More than Maps: New York - New Jersey Trail Conference

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Melissa Cascini: I mean, that's how I found out about the Trail Conference, too. I started using our maps, not even knowing that there was like a whole bigger part to the organization, so yeah, our maps are very popular. I know I'm a little biased because I work for the organization, but I personally think they're the best.

[00:00:17] Brett Barry: Catskills hikers are likely very familiar with those iconic waterproof, tear-resistant trail maps published for decades by the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference. You know the ones. Sixfolding maps in a sealable plastic sleeve illustrating every designated trail in the Catskill Park—unmaintained trails and woods roads, lean-tos and fire towers, waterfalls, viewpoints, parking areas—it's pretty much a hiking essential, but the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference is much more than just an expert cartographer. On today's "Kaatscast," we hike with Melissa Cascini, Senior Program Coordinator for the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference. Stay tuned.

[00:01:03] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by... The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local region such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com, and by Briars & Brambles Books, the go-to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily! For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call (518) 750-8599.

[00:01:43] Brett Barry: I met up with Melissa Cascini at the Catskills Visitor Center in Mount Tremper, New York, and we set out on the Upper Ridge Trail—a half-mile in and out—perfect length for our interview about trails. Melissa, if you want to just introduce yourself...

[00:01:59] Melissa Cascini: Sure, so I'm Melissa Cascini. I'm the Senior Program Coordinator for the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference. I cover from the New York-New Jersey border up to the Catskills on the west side of the Hudson, and then from Westchester County up to Taconic State Park on the east side of the Hudson.

[00:02:14] Brett Barry: Can you give me a bird's-eye view of the organization?

[00:02:17] Melissa Cascini: We started out in 1920, and we started out as a bunch of different member organizations that were kind of all out maintaining trails just in a different way, and we all came together and decided that, you know, there should be some unison with how things are working, and so the Trail Conference originated, and we've been around since then—building and maintaining trails, protecting public land—in recent years, we've done a lot with invasive species; we have a conservation dog program, which is very cool, and they are out like sniffing invasive species and just helping us with that work.

[00:02:51] Brett Barry: Why New York and New Jersey? Is there a reason that it... it concentrates on those two states?

[00:02:57] Melissa Cascini: Where we really started out was in Harriman State Park. I think our big volunteer base, and like the... the people who started our organization, we're based in New York City, so it just made sense. You know it's the central area there. Once the organization started to grow, we started to spread out a little bit, so more towards central New Jersey and spread our wings out a little bit in New York, working all the way up in the Catskills.

[00:03:21] Brett Barry: One of the things that immediately comes to mind, I think, for a lot of people with the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference is those iconic maps.

[00:03:28] Melissa Cascini: Yeah, absolutely. Our maps—I mean, that's how I found out about the Trail Conference, too. I started using our maps, not even knowing that there was like a whole bigger part to the organization, so yeah, our maps are very popular. I know I'm a little biased because I work for the organization, but I personally think they're the best. I wish that we covered more area with them when I'm like, if I'm up in the Adirondacks or out west somewhere, I find myself wishing that I had our maps, so they're definitely a really big part of our organization.

[00:03:55] Brett Barry: You know now, with apps and phones, there's still, I think, a lot of hikers who, if they only have one map in their bag is... would you say that one's it?

[00:04:06] Melissa Cascini: Yeah, I would say if people have a paper map in our area, it's the Trail Conference map, which is great.

[00:04:11] Brett Barry: Tell me a little bit about how you guys interface with other entities and stakeholders, including such places as the DEC or DEP or any of the many organizations that are doing work in and around the Catskills, especially with trails and public lands.

[00:04:33] Melissa Cascini: Across New York and New Jersey, we work with about 200 individual park partners up in the Catskills: DEC being the biggest and everything that we do, you know, we are there to support our partners, so we do the work that they want us to do that's going to support their mission, so up here in the Catskills that means building and maintaining trails, working on lean-tos, and just making sure that things are open and accessible for people to enjoy them.

[00:04:59] Brett Barry: Where does the support come from? Are you a nonprofit, or how does that work?

[00:05:04] Melissa Cascini: Yeah, so we are a nonprofit. Support comes from our private donors, comes from state and federal grants, a lot of different avenues that kind of bring everything together to allow us to do the work that we do.

[00:05:15] Brett Barry: How big is the organization, and how do you fit into that? I guess just to give a sense of the... the breadth of the organization.

[00:05:23] Melissa Cascini: So I think right now we have a staff of about 31 people that support about 2,000 volunteers working across 2,100 miles of trail, so for the amount of trail and the amount of volunteers that we have, we do have a pretty small staff, so a lot of our staff are wearing a lot of different hats, and we are also spread over a pretty wide geographical area, so we have staff all over the place out and about with our volunteers.

