I’ve been trying to get public land boundaries in New York State tidied to where trail maps will show reasonable results for the parks and forests.

One problem that was recently called to my attention was Camp Smith in Peekskill, New York. Researching this area revealed rather a complex history, and I thought that I had better write this diary entry to explain what I did, since it doesn’t quite agree with any of the ‘authoritative’ data sources.

Camp Smith, purchased by New York State between 1923 and 1940, is a National Guard post, and as such, is State land rather than Federal. The Hudson Highlands State Park that borders it is also, of course, State land, and in fact, portions along the north of Camp Smith had been carved out of it historically to create a corridor for the Appalachian Trail.

On that state land, a trail from the Bear Mountain Bridge to the summit of Anthony’s Nose has existed for a very long time. I know that I visited Anthony’s Nose as a Boy Scout in the late 1960’s. Since at least 1993, there has been a trail open to the public that takes a strenuous course from there southeast along the cliffs, with many fine view overlooking the river. Everyone understood it at the time to be a way along which public access was granted, that traversed the grounds of Camp Smith.

In 2001, the political climate of the time forced Camp Smith to post its borders as being closed to the public. The recreational opportunities were restored in 2002 (at the same time as the historic site was created for the old Bear Mountain toll house) by changing the land management. The Hudson Highlands State Park was expanded to 50 feet northeast of the trail center line, and all of the land between there and the rail grade on the riverbank came under the management of New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. The flyer that is given out at the trailhead details this situation, and warns hikers that they may encounter the occasional patrol of Guardsmen, to whom they should give way.

Since this move was, in effect, a transfer of land from New York State to itself, there was very little formal record of it, and the official maps all still show the old boundaries. In many cases, owing to database incompatibilities among the state agencies, even the official maps are full of gaps and overlaps at the border between the two reservations.

It seemed important to me to indicate that the trail on the cliff top is open to the public, not subject to the restrictions of the military post. I therefore adjusted the boundaries of the military reservation as follows, and conflated them with the boundaries of the state park:

1. A line fifty feet from the trail was created using the ‘buffer’ function of GDAL, and became the boundary wherever it penetrated into former Camp Smith lands.

2. The (otherwise questionable) import of Camp Smith from a Federal database was retained. Where it was adjacent to roads, it aligned well to the road network and to aerial images. In the woods, the borders are indefinite in any case. The Westchester County portion of Hudson Highlands had originally been reconstructed from county tax data, which were recognized to have problems with alignment, partly due to mixed datums.

3. Anywhere that Camp Smith and Hudson Highlands were coterminous, their joint border was replaced with a shared way.

This is pretty close, I think, to the situation that exists in the field. Indefinite borders are always a bit of a headache, but this change should at least clarify that the hiking trail is open to the public.