IN THE CATSKILLS 



all, and apparently the least willing to be seen ; only 

 at a distance of thirty or forty miles is it seen to 

 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 cultivated 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. 

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