[00:05:49] Brett Barry: Now do you cover all the trails in the Catskills, all the public trails, or, you know, and if not, how do you determine what your domain is in terms of maintenance and... and work?

[00:06:04] Melissa Cascini: So we cover just shy of 260 miles of trail in the Forest Preserve. We started maintaining trails in the Catskill Forest Preserve, I believe, in the nineties, and that number that we maintain has grown since then, so we primarily maintain, "Oh, sorry, we're going uphill," so we primarily maintain trails that are open and accessible to the public. How we decide what trails to maintain is primarily up to our volunteers because that's our staff. Right, we support our volunteers, so if they see a need for maintenance on a trail and it's something that they feel like they can add to our network, we'll do that. You know, we'll have that discussion internally, and then we'll go to the DEC, the park partner... we'll talk to them about it. If they agree, we add it in, and then we take on maintenance from there. In the Catskills specifically, we have over the past few years really grown our bandwidth up here, so we have taken on a few additional miles. We have done a lot more work on, like heavy maintenance of trails, heavy maintenance of lean-tos... we've started our Catskills Trail Crew, who are outdoing like work that maybe a general maintainer can't do as well as our Lean-to Crew that are outdoing more like heavy construction stuff, rehabbing the lean-to, so that they can last another ten years or so until they're able to be replaced. Day to day is always different, and it's very dependent on the weather, the season. In the winter, I would say, "My day to day is definitely more." I'm at a desk. I'm at my computer working on project proposals with volunteers, meeting with partners to discuss the last season and plans for the upcoming season, and then come summer, spring, it's more, you know, we're in the field, we're getting work done, and while I may not be out in the field every day doing the work that the volunteers are doing, I'm just like behind-the-scenes supporting them and the cool work that they get to do.

[00:08:03] Brett Barry: And the geographical region of the entire Trail Conference?

[00:08:07] Melissa Cascini: In New Jersey, we begin working about Hunterdon County up to the New Jersey border, and I think in New Jersey it's about 800 miles of trail that we maintain, and then across New York and New Jersey, we include those long-distance trails, so the long path that goes from a subway stop in Manhattan with the goal of going all the way up to the Adirondacks. It's about 360 miles, and then we have the Appalachian Trail through New York and New Jersey and the Highlands Trail.

[00:08:39] Brett Barry: What a cool trailhead that is!

[00:08:41] Melissa Cascini: Yeah, it's awesome, and I mean, it's just such a cool way to connect people from the city with nature, like you can walk from the city, ideally up to the Adirondacks once the trail is like complete and in its final form.

[00:08:53] Brett Barry: We're planning a whole episode on the long path, which begins at the 175th Street subway station near the George Washington Bridge and continues up into and through the Catskills. Stay tuned for that one, and in the meantime, here's Campbell with a quick announcement while Melissa and I catch our breaths.

[00:09:12] Campbell Brown: This episode is supported by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past and learn about the ingenuity of the historic milling industry. Watch the waterwheel bring a working sawmill to life. Bring a picnic to enjoy by the millpond. For more information about scheduling a tour or about their 2024 exploration days, visit hanfordmills.org.

[00:09:33] Brett Barry: Back at the Upper Ridge Trail in Mount Tremper, New York, I asked Melissa Cascini from the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference... can you tell me a little bit about the projects that you've been most involved with over the past season or two and what we could look for in the trails?

[00:09:48] Melissa Cascini: So up in the Catskills, especially over the past few years, I have personally really enjoyed working with our Lean-to Crew. Eric Friedman... he is our volunteer crew leader for that crew; he has been a carpenter his whole life; he's been a maintainer for a lean-to for a very long time, saw that it needed work, and offered to do the work. From there, we grew the Lean-to Crew, and while Eric does a lot of the heavy lifting, you know, he's the expert carpenter. I'm behind-the-scenes just purchasing the lumber and getting the work plan together, things like that. I would say, "Probably one of the projects that they've done that I've been most excited about was the project that they did last year at the 2 Trout Pond Lean-tos in the Western Catskills." One of those lean-tos is ADA accessible, so that was a bigger project for us where we had to build an ADA accessible privy, and it just felt like a really awesome, like, milestone project. The crew had started up their first full season in 2022, and by 2023 they were doing this huge project with a lot of people coming out to help.

[00:10:56] Brett Barry: For the non-hikers or the less frequent hikers, can you explain the importance of lean-tos in the Catskills?

