Conservation Spotlight: the Catskill Center's 3.6 Acre Add at Platte Clove

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Jeff Senterman: So those 3.6 acres—it doesn't sound like very much land, but it is the last undeveloped parcel here at the top of Platte Clove.

[00:00:10] Kali Bird: This is a beautiful property with a lot of native habitat, plants, animals, and breeding habitat for our interior forest birds. It's also—it's really critical access for people to be able to get out into some of the more wilderness and very rugged areas of the Catskills, which are so special and so important for so many people.

[00:00:34] Brett Barry: In our last episode, we detailed the Open Space Institute's acquisition of 3,100 acres in the Southwest Catskills. Today's show covers the protection of a parcel that's just 3.6 acres, but it's a critical piece in a treasured clove. This is Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast, and today we are off to the Platte Clove Preserve to talk with the Catskill Center's Jeff Senterman and Kali Bird about this 208, make that 211.6-acre preserve, and later in the show, Jeff and Kali reflect on their 10 years at the Catskill Center and how the organization has evolved in its advocacy for the Catskills. All that and more right after this...

[00:01:20] Campbell Brown: This episode is brought to you by Briars & Brambles Books, the go-to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path, open daily! For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call (518) 750-8599; and by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past at their 2025 events that feature woodworking, historic machines, and even ice cream! You can find a calendar of events and more information about visiting the museum at hanfordmills.org.

[00:01:58] Jeff Senterman: I am Jeff Senterman. I'm the Executive Director of the Catskill Center, and we are at the Catskill Center's Platte Clove Preserve at the top of Platte Clove in the Town of Hunter.

[00:02:07] Kali Bird: And I'm Kali Bird. I'm the Deputy Executive Director of the Catskill Center.

[00:02:12] Brett Barry: And this house that we are at, this little rustic cabin on the side of the road, has some history of its own. Can you tell me what that is in relation to the Catskill Center or even maybe before?

[00:02:24] Jeff Senterman: We call it the Artist Cabin. It's also been known as the Little Red Cabin for anybody that drives Platte Clove Road and goes by. It has been part of the preserve since the Catskill Center acquired the lands back in the 1970s. It's been used in a number of different ways over the years. Most recently, for about 20 years, it was home to the Catskill Center's Artisan Residence Program. That program has winded down, and now we are looking to preserve and protect this cabin, keep it up, and look at new ways that we can use it to engage with the public and help interpret the Platte Clove Preserve for the public.

[00:03:02] Brett Barry: What's the history of this property, and how did the Catskill Center come to be its steward?

[00:03:09] Jeff Senterman: So Platte Clove has been sort of a destination for a very long time for folks coming to the Catskills [just down the street used to be what was called the Grand Canyon of the Catskills]. Other folks may know it as the hellhole now or Devil's Kitchen, so this has always been a place where people have come and congregated and explored and relaxed—the property before the Catskill Center was owned by the Griswold family, and then there was the Kukle family that also has property nearby, and the Kukles spoke with the Griswolds about the importance of this property, about the historical significance of the area [this was all during the 1970s], and convinced the Griswold family to donate about 206 acres of land to the Catskill Center, so there's a hundred acres of the preserve south of Platte Clove Road and about a hundred acres north of Platte Clove Road now.

[00:04:02] Brett Barry: And "Forever Wild" in the hands of the Catskill Center—tell me how that kind of stewardship works and how it might be different from something like the New York State Forest Preserve.

[00:04:13] Jeff Senterman: While the Catskill Center manages the Platte Clove Preserve and owns the Platte Clove Preserve as a wilderness property, it is not state land, and so state lands within the Catskill Park Blue Line are considered forever wild forest lands under the state constitution, but because we are a private owner, we're free to manage the property just like any other private owner would be, but part of the donation of the preserve to the Catskill Center by the Griswold family was that we keep it as a generally wilderness area that [things like trails and the upkeep of the red cabin] can go on, but in general, you know, leave the property as it is and protect it as a wilderness site.

[00:04:56] Brett Barry: How can visitors use this property? What are the restrictions? What are the opportunities? How do people engage with this parcel?

[00:05:03] Kali Bird: Well, I think we should go walk down to the waterfall.

[00:05:07] Brett Barry: Let's do it.

