page_title: Balsam Lake Mountain
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Balsam Lake Mountain / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Balsam Lake Mountain fire tower, Hardenburgh, NY, USA
context_page_description: Balsam Lake Mountain is one of the Catskill Mountains, located in the Town of Hardenburgh, New York, United States. It is the westernmost of the range's 35 High Peaks. Its exact height has not been determined, but the highest contour line on topographic maps, 3,720 feet, is usually given as its elevation.
  Located within the Balsam Lake Mountain Wild Forest management unit of the Catskill Park Forest Preserve, in the late 19th century its summit became the site of the first fire lookout tower in the state, operated by members of a nearby sportsmen's club. It was later taken over by the state's conservation agencies, which built several improved towers on the site, one of which remains, along with its accessory buildings and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, although it has not been used for fire detection since 1988. The summit is also the site of a rare sphagnum bog that has been affected by acid rain since a mid-20th century windstorm blew down many of the trees sheltering it at the time.
context_section_description: The Catskills were formed 250-350 million years ago, during the Devonian and Silurian periods, when the sands and silt that had eroded from the Acadian Mountains to the northeast collected in a river delta at the mouth of the shallow inland sea that is now the Allegheny Plateau. The delta uplifted as a single unit, and gradually streams eroded valleys, creating a dissected plateau. The harder, younger shale and sandstone remains as the mountain summits. Later glaciation made the valleys steeper and smoother.
  Catskill forest historian Michael Kudish says the Mill Brook Ridge range, including Balsam Lake, is one of the areas in the region showing the fewest signs of human disturbance. The Iroquois who were the first settlers in today's New York only went into areas above 1,500 feet (460 m) to hunt, if they went there at all. European settlers established few farms in the area, both before and after independence. The clearings that give the Quaker Clearing trailhead its name are the only significant past agricultural use that can still be seen today. Limited logging, primarily by farmers procuring firewood, took place above those clearings.
  The most significant developments in the human history of the mountain took place in 1887. The state bought the southeast slope of the mountain that year for the newly created Forest Preserve, ensuring the land would remain forever wild, always in public ownership and never logged, per a law later added to the state constitution as Article 14. Also that year the Balsam Lake Club decided to erect a crude wooden fire lookout tower on the summit so that an observer could detect fires that threatened the lands around the lake and the headwaters of the Beaver Kill where they hunted and fished. It was the first such lookout tower built in New York State.
  Two years later, the state bought more of the mountain, and eventually acquired the summit itself in 1900. At some point before the United States Geological Survey resurveyed the area for its 1901 maps, the Turner Hollow Road, an old, rough turnpike connecting Seager and Quaker Clearing, often used by members of the Balsam Lake Club to get to the train station at Arkville, was rerouted from the col between East and West Schoolhouse mountains to the one between West Schoolhouse and Balsam Lake. The southern portion survives as part of the Dry Brook Ridge Trail.
  Eight years later, in 1909, the state's Forest, Fish and Game Commission took over the fire tower; a decade later it built the first cabin and replaced it with the steel tower that stands today. By 1935 the state was maintaining not only the jeep road to the summit but the old Turner Hollow Road south to Quaker Clearing and the foot trail from the summit to the road.
  The Great Appalachian Storm of November 1950 took a heavy toll on the summit balsam firs. Blowdown was extensive in both the bog and non-bog areas. The trees that remained standing died more rapidly due to the exposure. It has since recovered, but the bog has become vulnerable to the effects of acid rain in the meantime, possibly changing its growth patterns.
  After a series of severe droughts and fires in the early 1960s that led to some temporary closings of the Forest Preserve,. fires and the damage they caused declined due to an increase in public awareness of forest fire danger and the decline in activities that caused them. Manned fire towers became less essential; the state began closing them down and dismantling them in favor of more cost-effective aerial surveillance.
  In 1976 the Balsam Lake Club donated 3,615 acres (1,463 ha) to the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, keeping all but the immediate shoreline of the lake itself. Three years later, the Catskill Center in turn sold the land to the state, putting most of the mountain in public ownership. When the first Catskill State Land Master Plan was drafted and implemented in the mid-1980s, the 13,500-acre (5,500 ha) contiguous tract that stretched from Balsam Lake Mountain to Alder Lake over Mill Brook Ridge was designated as the Balsam Lake Mountain 
caption: Fire tower
exif: {"Image Make": "EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY", "Image Model": "KODAK C340 ZOOM DIGITAL CAMERA", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "230", "Image YResolution": "230", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:03:05 17:23:30", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "252", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "930", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5115", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/500", "EXIF FNumber": "24/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "80", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:09:30 14:12:39", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:09:30 14:12:39", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "9", "EXIF ApertureValue": "9/2", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "29/10", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "28/5", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1653", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2356", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "804", "EXIF ExposureIndex": "80", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "34", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}