34 HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 



stand up above all other peaks. It takes its 

 name from a landslide which occurred many 

 years ago, down its steep northern side, or 

 down the neck of the grazing steed. The mane 

 of spruce and balsam fir was stripped away for 

 many hundred feet, leaving a long gray streak 

 visible from afar. 



Slide Mountain is the centre and the chief 

 of the Southern Catskills. Streams flow from 

 its base and from the base of its subordinates 

 to all points of the compass: the Rondout and 

 the Neversink to the south; the Beaverkill to 

 the west; the Esopus to the north, and several 

 lesser streams to the east. With its summit as 

 the centre, a radius of ten miles would include 

 within the circle described but very little culti- 

 vated land ; only a few poor, wild farms in some 

 of the numerous valleys. The soil is poor, a 

 mixture of gravel and clay, and is subject to 

 slides. It lies in the valleys in ridges and 

 small hillocks as if dumped there from a huge 

 cart. The tops of the Southern Catskills are 

 all capped with a kind of conglomerate or 

 "pudden stone" — a rock of cemented quartz 

 pebbles which underlies the coal measures. 

 This rock disintegrates under the action of the 

 elements, and the sand and gravel which result 

 are carried into the valleys and make up the 

 most of the soil. From the Northern Catskills, 

 so far as I know them, this rock has been swept 

 clean. Low down in the valleys the old red 

 sandstone crops out, and as you go west into 

 Delaware County, in many places it alone re- 



