United States · New York
Catskills (Phoenicia)
Two hours from Manhattan: the range where American landscape painting was invented, and where the city's water still comes from.
The Catskills are a rumpled block of forested mountains west of the Hudson River, close enough to New York City that the range has been the city's escape hatch for two hundred years and, since the reservoirs went in, the source of its drinking water. Around seven hundred thousand acres sit inside the Blue Line of the state park, roughly half of it constitutionally protected forest preserve and the rest private land with working hamlets scattered through it. The peaks are lower and softer than the ranges further north, but the valleys are cut by narrow gorges with waterfalls in them, and the villages have more bookshops, diners and galleries than a wilderness this size has any right to.
Suggested stay
2–4 days
Language
English
Currency
USD
Timezone
UTC-4
Why you'll love Catskills (Phoenicia)
Close in the fastest jump from a dense city to real mountains anywhere in the northeast, near enough for a weekend and wild enough that the trails still feel like an undertaking
The escarpment a wall of mountains rising straight off the Hudson valley with ledge-top views that launched a whole school of American painting, and the ruins of the hotel that sold those views still lying in the moss
Cloves and creeks steep-sided gorges with waterfalls at the roadside, swimming holes down side roads and a creek you can float down on a tube through the middle of a village
Villages, not gateways one-street hamlets with a diner, a gear shop and a bar rather than resort complexes, and a long artistic streak running through them
Best time to visit
May-Jun, Oct
16-23° days
42.078° N, 74.305° W
UTC-4 · America/New York
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Weather & when to go to Catskills (Phoenicia)
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best May-Jun, Oct
Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Catskills (Phoenicia)
December through March is the lean stretch outside the ski areas, with short grey days, cold rain alternating with snow, icy trails that need spikes and a lot of small businesses closed midweek. April is mud season, black flies bite from late May into June, and high summer brings humidity, afternoon thunderstorms and bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic at the popular trailheads.
Top things to do in Catskills (Phoenicia)
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Kaaterskill Falls - the two-drop waterfall the painters made famous
nature wildlife scenic hiking 👍 PopularWater comes off an amphitheatre lip and falls in two stages to a plunge pool, one of the tallest falls in New York State and the single most painted piece of ground in the range. You can walk in from the roadside on Route 23A past Bastion Falls, or come down a stairway from the Laurel House Road viewing platform at the top. The rock is slick and people fall off it every year, so stay on the built paths.
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North-South Lake and the Escarpment Trail - the Catskill Mountain House ledge
hiking scenic history ⭐ Highly recommendedThe grand hotel that stood on this ledge from 1824 is long gone, but the platform of rock it sat on still gives the view down the Hudson valley that made the Catskills a destination. Short walks from the campground reach Artist's Rock, Sunset Rock and Boulder Rock, and the Escarpment Trail runs the clifftop north for days if you want it to.
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Overlook Mountain - fire tower, hotel ruin and a monastery at the trailhead
hiking scenic history ⭐ Highly recommendedA steady climb on an old road out of Woodstock past the concrete carcass of the Overlook Mountain House, abandoned half-built and now full of saplings, to a restored fire tower with the whole Hudson valley underneath. A Tibetan Buddhist monastery sits at the bottom of the trail, and the ledges partway up are known rattlesnake ground, so watch where you sit.
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Esopus Creek - tube the run through Phoenicia
adventure nature wildlife 👍 PopularThe classic hot-afternoon Catskills activity: hire a tube in the village, ride the shuttle upstream and float back down through riffles and a couple of genuine rapids. The creek keeps its flow through summer partly because water is released into it from a reservoir tunnel upstream, which is why it runs when other local creeks are bony.
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Hunter, Windham and Belleayre - the closest lift-served skiing to New York City
snow adventure 👍 PopularThree ski areas within an hour of each other: Hunter with the biggest drop and the loudest weekend crowd, Windham quieter and more polished, and Belleayre run by the state above Pine Hill. None of them is a Rockies mountain and all of them lean hard on snowmaking, but they are what a New Yorker can reach and ski on the same day. Hunter also runs one of the longest zipline courses in North America off the same hillside in summer.
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Slide Mountain - the highest summit in the Catskills
hiking nature wildlifeAt just over four thousand feet it tops the range, reached on a steady half-day climb from the Slide Mountain trailhead through fir forest to a ledge with a plaque to the naturalist John Burroughs bolted to the rock. The true summit is wooded, so the view comes from the ledge just below it, looking straight across at the Burroughs Range.
