The Long Path is a long-distance hiking trail beginning in New York City, at the West 175th Street subway station near the George Washington Bridge and ending at Altamont, New York, in the Albany area. While not yet a continuous trail, relying on road walks in some areas, it nevertheless takes in many of the popular hiking attractions west of the Hudson River, such as the New Jersey Palisades, Harriman State Park, the Shawangunk Ridge and the Catskill Mountains. It offers hikers a diversity of environments to pass through, from suburbia and sea-level salt marshes along the Hudson to wilderness and boreal forest on Catskill summits in elevation.
When conceived in the 1930s, it was to be the antithesis of a hiking trail, with neither a designated route nor blazes, simply a list of points of interest hikers could find their own routes to. However, increasing development after World War II in Orange and Rockland counties made that less workable, and it was revived in the 1960s as a standard trail. Work to extend the trail into the Adirondacks is currently underway.
History
Conception
Vincent Joseph Schaefer, a scientist who worked in Schenectady for General Electric, began to imagine a "hiker's route" from New York City to the Adirondacks shortly after helping to found the Mohawk Valley Hiking Club in 1929. He was very clear on one thing: that it not be marked as a trail.
"Schaefer envisioned resourceful hikers making use of what they found along the way," say historians Guy and Laura Waterman — whether hikers' trails, back roads, abandoned wood roads, tow paths, creek beds, game trails, plus occasional bushwhacks where that appeared to offer the most interesting route." They quote him describing the Long Path as:
...[A] route that a person having good "woods" sense could use to move across a region using compass and "topo" map, and that in a meandering way would lead such persons to most of the interesting scenic vistas, rock formations, choice or unique vegetation, historical sites and similar items that a certain type of outdoors person enjoys. He wrote to an official at Harriman that: There would be no cutting or blazing, for this trail would be a truly wild walk that wouldn't erode the land or scar the solitude ... and each found site would be an adventure in orienteering.
Implementation
He named his idea the Long Path after Walt Whitman's line about "the long brown path that leads wherever I choose" from his poem "Song of the Open Road". Since that was also where Raymond H. Torrey, the New York Post influential hiking columnist, had gotten the name for his column, it was a smart public relations choice. Torrey, who had done much to get the Appalachian Trail built, both physically and in print, in the New York metropolitan area the previous decade, announced the idea in a column in 1933. Another strong advocate in the early days was a transplanted Coloradan, W. W. Cady, who came to be identified with the Long Path almost as much as Schaefer.
He and Torrey, who devoted a series of columns to it the next year, scouted a "trail" from the city to the Catskills, while Schaefer and his brother did the same for the northern half. Several alternative endpoints were envisioned: the "History" chapter of the Guide to the Long Path places the end at Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondack High Peaks, but Torrey's column of August 21, 1934 places the terminus at the Adirondak Loj at Lake Clear of Heart (now called Heart Lake). The column further discusses possible extensions: a route over Wallface Mountain to join the Northville-Placid Trail by way of Henderson Lake and the Preston Ponds; a climb over Mount Van Hoevenberg and traverse of the Sentinel Range Wilderness Area to emerge at Jay, New York; and possible routes to the Canadian border, either to the Thousand Islands to the west or along the Chateaugay River to the north. Curiously, Schaefer's account in Torrey's column never mentions Whiteface as a possible ending point.