[00:05:08] Kali Bird: Yeah, so there is a waterfall on site, which is beautiful. People are not allowed to swim or camp or hunt or fish, and no ATVs. I don't know how you get one on here, but I'm sure that could happen [no motor vehicles or bikes used]. Yeah, but there are trails, so the Long Path does go through the property, so there's a long-distance hiking trail that goes through here that does get a lot of use, access to the Devil's Path, and for, you know, birdwatching, nature, enjoyment, reflection, art, et cetera—anything you want to do outside. It's a beautiful property.

[00:05:46] Brett Barry: And it's open to the public [daytime hours], is that right?

[00:05:50] Kali Bird: Daytime, yes.

[00:05:51] Brett Barry: Rules explained! I stowed my bathing suit, fishing rod, rifle, and tent back onto the old Kaatscast ATV, and Kali and I simply hiked a short distance to the bottom of the waterfall.

[00:06:04] Kali Bird: So this trail is just adjacent to the road, which is awesome because it really provides access to folks who don't want to go hiking on a very long trip up to the top of a mountain.

[00:06:20] Brett Barry: Yeah, so it's very accessible right off the road. This is called the Waterfall Trail, and it heads down to the base of this beautiful waterfall with these switchbacks.

[00:06:30] Kali Bird: Yes, so the trail's about—only about a third of a mile long, though it is root-y and has lots of rocks, and it's steep to get down to the base of the waterfall, but it is only a third of a mile long, so it's really great access for a quick trip or for someone who does not want to go on a six-mile hike perhaps.

[00:06:53] Brett Barry: And through the magic of editing, here we are at the bottom of the falls, and here we are at this beautiful waterfall. How tall is this fall?

[00:07:01] Kali Bird: About 60 feet, and you can see people are hanging out on the rocks enjoying it, which is awesome.

[00:07:07] Brett Barry: This is a beautiful spot, and it looks like it could be a really nice alternative to an even more high-use area like Kaaterskill. It's gorgeous, so it's got that same kind of character—this bowl that this waterfall is flowing into.

[00:07:25] Kali Bird: Just don't go tell the, I don't even know, 40,000 people that go to Kaaterskill Falls every year, whatever it is, maybe just your podcast listeners.

[00:07:34] Brett Barry: We'll just keep it to our small audience.

[00:07:35] Kali Bird: Yeah, I mean, the color of the water—look how beautiful.

[00:07:40] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:07:40] Kali Bird: It's so nice.

[00:07:41] Brett Barry: So we're heading back up the trail, and this kind of a mossy clove with lots of ferns and big rock outcrops heading up back to the little cabin. Kali, what does it mean for you to come to a place like this? I assume that most of the work you do is out of an office, so does this give you kind of a needed recharge?

[00:08:03] Kali Bird: Yeah, so most of my job is really helping to ensure that everybody else can do theirs really well, so I do a lot of, basically, operations oversight, making sure that cash flows in and out in all the appropriate ways, making sure that people are equipped and able to do their work effectively, and so I don't actually get to interface with the outcome and, like, and to see a lot of the work we do as much as, of course, I would love, so having the opportunity to be at this property, which is completely amazing, and to see people enjoy it and put their toes in the water and recharge themselves is actually very awesome for me and just delightful, and that's really why I do what I do.

[00:08:56] Brett Barry: Back at the cabin, Jeff Senterman elaborated on some of the features of the Platte Clove Preserve.

[00:09:02] Jeff Senterman: So we have a number of different trails here on the preserve. As Kali had mentioned, there's the Overlook Trail. We have the trail to the waterfall, and then on the other side of Platte Clove Road on the north side, the trail up to Huckleberry Point traverses our property, and the really cool thing about the Platte Clove Preserve is that it's surrounded probably by about 90% state land, and so the Platte Clove Preserve on both sides of Platte Clove Road are really kind of the entryways to significant wild forest and wilderness areas, and so to the south is the Indian Head Wilderness Area, which is tens of thousands of acres of wilderness area across the Devil's Path range, and to our north is the Kaaterskill Wild Forest, which immediately to the north is Kaaterskill High Peak and Roundtop Mountains, and so really to access any of those lands and all of the trails that are on that forest preserve, folks have to begin here at the trailhead on Platte Clove Road and come through the Platte Clove Preserve, so it's an awesome opportunity for us at the Catskill Center to kind of welcome people to the Catskill Center and in the Catskill Park and to have them understand what the Catskill Center is doing here.

[00:10:16] Brett Barry: What is the Catskill Center doing here? For those who don't know, can you both maybe give me a little overview of the relationship between the Catskill Center and the Catskills and how you interface with the public and the programs from a very kind of bird's-eye view?

