskills were formed 250-350 million years ago, during the Devonian and Silurian periods, when the sands and silt that had eroded from the Acadian Mountains to the northeast collected in a river delta at the mouth of the shallow inland sea that is now the Allegheny Plateau. The delta uplifted as a single unit, and gradually streams eroded valleys, creating a dissected plateau. The harder, younger shale and sandstone remains as the mountain summits. Later glaciation made the valleys steeper and smoother.

Catskill forest historian Michael Kudish says the Mill Brook Ridge range, including Balsam Lake, is one of the areas in the region showing the fewest signs of human disturbance. The Iroquois who were the first settlers in today's New York only went into areas above 1,500 feet (460 m) to hunt, if they went there at all. European settlers established few farms in the area, both before and after independence. The clearings that give the Quaker Clearing trailhead its name are the only significant past agricultural use that can still be seen today. Limited logging, primarily by farmers procuring firewood, took place above those clearings.

The most significant developments in the human history of the mountain took place in 1887. The state bought the southeast slope of the mountain that year for the newly created Forest Preserve, ensuring the land would remain forever wild, always in public ownership and never logged, per a law later added to the state constitution as Article 14. Also that year the Balsam Lake Club decided to erect a crude wooden fire lookout tower on the summit so that an observer could detect fires that threatened the lands around the lake and the headwaters of the Beaver Kill where they hunted and fished. It was the first such lookout tower built in New York State.

Two years later, the state bought more of the mountain, and eventually acquired the summit itself in 1900. At some point before the United States Geological Survey resurveyed the area for its 1901 maps, the Turner Hollow Road, an old, rough turnpike connecting Seager and Quaker Clearing, often used by members of the Balsam Lake Club to get to the train station at Arkville, was rerouted from the col between East and West Schoolhouse mountains to the one between West Schoolhouse and Balsam Lake. The southern portion survives as part of the Dry Brook Ridge Trail.

Eight years later, in 1909, the state's Forest, Fish and Game Commission took over the fire tower; a decade later it built the first cabin and replaced it with the steel tower that stands today. By 1935 the state was maintaining not only the jeep road to the summit but the old Turner Hollow Road south to Quaker Clearing and the foot trail from the summit to the road.

The Great Appalachian Storm of November 1950 took a heavy toll on the summit balsam firs. Blowdown was extensive in both the bog and non-bog areas. The trees that remained standing died more rapidly due to the exposure. It has since recovered, but the bog has become vulnerable to the effects of acid rain in the meantime, possibly changing its growth patterns.

After a series of severe droughts and fires in the early 1960s that led to some temporary closings of the Forest Preserve,. fires and the damage they caused declined due to an increase in public awareness of forest fire danger and the decline in activities that caused them. Manned fire towers became less essential; the state began closing them down and dismantling them in favor of more cost-effective aerial surveillance.

In 1976 the Balsam Lake Club donated 3,615 acres (1,463 ha) to the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, keeping all but the immediate shoreline of the lake itself. Three years later, the Catskill Center in turn sold the land to the state, putting most of the mountain in public ownership. When the first Catskill State Land Master Plan was drafted and implemented in the mid-1980s, the 13,500-acre (5,500 ha) contiguous tract that stretched from Balsam Lake Mountain to Alder Lake over Mill Brook Ridge was designated as the Balsam Lake Mountain Wild Forest, a land classification slightly less restrictive than a wilderness area allowing for state vehicular use of the road up the mountain.

The fire tower remained manned until 1988, one of the last to be closed. Hikers continued to climb it for the views, even though it was no longer maintained. A proposal by the state Department of Environmental Conservation to dismantle the Red Hill fire tower in nearby Denning led to a community effort to save and restore the five remaining towers in the Catskill Park. In conjunction with that effort, the new Mill Brook Ridge Trail was built from Alder Lake in the west across that mountain's two eastern summits to Balsam Lake, to connect the trail system on the hills above Pepacton Reservoir to the central Catskill trail system and provide another link in the Finger Lakes Trail.