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The Devil's Path - the hardest ridge walk in the east
hiking adventureA brutal line over Indian Head, Twin, Sugarloaf, Plateau and Hunter, dropping into a deep notch between each one and climbing rock scrambles back out. Regularly called the toughest trail in the eastern United States, and the through-hike is a serious day or an overnight; the individual peaks make hard but sane out-and-backs.
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Ashokan Reservoir - the rail trail and the dividing weir
scenic history nature wildlifeA flat trail runs along the reservoir's northern shore on the bed of the old Ulster and Delaware railway, with the high peaks lined up across the water and no shade to speak of. The promenade over the dividing weir on the southern side gives the postcard view. Twelve hamlets were bought out and drowned to build this, and the cemeteries were moved uphill.
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Woodstock village - Byrdcliffe, Tinker Street and the Maverick
culture arts shopping historyThe arts colony on the hill above town was founded in 1902 and is still there in its dark-stained wooden studios; the Maverick Concert Hall in the woods nearby has run a summer chamber music series longer than any other in the country. Down in the village it is galleries, bookshops, a green with drumming on it and a lot of people conflating the town with a festival held sixty miles away.
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Beaverkill and Willowemoc - fish where American dry-fly fishing started
nature wildlife historyThe two rivers meet at Junction Pool in Roscoe, a village that calls itself Trout Town, and it was on this water and the nearby Neversink that Theodore Gordon adapted English dry flies to American conditions around the turn of the last century. A fly-fishing museum upstream at Livingston Manor holds the rods and flies, and the covered bridge pools are open to anyone with a licence.
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Kaatskill Kaleidoscope, Mount Tremper - stand inside a grain silo
culture artsA farm silo on Route 28 was converted into what is billed as the world's largest kaleidoscope: you lie back on the floor of it and the show plays across the mirrors above you. Ten minutes long, completely daft, and the best rainy-afternoon option on this stretch of road.
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Phoenicia Diner - the Route 28 roadside institution
foodA 1962 stainless-steel diner car on the highway outside the village, cooking a mountain-town breakfast well past breakfast time with local produce in it. The queue on an autumn Sunday morning is a fair measure of how many people have driven up from the city that weekend.
Best areas to stay in Catskills (Phoenicia)
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Phoenicia
First-time visitors $$Creekside hamlet at the trailheads
Explore hotels in Phoenicia →
Woodstock
Culture and browsing $$$Art-colony village with a famous name
Explore hotels in Woodstock →
Tannersville and Hunter
Skiers and families $$Painted main street below the ski hills
Explore hotels in Tannersville and Hunter →
Livingston Manor and Roscoe
Anglers and slow weekends $Trout rivers and quiet western valleys
Explore hotels in Livingston Manor and Roscoe →
Kingston
Car-free arrivals $$Hudson river city at the gateway
Explore hotels in Kingston →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Catskills (Phoenicia)
Getting to & around Catskills (Phoenicia)
Getting there
Drive up from New York City in about two and a half hours, or take the Trailways coach to Kingston, Woodstock and Phoenicia
Flight
New York Stewart International Airport, Newburgh (SWF)
Stewart is the nearest airport to the eastern Catskills, about an hour and a quarter to Phoenicia: pick up a rental car, run north on I-87, the Thruway, to Exit 19 at Kingston, then west on Route 28 up the Esopus valley. Flight choice there is thin, so plenty of visitors fly into a New York City airport instead and drive two and a half to three hours, while Albany is the better bet for the northern Catskills at around an hour and three quarters. Without a car, the Trailways coach from Manhattan runs the same Route 28 corridor and sets down in Kingston, Woodstock, Phoenicia and Pine Hill.
