Burrough’s Backyard
- Jake Brown
- Jul 8
- 5 min read
"But in assaulting a mountain, as in assaulting a fort, boldness is the watchword." -John Burroughs
If you're new to the Catskills or are a seasoned hiker, it never hurts to revisit some of the historical sites associated with the park. Naturalist and author, John Burroughs, is credited with bringing the Catskills into the national conversation, and his properties and hiking routes are worth the trek.
Burroughs’ Youth
Burroughs was born April 3, 1837, the seventh of ten children, on a dairy farm near Roxbury, New York. As a boy he preferred books over farm chores, spending long hours on the slopes of Old Clump Mountain near the family farm, looking east toward the higher Catskill peaks. He could just make out his white whale, Slide Mountain, from his vantage point. During his schooling and as a teacher, he developed an affinity for the works of Wordsworth and Emerson, so much so that he was later suspected of plagiarising Emerson in his essay, Expression, that was eventually accepted to The Atlantic Monthly. At 20, he married his wife, Ursula North, and continued teaching for 2 years until they could afford a house together.
In 1863, John Burroughs left teaching for a clerkship in the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. There he met one of his idols, Walt Whitman himself, and forged a lasting friendship that reshaped him. John later wrote of Whitman: "I owe more to him than to any other man in the world. He brooded me; he gave me things to think of; he taught me generosity, breadth, and an all-embracing charity." Burroughs’ co-wrote his first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, in 1867 with Whitman himself, an unconventional debut but one that brought him into the literary conversation nonetheless. Burroughs made his individual breakout in 1871 with Wake-Robin, a collection of bird essays whose title Whitman suggested. He continued at his Treasury job and later worked for years as a federal bank examiner while writing on the side, well into his 40s.
Upstate in Ulster County
In 1873, Burroughs purchased a nine-acre farm in West Park, New York, on the west bank of the Hudson River, where he built an estate he named Riverby, and grew table grapes and other crops. He continued his finance-by-day-writer-by-night schedule, publishing Winter Sunshine in 1875, and Locusts and Wild Honey in 1879, which solidified his reputation as an author. In 1895 he and his son, Julian, built a rustic Adirondack-style one-room cabin about a mile from Riverby on land he'd bought with a neighbor, and it became known as Slabsides. This cabin still stands today, and served as his working retreat where he wrote, grew celery and, increasingly, received a stream of visitors who wanted an audience with the man himself.
Burroughs’ reputation preceded him and in 1899, he was recruited as official historian by railroad magnate E.H. Harriman on an expedition to explore the Alaskan coast, along with roughly 40 other scientists and naturalists, including John Muir. The Johns had met a few years earlier and maintained what biographers describe as a genuine but not entirely easy friendship. In 1903, Burroughs published Real and Sham Natural History, in the Atlantic Monthly, attacking popular nature writers of the day like Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles G.D. Roberts and William J. Long, peers of Muir’s, for unscientific depictions of animal behavior, calling the genre, "yellow journalism of the woods." This ignited the four-year "nature fakers controversy," which drew support for Burroughs from his personal friend, President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt visited Slabsides that same year and later took Burroughs camping in Yellowstone in 1903, an experience Burroughs recorded in Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt (1907).
What set John Burroughs apart was his methodological stance: where Muir and the sublime-wilderness tradition celebrated towering, dramatic, remote nature, Burroughs, "urged his readers to find grandeur in the local, accessible, and familiar." His biographer, Edward Renehan, said that Burroughs was, "less that of a scientific naturalist than that of a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." He championed:
Slowing down on purpose: noticing patterns and specifics rather than grand, vague impressions.
Writing it all down in plain language: nature doesn’t need fluff.
Local is lore: Your backyard (and the Catskills in this case) deserves the same attention as famous terrain like Yellowstone or Alaska. Everything is worth observing and writing about.
The White Whale
Slide Mountain is the highest peak in the Catskills at 4,180 feet, and the highest point in New York outside the Adirondacks. It took Burroughs several attempts to summit before he succeeded. He finally made the ascent from Woodland Valley in June 1885 and recorded it in what's generally regarded as his best Catskills essay, The Heart of the Southern Catskills. His description of the summit view: "We saw the world as the hawk or the balloonist sees it when he is three thousand feet in the air... The works of man dwindle, and the original features of the huge globe come out. Every single object or point is dwarfed; the valley of the Hudson is only a wrinkle in the earth's surface." Though he wasn’t the first to summit Slide Mountain, the connected ridge of Slide, Cornell (3,860 ft), and Wittenberg (3,780 ft) mountains was named in his honor as the Burroughs Range.
Burroughs reputation as a writer and naturalist helped him establish friendships with the likes of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone too. Ford gave John one of the first cars in the Hudson Valley, and in the late 1910s the four men went on a series of elaborately staffed but rustically branded publicized camping trips as self-styled "Vagabonds." In the early 1900s he renovated an old farmhouse near his Roxbury birthplace, naming it Woodchuck Lodge for the animals that overran the property. That became his summer home from 1910 until his death in 1921; this was honored with a front page obituary in the New York Times and the adjournment of the New York State Senate. Grab a notebook and a pen, lace up your hiking boots, and hit the Catskills to see what John Burroughs spent most of his life observing and appreciating.
Following in Burrough’s Footsteps
The Burroughs Range Trail (Slide, Cornell, Wittenberg) - Take (roughly) the same route of Burrough’s 1885 ascent by starting at the Woodland Valley State Campground, south of Phoenicia, NY. Follow the red-blazed Burroughs Range Trail over Wittenberg and Cornell before the final push up Slide's steep east slope. It’s a roughly 14 mile round trip, or can do it one-way and return via shuttle. You can also climb Slide alone for equally gorgeous views.
For bonus points, read Burrough’s, The Heart of the Southern Catskills, before you go, or on the summit itself.
Slabsides and the John Burroughs Sanctuary — West Park, UlsteThe Hudson-side cabin, maintained by the John Burroughs Association, is where Burroughs Roosevelt/Edison/Ford/Muir visits mostly happened. Open house dates are notably sparse and worth planning around deliberately: the third Saturday in May, the first Saturday in October, and the second and fourth Saturdays of June through September, plus by appointment. The surrounding trail network is open year-round, dawn to dusk, regardless of house-tour scheduling. It's a National Historic Landmark as of 1968.
Address: Burroughs Drive off Floyd Ackert Road / 261 Floyd Ackert Road, West Park, NY 12493
Woodchuck Lodge / John Burroughs Memorial State Historic Site — Burroughs’ actual summer home and burial site. Free guided tours run the first weekend of every month, May through October, Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., no reservation needed. It's a National Historic Landmark, designated in 1962. Up the road, John Burroughs Memorial Field has an outdoor exhibit on his life and a marked path to Boyhood Rock and his grave — worth the separate stop even if you can't make a tour weekend.
Address: 1633 Burroughs Memorial Road, Roxbury, NY 12474.
What to Bring
Solomon Hiking Boots
Water Bottle
Saltines
Fish Fork (we’re fine and feral)
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