SUMMER WALKS IN THE WOODLAND 



1359 



swallowed up by the precipitous paths, jungles jand 

 hillside forests in a few minutes. We have certain things 

 to say to Mother Nature, and must sit in front of stone 

 altars in inner recesses of the vast rock -heaps at the foot 

 of the purple crags, jumbles of broken trap from the 

 size of a man's head to a house, hurled down by frosts 



hinterland, cover stretches of the rock heap. In this 

 grow all — I am sure — of the trees and shrubs indigenous 

 to the locality. Then, rising majestically in sheer wall, 

 fissured battlement, detached pinnacles and weather- 

 scarred, time-colored precipices, to a height of between 

 300 and 500 feet, begin the Palisades. They are of a 

 lava rock called trap which was 

 penetrated as a sheet into the 

 Triassic sandstones. Next to 

 Niagara Falls they form one of 

 the most widely known natural 

 phenomena in America, probably 

 because of their nearness to one 

 of the world's great cities. The 

 awesomeness of their dizzy height 

 as we look up, contrasted with the 

 simple sweet beauty of beds of 

 wild spikenard or False Solomon's 

 Seal, tall meadow rue, bloodroot, 

 wild ginger, white baneberry, 

 black cohosh, wild bergamot, 

 pipsissewa, and clumps of moun- 

 tain laurel, pink azalea, bayberry, 

 blueberry, black-cap raspberry 

 and blackberry, growing all 



THE ENTRANCE INTO ONE OF THE HUNDREDS OF BEAUTIFUL WOOD PATHS IN THE PARK. arounc l, appals US. The beautiful 



twelve-mile fringe of sloping land 



of untold ages, and make our confession. We must 

 ponder upon the persistence of this thing we call Life 

 and which is all around us from the crawling partridge 

 berry vine, woodbine and honeysuckle, binding the 

 rocks together, to the earth cur- 

 rents palpitating in the solid 

 ledges and rising with the sap in 

 giant old oaks, tulips, black 

 birches, and sycamores, towering 

 above. Leaving the little white 

 house that was Cornwallis' head- 

 quarters in the Revolution, and 

 nestles now at one of the nine 

 docks for steamers at the foot of 

 the Palisades, we plunge up a 

 tiny hidden foot path toward the 

 bottom of the crags. A scarlet 

 tanager flutters along ahead to 

 lead us away from her nest, dis- 

 covered at the end of a black 

 birch's limb. A chipmunk sits on 

 a mossy log and stares, and a gray 

 squirrel scolds from a black oak. 

 At once we are as far from civili- 

 zation as if we were lost in the 



Adirondacks. From the shore of the river the fallen 

 rock debris rises at an angle of forty-five degrees or 

 everal hundred feet in places. Ages of erosion that 

 started, perhaps, with the deluge, leaf-mould from cen- 

 turies of vegetation, earth deposited when the Hudson 

 was an unthinkably big stream, draining the Laurentian 



under the Palisades is a paradise for artist, naturalist 

 and geologist. Although the State Commission of Con- 

 servation, headed by George W. Perkins, has spent much 

 money and done an incredible amount of work building 



AT THE FOOT OF THE CLIFFS STILL STANDS THE QUAINT LITTLE WHITE-WASHFD HOUSE 

 WHERE CORNWALLIS. IN LONG GONE DAYS, MADE HIS HEADQUARTERS. 



bathing beaches, lawns, boat lagoons, winding paths, 

 automobile roads, log comfort stations, bridges, piers, 

 masonry walls, causeways, and monster rustic pavilions 

 that would have decked a Roman emperor's gardens, the 

 vast wilderness of the park remains untamed and is its 

 greatest asset. "The Commission is doing its best to 