Drive
Phoenicia
How nearly everyone arrives. The Thruway, I-87, runs up the eastern edge of the range: Exit 19 at Kingston then Route 28 west for Phoenicia, Belleayre and Slide Mountain, or Exit 20 at Saugerties then Route 23A up the Kaaterskill Clove for Tannersville and Hunter. The western Catskills come off Route 17 instead
Coach
Phoenicia Main Street
Adirondack Trailways runs from the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan to Kingston and on up Route 28 through Woodstock, Phoenicia and Pine Hill. A genuine car-free option if you plan to stay in one village and walk from it
Train
Rhinecliff
Amtrak's Hudson line stops at Rhinecliff and Hudson on the far bank, and Metro-North commuter trains reach Poughkeepsie. All of them leave you on the wrong side of the river with a taxi or rental car still to sort out
Getting around
Car
Effectively compulsory. Trailheads, waterfalls and villages are spread across four counties on winding two-lane roads, and the drive between two neighbouring hamlets can still be half an hour
TBC
On foot
Phoenicia, Woodstock, Tannersville and the Kingston Stockade District are all walkable once you have parked. Nothing between them is, and there are no footpaths along the highways
Free
Coach
The Trailways service along Route 28 doubles as local transport between Kingston, Woodstock, Phoenicia and Pine Hill, but it runs a handful of times a day and goes nowhere else
TBC
Taxi and rideshare
Reasonable in and around Kingston, thin and slow everywhere else, and there is no guarantee of a car back from a trailhead. Do not build a day around it
TBC
Bicycle
The rail trail along the Ashokan Reservoir and the quiet valley roads are excellent riding; the main highways through the cloves are steep, narrow and busy at weekends
TBC
Day trips from Catskills (Phoenicia)
Thomas Cole's house and Olana
Full dayHudson River School houses
Cole painted the Catskill escarpment from the porch of his house at Catskill and effectively invented American landscape painting doing it. Across the river his student Frederic Church built Olana, a Persian-inspired villa on a hilltop laid out as one enormous composed view. Seeing both in a day explains most of what you have been looking at all weekend.
Getting there
car
About 1 hr drive northeast to Catskill and Hudson
The Shawangunks: Minnewaska and Mohonk
Full dayCliff ridge and lakes
A separate white-conglomerate ridge south of the Catskills, with sky-lakes on top, carriage roads cut into the cliff edges, Awosting Falls and one of the best-known trad climbing crags in the country. A Victorian mountain hotel with a tower on the summit anchors the northern end. Steeper, whiter and more dramatic rock than anything in the Catskills proper.
Getting there
car
About 1 hr drive south to New Paltz
Bethel Woods and the 1969 festival field
Full dayMusic history site
The Woodstock festival happened here, on a dairy farmer's sloping alfalfa field sixty miles from the town it borrowed its name from. The field is preserved and open, and the museum beside it does an honest job of the whole 1960s context rather than just the weekend. An amphitheatre on the site runs concerts through the warm months.
Getting there
car
About 1 hr 45 min drive southwest into Sullivan County
Opus 40 and Saugerties
Half dayQuarry sculpture
One man spent almost forty years turning an abandoned bluestone quarry into a sweep of dry-laid ramps, terraces and pools around a standing monolith, working with quarrymen's hand tools. Saugerties village nearby has an antiques main street and a walk out along a spit to a lighthouse that still works.
Getting there
car
About 35 min drive east
Hyde Park and Rhinebeck
Full dayRiver estates
Franklin Roosevelt's family home and the first presidential library sit on the east bank, with a Vanderbilt mansion up the road and the country's best-known cooking school between them, restaurants open to the public. Rhinebeck village a little north has an inn that has been serving since the 1700s and an aerodrome flying First World War biplanes at weekends.
Getting there
car
About 1 hr drive east across the river
Storm King Art Center
Full daySculpture parkland
Five hundred acres of mown hillside with monumental steel and stone sculpture set across it, big enough that you walk or hire a bike between works, and the surrounding hills are half the composition. It closes over the winter, so keep it for the warm end of the year.
Getting there
car
About 1 hr 30 min drive south to New Windsor
A little history of Catskills (Phoenicia)
This was Lenape country, hunted rather than settled at height, and the Dutch traders in the valley below gave the range the name that stuck, from their word for the creek running out of it. The high interior stayed blank on maps well into the nineteenth century, at which point two things happened almost together: Washington Irving put a sleeping Dutchman in these mountains in 1819, and a hotel opened on the escarpment ledge in 1824 selling the sunrise over the Hudson valley. Thomas Cole came up to paint the falls and the clove, his pictures founded the Hudson River School, and the Catskills became the first landscape Americans travelled to look at on purpose.
Then the range was worked hard. Tanneries stripped the hemlock forests for their bark, quarries cut bluestone for city pavements, and railways carried both out and boarding-house guests in. The state drew a line around a forest preserve in 1885 and voters made it forever wild in 1894, but the biggest change came from New York City's thirst: between 1907 and the 1950s a chain of reservoirs was built through the valleys, drowning whole hamlets and moving their graveyards uphill. Sullivan County meanwhile filled with the Jewish resorts of the Borscht Belt, which emptied again when cheap flights arrived, and a festival named after a Catskills art town was held on a farm in the same county in 1969. The weekender wave that followed is the range's present economy.
