Catskill Park: What's Inside the Blue Line

In Ulster County, the Catskill Park stretches from near the Hudson River just west of the city of Kingston in the east and continues to the north to Saugerties and to the west through Woodstock and on to Highmount. The Park consists of 700,000 acres of land inside a “Blue Line” in four counties: Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, and Ulster.

The Blue Line is a term used in New York for the boundaries of the Adirondack and Catskill parks, within which can be found the state's Forest Preserve. New York’s constitution requires that any property owned or acquired by the state in those parks "be forever kept as wild forest lands" and prohibits it from selling or transferring them in any way.

It is so called because blue ink was used when they were first drawn on state maps. That started a tradition that persists to this day. While they were originally meant merely to guide the acquisition of future Forest Preserve land, over time they have come to define and have legal impact on all lands, public and private, within them.

In Ulster County, the area inside the Blue Line was first used by the Mohawks for hunting and fishing. Dutch, English, Irish, and Germans  settled in Ulster County’s portion of the Catskill Park engaging in logging, bluestone quarrying, leather tanning, trapping, fishing and eventually tourism. 

Today the bobcats, minks and fishers, coyotes and black bears which first attracted people to the region remain, and, while hunting, in season, is still permitted, the forest preserve attracts about a half million visitors a year to tamer pursuits like antique shopping or touring art galleries. With tiny, charming hamlets such as Phoenicia, Pine Hill and Oliveria to explore, the highest peak in the Catskills (Slide Mountain) to climb, and world famous fly fishing in the upper Esopus Creek there is plenty to see and do in the Catskill Park year round.