[00:10:33] Jeff Senterman: The Catskill Center was founded in 1969 in order to preserve, protect, and enrich the environmental, cultural, and economic resources of the Catskills. Now that's a really wide-ranging mission, and I joke when people ask me, "What you do with that?" I basically means that the Catskill Center can work kind of in all areas across the Catskills, and we have done it in many different ways in the 56 years of history that we have here in the Catskills. Our real big goal, for all of our work, I think, through all of that time, has been to show that both natural places and communities can coexist and really need each other. You know, the reason—one of the reasons why the Catskills is so special—is because we have such amazing protected wild areas, and within that are nestled vibrant communities, and so people are not only coming to the Catskills like in a traditional park sense, where you go to a park to just recreate and, you know, you have that experience, or the park protects one certain resource. The Catskill Park is both those incredible wild areas, but it's also those incredible communities, and so all of our work throughout time has been to protect as much as possible across the Catskills. We've—over that history—protected tens of thousands of acres of land that have been transferred to New York State. Other properties, like this Platte Clove Preserve, we have kept as our own preserves. That's been our driving force: how do we protect the Catskills but protect them holistically as opposed to simply focusing on, you know, just protecting natural resources?

[00:12:12] Brett Barry: And also conservation easements on lands that you don't own, right?

[00:12:16] Jeff Senterman: Correct, we hold about 2,000 acres of conservation easements on other folks' property throughout the Catskills that help protect those properties from further development.

[00:12:27] Brett Barry: So the Catskill Center just acquired 3.6 acres, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's an important parcel that is added to the Platte Clove Preserve. Tell me a little bit about this property. How did it come up for sale, or was there an effort to acquire it, and why is it so important to add it to what you have here?

[00:12:51] Jeff Senterman: So those 3.6 acres, like you said, it doesn't sound like very much land, but it is the last undeveloped parcel here at the top of Platte Clove, so the other properties—there is an existing home that is privately owned, but then the rest of the properties surrounding the top of Platte Clove are all in public hands or in the hands of the Catskill Center, and so when a for sale sign went up on that property, we were concerned at the Catskill Center, and the community was concerned, the town, the state, everybody was concerned, but as I think everybody who has ever looked at real estate in the Catskills knows that real estate market can be challenging, and so, you know, at first when we looked into it, it was beyond the means of the Catskill Center to move quickly and to make a purchase. The Catskill Center is a nonprofit organization without unlimited resources, and so therefore we had a conversation with the private owner at the time but weren't able to make an offer. We had a lot of conversations with lots of people, and we had a donor that stepped forward and was willing to help the Catskill Center as long as we also included some of our own funding and entered into a conversation with that private owner of the property, and we were able to secure that 3.6 acres for about $300,000.

[00:14:13] Brett Barry: How would the nature of this place have changed if that property had gone to someone who built a big house on it? What would that look like, and what have we avoided as a community by the Catskill Center stepping in and preserving that land?

[00:14:28] Jeff Senterman: First and foremost, it would just change the natural character of the top of Platte Clove, so the house that does exist here currently has been—it's the original Griswold home, so it has been here, you know, for many, many decades and is kind of part of the landscape, which then overlooks the property that we acquired, which, has sort of been an overgrowing field, I guess, is the way that I would describe it, throughout the last several years, and you probably would have seen, you know, sort of the removal of the forest around the field area. You would've seen that field turn into a lawn and a home. You would've had, in terms of natural resources and wildlife connectivity, just a break-in the wilderness and the forest between the north and south sides of Platte Clove Road, and for anyone driving up and down the scenic byway, the Mountain Clove Scenic Byway, which Platte Clove Road is part of, instead of that view out across Platte Clove, from that field you would maybe see a fence and a home. You know, it was really important to us that we try to find a way to avoid that, and, you know, we are—we're grateful that we were able to step in and make that purchase to keep it in the state that it's in and also plan for the future on ways that we can utilize that property to better move people around through the Platte Clove Preserve and out to the forest preserve beyond.

[00:16:02] Brett Barry: Kali, tell me a little bit about your relationship to this property.