Henry Hudson sails the river below the escarpment; the mountains are Lenape hunting ground and Dutch traders name them for the creek
Washington Irving publishes Rip Van Winkle, setting his twenty-year sleep in these mountains
The Catskill Mountain House opens on the escarpment ledge, selling the Hudson valley sunrise to city visitors
Thomas Cole exhibits his Catskill landscapes in New York, launching the Hudson River School
Hemlock tanneries strip the forests; the works at Prattsville are among the largest anywhere, and Tannersville is named for the trade
New York creates the Catskill Forest Preserve alongside the Adirondack one
Voters write the forever wild clause into the state constitution, permanently protecting the preserve
Theodore Gordon adapts English dry flies to the Neversink and Beaverkill, founding American dry-fly fishing
The Byrdcliffe colony is founded above Woodstock, beginning the village's century as an artists' town
The Ashokan Reservoir fills, drowning a dozen hamlets to supply New York City with water
The Pepacton Reservoir takes four more Delaware County villages under the Delaware system
The Borscht Belt resorts of Sullivan County peak, having schooled a generation of American comedians, then fade as cheap flights change where families go
The Woodstock festival is held at Bethel, sixty miles from the town whose name it took
The rail trail along the northern shore of the Ashokan Reservoir opens on the old railway bed
Know before you go
Payment
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Everywhere
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Power
Type A / B
120 V, 60 Hz
Dialing
+1
The months our climate read flags to avoid: the wettest, lowest-rated weather of the year.
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FAQs about Catskills (Phoenicia)
▸ When is the best time to visit the Catskills?
May, June and October. October is the standout: cool clear air, dry trails and the foliage that packs the roads in the first half of the month. May and June are green-up, high water in the creeks and everything open before the summer crowds, with black flies the price you pay. July and August are warm, humid and thundery, and busy at weekends.
▸ Was the Woodstock festival held in Woodstock?
No. It was held on a farm at Bethel in Sullivan County, about sixty miles southwest, after the town of Woodstock and then another site turned the organisers down. The name came from the festival company, which had been based in Woodstock. The field and a museum are open to visitors, and the town of Woodstock is a separate, older artists' colony worth its own afternoon.
▸ Do I need a car?
Effectively yes, though less absolutely than in most mountain regions. The Trailways coach from Manhattan will put you in Kingston, Woodstock, Phoenicia or Pine Hill, and from any of those you can walk the village, eat well and reach some trails on foot or by a short taxi hop. Anything spread out, which is most of it, assumes a vehicle.
▸ How far is it from New York City?
About two to two and a half hours' drive to the eastern Catskills, longer on a Friday evening in autumn. That proximity is the whole point of the place and also its main drawback: popular trailheads fill early at weekends and the parking, not the trail, is usually the limiting factor.
▸ Can you swim in the reservoirs?
No. The reservoirs are New York City's unfiltered water supply and contact with the water is prohibited; some allow rowing with a permit and a scrubbed boat, but no swimming or wading anywhere. Swim in the creeks, the state campground lakes and the roadside swimming holes instead, and remember mountain water stays cold well into summer.
▸ Is the skiing any good?
It is honest skiing rather than great skiing, and its virtue is that a New Yorker can drive up and be on a lift the same morning. Three lift-served areas run from roughly late autumn into early spring, all heavily dependent on snowmaking, with modest vertical and busy weekends. Anyone travelling internationally for snow should be looking further north or west.
▸ Catskills or Adirondacks?
The Catskills are closer to the city, lower, softer and much more settled, with better food and stronger cultural pull for a short trip. The Adirondacks are far bigger, wilder and higher, and reward a week rather than a weekend. Choose the Catskills for a two- or three-night escape, the Adirondacks for a proper mountain holiday.
▸ What are the Catskill 3500s?
The thirty-five peaks in the range measured above three thousand five hundred feet, and the list a hiking club has been ticking off since the 1960s. Several have no marked trail to the summit, and four of them must be repeated in winter to complete the round, which turns a hiking list into a multi-year project.
▸ Is it expensive?
It has become one of the pricier weekend regions in the northeast, and the eastern villages closest to the city are where you feel it most in beds and dinner. The western Catskills and the Delaware County hamlets are noticeably easier on the wallet, camping is cheap, and the hiking, the waterfalls and the state land cost nothing to walk on.
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