Raymond H. Torrey - The Long Brown Path

The Long Brown Path

In the early 1920s Torrey developed a weekly outdoor column for the Post, called the Long Brown Path which was named for a line in Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road. Major William A. Welch, General Manager of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, was interested in creating hiking trails in Bear Mountain-Harriman State Parks, but was lacking funds. Welch suggested that Torrey use his influential column to help organize New York metropolitan area hiking clubs into a volunteer trail-building confederation; this led to the creation of the Palisades Interstate Park Trail Conference, a precursor of the NY/NJTC.

Torrey not only wrote the columns, he organized and coordinated the resulting volunteers and did plenty of route-scouting and trail building himself.

The column was very popular: along with news of the clubs and their trails, it included a listing of hikes, as many as 20 or 30 weekly. He also used the column as a "bully pulpit", railing against litter, championing environmental causes, giving notice of upcoming conservation bills in New York and New Jersey, and organizing letter-writing campaigns in support of reforestation measures and proposals for the creation of new parks.