[00:16:05] Kali Bird: Sure, this is a beautiful property with a lot of native habitat, plants, animals, and really important breeding habitat for our interior forest birds. It's also a really critical access for people to be able to get out into some of the more wilderness and very rugged areas of the Catskills, which are so special and so important for so many people, and adding this parcel of land helps improve the safety of that access, which is also important for our local communities, as it is an extremely popular destination. One of the things I didn't mention is that a lot of people use this property to ice climb next door on the state property. It is not allowed on our property on the waterfall, but it is really good access for climbing on the state property nearby, so, you know, people use the land for so many different things, and adding this piece will help improve that opportunity as well as helping to continue to protect the integrity, the ecological integrity, of this land. Anytime people are building anything, especially new homes, there's usually fill that comes in. There's usually more invasive plants that come in, not intentionally, but seeds will come in with the dirt. It'll come in on equipment, et cetera, and so by not having a new building at the top of a clove, it also means we will not have that new source of invasive plant seeds coming in at the top of a clove to filter down and trickle down with the waterways to the bottom and all along through, so it really does just help to protect the ecological integrity of this whole landscape.

[00:17:47] Brett Barry: And the Catskill Center is an accredited land trust, and that was recently renewed. Can you tell me anything about that?

[00:17:54] Kali Bird: Sure, so we are part of the Land Trust Alliance, and there is a Land Trust Accreditation Commission, which helps to ensure or otherwise sort of certify land trusts across our country that they are fulfilling their responsibilities as a land trust in sort of best practices in all sorts of ways, from governance and financial sustainability viability to—are they doing everything they need to do to actually be able to perpetually protect the lands that they're entrusted with? So are they monitoring their easements? Do they do all of the due diligence necessary before they close on new properties such as this one so we are accredited by the Land Trust Accreditation Commission? This is our first property that we have acquired in fee since I joined, I believe, 10 years ago. I joined the Catskill Center, so we don't acquire properties very often, so it's actually kind of a big deal for us, not just acquiring this particular property, but any property really in fee for the Catskill Center to have, so it, you know, it's not—we don't have staff that regularly do these transactions, so it was a nice opportunity to, you know, go through all of our documents and make sure we're jotting all our i's and crossing all our t's and continuing to pull the standards of, you know, best practices for land acquisition and management in the Catskills.

[00:19:24] Brett Barry: And you just created a really nice segue for me. You mentioned that this is the first acquisition since you've been with the Catskill Center [10 years], and this year marks both of your 10-year anniversaries with the Catskill Center, so congratulations. I guess reflect a little bit for me on those 10 years and some of your proudest accomplishments or what it's like to be a part of this organization.

[00:19:48] Kali Bird: I would say it's been a whirlwind in so many ways. 10 years is a long time for any particular thing, so over these 10 years of time at the Catskill Center, when I first started, we had about 6 staff and a $600,000 budget, and more recently we've had about 24 full-time equivalent staff and a nearly $3 million budget, a $2.5 million budget, so it's been a lot of growth but also lots of challenges with that, both in terms of just growth [but moving from one place to another place as an organization]. Jeff and I inherited one organization with a certain sort of culture and background, and, you know, we've really brought it to not a different organization, but just a new place. I mean, 10 years out of 56 is kind of a significant amount, you know, in terms of just the experienced life and accomplishments of an organization, and so I think in terms of proudest accomplishments, honestly, I think I feel like we have a better foundation from governance structures for collaboration for advocacy. We're, I think we are, a more equipped partner for achieving great things in the Catskills now than we were 10 years ago. You know, I think when we inherited the organization, on some level of the leadership of the organization, there were some really big dreams and some, like, really significant accomplishments that had recently occurred. We had just opened the visitor center, the Catskills Visitor Center, quite recently, and there was a lot of vision for the future, and so spending 10 years sort of helping to build that has been, you know, exciting and tiring.

[00:21:39] Brett Barry: Jeff, do you have similar sentiments?

