The Catskill Park is a mountainous region of public and private lands in the Ulster, Green, Delaware and Sullivan Counties of New York State. It is a blend of public and private lands of often remote mountain landscape. Its rich history includes logging, blue stone quarrying, leather tinning, wintergreen and blueberry harvesting, trapping, fishing, mountain house tourism, railroads, and even World War II pilot training. Much of it had been deforested during the Industrial Revolution to supply...
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The Catskill Park is a mountainous region of public and private lands in the Ulster, Green, Delaware and Sullivan Counties of New York State. It is a blend of public and private lands of often remote mountain landscape. Its rich history includes logging, blue stone quarrying, leather tinning, wintergreen and blueberry harvesting, trapping, fishing, mountain house tourism, railroads, and even World War II pilot training. Much of it had been deforested during the Industrial Revolution to supply New York City with lumber. Over 60% of the lands in the Catskill Park are privately owned, the home of about 50,000 year round residents. For eight months in 2007 I lived in the midst of that beautiful landscape while working in the area. I would occasionally take walks in the serenity of the forest that surrounded my cottage. During one such walk I came upon a clearing, a kind of meadow, blanketed with a knee-high carpet of fern plants. And in the midst of this clearing was an assortment of old and abandoned vehicles. It was like a graveyard of automobiles instead of elephants. There was no road or any visible sign of how they got there. A license plate from 1962 indicated they had been put there around 40 years ago. In those 40 years Nature began to slowly embrace what Man had made, used, discarded, and forgotten. In the midst of this embrace I walked as a visitor, a witness, and recorder of a wonderful tableau of decay; evidence of the ceaseless march of time. I returned on a couple of occasions with my camera before moving away. I hope that I have caught in these images the transience of Man's creations and the beauty in Nature's work to reclaim them.
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