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As we paused on the brow of this, another glorious valley spread out to our view, with the broad sluggish waters of the Wallkill winding away, with hardly any visible motion, toward the north-east, through a vast tract of meadow-land covered with high, rank grass, dotted with clumps of willows and alder brakes, and interspersed with large, deep swamps, thick-set with high grown timber; while far beyond these, to the west, lay the tall variegated chain of the Shawangunk mountains.
When you come home, you'll hear the voice of the wilderness calling you to return, and it will lure you back again." It was Leonidas Hubbard, the heroic explorer, who spoke these words to Dillon Wallace when they were lying by a camp fire in the snow-covered Shawangunk mountains where they planned the trip that cost them indescribable suffering, and Hubbard his life.
Its shores are steep quartz rocks rising fifty feet perpendicularly from the water. The face of "Sky Top" is heaped around with enormous boulders some thirty feet in diameter. In among them extend rocky labyrinths which can be explored with torches. On every hand are immense masses of Shawangunk grit hurled together over the cliff as if with the convulsions of an earthquake.
In these mountains are some very remarkable rock conformations, and we merely mention this fact to the lads in the East, who may think that these stories of rock caverns are exaggerated. There are probably hundreds of caves in the Catskill and Shawangunk Mountains that have never been entered or explored since the days when the early settlers may have found them while bear hunting.
The palisades were then piled around the dwellings and in a few hours nothing remained of the once imposing fortress but smoking embers. This Indian fort or castle, it is said, stood on the banks of what is now called the Shawangunk kill, in the town of the same name, at the southwestern extremity of Ulster county.
There are plenty of them in summer along the Shawangunk range, just west of us, in the Catskills, and so northward above the Arctic Circle. In the spring, before it leaves us, you will often hear its pretty little song. They are very much afraid of hawks, which make havoc among them at all times, but are fearless of their human and especially of their humane neighbors.
The surface rock is a coarse sandstone superincumbent upon a lighter-colored conglomerate that looks like Shawangunk grits, and when this latter is reached by the water it seems to be rapidly disintegrated by it, thus forming the deep excavations alluded to. My eyes had never before beheld such beauty in a mountain stream.
The full magnificence of the mountains in that quarter; the river's course between them, the blue hills of the distant Shawangunk range, and the woody chasm immediately at my feet, stretching from the height where I stood over to the crest of the Crow's nest; it took away my breath. I sat down again, while Mr.
Right in the State of New York, in Ulster County, and in what is called the Shawangunk Mountains, there are some of the most wonderful caves and crevices, and in some of these caves during the winter the snow drifts down, and in the spring becomes a solid mass of ice, and the writer remembers upon one occasion after a long and weary scramble over rocks under the face of a cliff which towers up and overlooks counties, being shown a rock cave where there was a solid mass of ice, which, in its contour resembled a ship.
Never did apiary have a finer outlook or more rugged surroundings.. A black, wood-embraced lake lay at our feet; the long panorama of the Catskills filled the far distance, and the more broken outlines of the Shawangunk range filled the rear. On every hand were precipices and a wild confusion of rocks and trees.
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