[00:21:41] Jeff Senterman: Everything that Kali said, you know, my first day at the Catskill Center was actually the day that the Catskills Visitor Center opened, and I think it really represents—it represents a new direction for the Catskill Center. You know, prior to the twenty-teens, the Catskill Center was a quiet organization for many reasons, and it did a lot of great work, but it did it kind of behind-the-scenes, and a lot of folks had no idea that there was a Catskill Center and that it was doing the work that it did, and shortly before I arrived and Kali arrived, that really started changing. You know, the Catskill Center accepted the partnership with New York State to operate the Catskills Visitor Center together, which really just put the Catskill Center front and center of, like, we are going to be the organization that represents the Catskill Park and the Catskills. We also started embarking on understanding advocacy and education in Albany of our lawmakers, and that had started just before I arrived. I was actually involved with it in my prior job at the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference with the Catskill Center, just establishing a group of organizations and folks who would go to Albany and be a squeaky wheel, and, you know, between the visitor center, the rise of advocacy, and, as Kali had mentioned, sort of [that] better equipped to be a better partner in so many different ways, whether that's a partner with New York State, whether it's a partner with New York City, or whether it's a partner with other organizations here in the Catskills communities, whatever it might be. We just—we have much more capacity, and we're much more upfront and out and about with that information and with that work. For me, what I'm most proud of is really bringing attention in Albany to the Catskill Park. You know, for decades the joke was always the DEC commissioner's chair pointed north to the Adirondacks, and pretty much no one else in Albany, from the governor and the legislature on down, ever really even thought about the Catskill Park. You know, within a few years of us starting our advocacy effort, we created the Catskill Park Coalition, which is several dozen organizations that are all dedicated to the protection of the Catskill Park and bringing more resources. We started getting attention almost immediately. We started appearing in, maybe the Senate proposed some funding for the Catskills. It didn't make it to the final budget, but like, we were getting there. We formed a coalition with other organizations and communities from the Adirondacks, so we now have not only the Catskill Park Coalition but also the Forest Preserve Coalition. All of that has led in the last three years to more than $26 million of funding being brought to the Catskills in the Adirondacks. This will be the fourth budget year that the two parks actually have a budget item. In the state budget, which, you know, some folks may be like, "Well, what's the big deal?" The big deal is that once you get named in the New York State budget, it's really hard to take you out of the New York State budget, and so now, instead of agencies like the DEC trying to pull bits and pieces of money from different places, they have a line that says, this money you must spend on the Catskills. We've also increased funding for programs like the Catskill Science Collaborative at the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies, doing good work across the Catskills in terms of science research. We've gotten funding for the Catskills Visitor Center in the state budget. We've maintained the funding for the Belleayre Ski Center, and we've just raised the awareness of the challenges that the Catskill Park and the Adirondack Park, really, as being these unique forest preserve parks, which are a mix of state and private lands, face and [that] the resources that they need, so to me, the fact that we are bringing millions of dollars that didn't exist 10 years ago into the Catskills is really our greatest accomplishment.

[00:25:46] Brett Barry: So the Catskills have experienced quite a surge in visitors and land use. Are we keeping up with that in terms of preservation access and increased funding? Where do you see that going?

[00:26:00] Jeff Senterman: My one-word answer would be no, and that's because we had so many years and so many decades of not investing in the park, and so when we did start seeing this growth, which kind of began in the early 2000s, we started seeing the rise of the Catskills as a destination that really went into overdrive over the last few years when we had the COVID pandemic. We saw, just, you know, massive increases in visitors. The rate of increase has decreased now, so organizations like the Catskill Center, agencies like DEC, and others that are working on all these issues have some room to breathe, but, you know, our wild lands, not just here in the Catskills, but everywhere, are becoming more popular. New York is one of the lucky places where we continue to invest in our wild spaces. You know, we see the federal government retreating from a lot of investment in, and perhaps even divestment of, public lands, which is just a really scary thought, but for us here in New York, New York has protected a lot of land and continues to protect land, and for the last decade or so, we have seen that investment ramp up in all of our public lands here in New York, but, you know, we have so much to catch up on in terms of anyone who's hiked a trail in the Catskills knows that many of our trails are eroded. Anyone who's tried to park in a parking lot for a popular trail knows that they're very undersized for the use that we see. If anyone has visited Kaaterskill Falls, you know that it's a little crazy to go there on even a weekday nowadays to get to see the falls, and so there's just a lot that needs to be done and needs to be thought of and needs to be implemented across the park in terms of steadily increasing funding and staffing resources for everyone from the agencies to organizations like the Catskill Center to towns like the Town of Hunter to be able to address that increasing recreational use that we're seeing. Recreational uses are awesome for the Catskill Park. Like, people are coming here because this place is awesome and it's an amazing natural place, but we need to do the hard work to ensure that what I see today on my explorations of the Catskill Park is what the next generation sees or that they see something even better than I'm seeing because, in many cases, we can do better. You know, we just need to ensure that we continue funding and doing that work to address that increasing use.

[00:28:49] Campbell Brown: Kaatscast is sponsored by The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like The Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

[00:29:08] Brett Barry: Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast is a production of Silver Hollow Audio. I'm your host, Brett Barry. Transcripts by Jerome Kazlauskas. Announcements by Campbell Brown. Keep in touch at kaatscast.com and follow us on Instagram [@kaatscast]. See you next time.