The Catskills

Longstreth's ramble was an intimate journey, a four-hundred-mile hike for ?fun and fish and freedom? filled with chance encounters and colorful characters, a ?walkabout? through the natural wonders of the high peaks and rugged cloves, providing rare, early-1900s impressions of the villages along the way: places like Woodstock, Windham, Hunter, Stamford, Grand Gorge, Roxbury, Palenville, and Phoenicia. The dairy farms and boardinghouses where Longstreth spent his nights listening to local lore and legend are gone, as is the Catskill Mountain House from whose boardwalk Longstreth caught ?Natty Bumpo's view? of ?all creation.? But thanks to the Catskill Park's protective ?blue line, ? the world-famous scenic beauty that inspired the Hudson River School painters remains today just as Longstreth found it, still displaying ?its own peculiar charm?a something not found elsewhere.?