Waiting for the crisis to pass, our thoughts go out to friends and loved-ones who also shelter in place. Old friends pass away, people we loved and admired. Immobilized for the time being, we can revisit destinations, near and far. join me in celebrating the joys of Quaranteam travel, the hope that these diversions might inspire us to value things we had taken for granted, to draw strength, wisdom and compassion from deeper engagements with nature.
Lower Cataract, Kaaterskill Creek. March 15, 2012.
(Image and text were featured in the exhibition James McElhinney. Discover the Hudson Anew, curated by Laura Vookles. Hudson River Museum. Yonkers, New York. September 13, 2019 to February 16, 2020. Published also as a limited-edition in Hudson Highlands. North River Suite Volume One. Needlewatcher Editions. New York. 2018)
“The first pitch is nigh two hundred feet; and the water looks like flakes of driven snow afore it touches the bottom; and then the stream gathers itself together again for a new start, and may be flutters over fifty feet of flat rock, before it falls another hundred, where it jumps from shelf to shelf, first turning this-a-way, and then turning that-a-way, striving to get out of the hollow, until it finally comes to the plain…The rock sweeps like mason-work on both sides of the fall, and shelves over the bottom for fifty feet…it’s the best piece of work I’ve met with in the woods; and none know how often the hand of God is seen in the Wilderness, but them that rove it for a man’s life.”
–Benson J. Lossing (1813-1891). The Hudson from the Wilderness to the Sea. 1866
Katers-Kill Falls. Benson John Lossing. Chromolithograph. 1860-1866 (7.1 × 5 cm (2 13/16 × 1 15/16 in.). Collection. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. (Reproduced under fair Use, etc.)
North-South Lake drains into Spruce Creek, which flows southward for roughly a mile, before plunging over a rocky precipice into a shallow pool on a broad ledge of rock, over which it cascades into a rocky defile known as Kaaterskill Clove. The combined height of the falls is 260 feet, neatly eighty feel taller than Niagara. Below the second falls the creek assumes a new identity, sharing its name with the gorge it has carved out the eastern escarpment of the Catskill mountains. Descending the gorge via a series of smaller falls and cataracts, treacherous waters give way to a chain of swimming-holes before the stream meanders across the floodplain and into to the Hudson, at the village of Catskill.
British-born Thomas Cole (1801-1848) had moved from England to Ohio with his family, but soon made his way east, to study in Philadelphia before settling in New York. The year after William Guy Wall published the last set of six prints in his Hudson River Portfolio—the same year the Erie Canal opened to traffic—Cole ventured upriver to visit what were well on their way to becoming bucket-list destinations. Both Sunset Rock and Kaaterskill Falls were within an easy walk of the Catskill Mountain House hotel. While he was not the first artist to behold these wonders, he was the first to establish them within the canon of American landscape painting. In Asher B. Durand’s memorial painting of Cole, the painter and his friend, poet William Cullen Bryant converse on an outcrop of Kaaterskill Clove. Bryant celebrated in verse the spectacle they both loved.
“Midst greens and shades the Katers-Kill leaps,
From cliffs where the wood-flower clings;
All summer he moistens his verdant steeps, with the sweet light spray of the mountain springs;
And he shakes the woods on the mountain side,
When they drip with the rains of the autumn tide”
Asher B. Durand. Kindred Spirits. 1849. Collection Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. (reproduced under Fair Use, etc.)
Check out April 2020 Quaranteam Traveler Dispatches
(A preview of SKETCHBOOK TRAVELER by James L. McElhinney (c) 2020. Schiffer Publishing).
Copyright James Lancel McElhinney (c) 2020 Texts and images may be reproduced (with proper citation) by permission of the author. To enquire, send a request to editions@needlewatcher.com