[00:11:03] Melissa Cascini: Yeah, so lean-tos provide just like a place, a shelter with kind of a roof over your head to stay while you're out in the woods. Some of them are like really beautiful viewpoints. They provide, like, a bathroom in some situations, either a thunderbox, which is essentially just a box on top of a hole where you go to the bathroom, or a privy that is more of an outhouse situation, especially in an ADA accessible privy... allows for people who may not otherwise be able to enjoy these spaces to come out.

[00:11:32] Brett Barry: Who else is maintaining trails in this region?

[00:11:37] Melissa Cascini: So the Catskills 3500 Club... they do maintain a few trails through our organization, so they have a maintaining club that they... they will coordinate a work day and then their hours get reported up to us hours that our volunteers send us are super important for purposes like grants, and just our funding aside from the 3500 Club, the Catskill Mountain Club also maintains a few trails.

[00:12:06] Brett Barry: And is New York State and DEC also maintaining, or is it... they lean on you for that?

[00:12:11] Melissa Cascini: So I would say that they lean on us in most cases, but they also have their seasonal crews or their operations crew that will go out and remove blowdowns or... or do, like, maybe bigger trail projects; they will also contract out professional trail crews like to Howish Trails who are working across the Forest Preserve again on like those heavy lift projects that maybe our crews don't have the capacity for or just because there is a lot of work to be done in the Catskills and, you know, our volunteers can't handle all of it, so just to spread out that work a little bit.

[00:12:45] Brett Barry: So this is a really important state nonprofit partnership that is keeping Catskills trails in great shape.

[00:12:53] Melissa Cascini: Yeah, our relationship with DEC is very important, and it stems back a long time. We also have relationships with the DEC outside of the Catskills. We maintain... on a lot of DEC properties on the Shawangunk Ridge or out in the eastern part of the state, so definitely a big partnership for us. We maintain a lot on their property.

[00:13:15] Brett Barry: What else should people know about your organization and kind of resources or ways to get involved?

[00:13:21] Melissa Cascini: I mean, we have so many opportunities for people to get involved. No prior experience is necessary in most cases. We have our conservation core crews who are out across the Hudson Valley who will often lead work trips in maybe building stone steps or those more like technical trail skills. We lead trail maintenance workshops for people who are interested in learning about trail maintenance. We lead a lot of ecological stewardship... invasive species opportunities for folks to learn about that realm of things, so lots of opportunity to get involved whether it's just for a workshop or you want to commit to a more permanent volunteer role with us. You can reach out to find out about these opportunities by going to our website at nynjtc.org, or you can just shoot us an email at volunteer@nynjtc.org. If you don't see an opportunity up on the website that really interests you, just reach out. We can always find a spot for you.

[00:14:22] Brett Barry: What's your favorite part about this job?

[00:14:26] Melissa Cascini: My favorite part about this job is working with the volunteers, hearing their stories about how they got involved in this work, and just seeing how passionate they are for the work that we do and getting to support that passion. So again, I'm doing, you know, the less fun administrative tasks, and then they get out to... they get to go out and do the really fun work, and just being able to make that happen is really rewarding, and just working for something that I'm passionate about—you know, I love trails, I love the Catskills, and so just being able to work towards that passion is really rewarding and really exciting.

[00:15:03] Brett Barry: Do you still hike for enjoyment outside of the job, or are there other things you enjoy, you know, doing in this area?

[00:15:10] Melissa Cascini: Yeah, I do still hike a lot outside of work; it is often hard to separate that work hike and a personal hike, but I think, especially coming up to the Catskills, I find myself up here pretty frequently on my time when I have time off, just kind of like taking in the sights and scenes without maybe analyzing the sustainability of a trail. Like, oh, is that stone step going to stay there a long time, or like, does it look like it needs maintenance, just being able to, like, take off the work glasses, put on my own personal glasses in a sense, and just enjoy, like, the flora and fauna of things rather than the nitpicky little trail things? Outside of hiking, I also really love paddling. I go up to the Adirondacks a lot to paddle. I bake, I garden, I... yeah, I definitely find ways to keep myself occupied that aren't always hiking.

[00:16:02] Brett Barry: "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. Production Intern: Olivia Sippel; Transcriptionist: Jerome Kazlauskas; Announcements by Campbell Brown. Sign up for our newsletter at kaatscast.com so you never miss a show, including that upcoming story on the long path with someone who's hiked it from New York City to the Central Catskills. Also on deck... The Woodstock Film Fest—Youth Film Lab, Witches of the Catskills, Jen Kabat and the Eighth Moon, and so much more. Please be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Rate and review so more people can find us and keep in touch at kaatscast.com. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.

[00:16:53] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by a generous grant from the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation, and by listeners like you! If you'd like to make a donation, you can do so at kaatscast.com. Thank you!