Catskill State Park

 park, nature conservation park / area, state park

The Catskill Park is in the Catskill Mountains in New York in the United States. It consists of 700,000 acres (2,800 km²) of land. As of 2005 there are 287,514 acres (1,150 km²), or 41 percent of the land within, owned by the state as part of the Forest Preserve; it is managed by the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Another 5% is owned by New York City to protect four of the city’s reservoirs in the region that lie partially within the park and their respective watersheds.

Historically, the area was used by the Mohawks primarily for hunting. Later it was heavily exploited by the Dutch, English, Irish and Germans; local industry included logging, bluestone quarrying, leather tanning, wintergreen and blueberry harvesting, trapping, fishing, and later, tourism. The old-growth hemlock and northern hardwood forests on the steep mountainsides and remote valleys were sufficiently inaccessible that they survived the logging, tanbarking and charcoal industries of the 18th and 19th centuries.