Southwick Beach State Park is a New York State park that lies along an unusual stretch of sandy beach on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario. The park is 464 acres (188 ha) in size with a 3,500 foot (1,100 m) length of beach, and is visited annually by about 100,000 people. Immediately to the south is the Lakeview Wildlife Management Area (3,461 acres (1,401 ha)), which extends the publicly accessible beach by several miles. They are in the Town of Ellisburg in Jefferson County, New York south of the lakeside community of Jefferson Park.
The park offers an extensive campground with tent and trailer sites, picnic facilities, playing fields and a playground. In summer, the swimming area has lifeguards and the park store is open. In winter, snowmobiles are permitted in the park. The park has an accessible nature trail. There are hiking trails from the park that extend into the Lakeview Wildlife Management Area. Lakeview itself has several access points for launching boats, as well as a second nature trail along South Sandy Creek. The hiking trails and boat routes are described at several websites, and in guidebooks by William P. Ehling and by Susan Peterson Gateley.
The park and wildlife management area lie within a rare, freshwater coastal barrier environment that consists of beaches, sand dunes, embayments and marshes. The wildlife management area is also the Lakeview Marsh and Barrier Beach National Natural Landmark, which was cited in 1973 as, "One of the best and most extensive marshlands that lie in protected bays and behind barrier beaches along eastern Lake Ontario." Southwick Beach State Park and Lakeview Wildlife Management Area are included as parts of a proposed New York State Natural Heritage Area entitled "Eastern Lake Ontario Barrier Beach and Wetland Complex".
Read more about Southwick Beach State Park: Beachgrass & The Dunes, Boogie, Baseball, and Beaches: The Southwick History, Lagoons and Sand: Geology of Eastern Lake Ontario
Famous quotes containing the words beach, state and/or park:
“When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the “big canoe” of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“In former years it was said that at three o’clock in the afternoon all sober persons were rounded up and herded off the grounds, as undesirable. The tradition of insobriety is still carefully preserved.”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public igominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)