Kid-Friendly
Kid-Friendly Catskills Hiking Trails
This kid-friendly list of Catskills hiking trails focuses on easier, shorter, flatter routes. Nonetheless, each provides a ton of interest. There are excellent scenic views, interesting terrain, dramatic geology, and even some ruins to explore.
Hiking With Children: Safety Issues
Many young people can enjoy even fairly strenuous mountain hikes safely. You know best what your kids can handle.
These trailed routes cross relatively even terrain: no big ascents, no rock scrambles. However, these are all still wilderness hikes — so make sure you’re prepared to hike in the wilderness. At the very least, carry the ten essentials.
Israel Wittman Sanctuary
This beautiful, serene and contemplative nature walk has so much to recommend it: lovely quiet woods of mixed evergreen and deciduous trees, easy stream crossings over delightful footbridges, dozens of stone fences built by settlers, small quarries and exposed rock faces, as well as fine field of glacial erratics.
Sloan Gorge Preserve
You don’t have to climb a mountain to experience the Catskills. The lowlands have so much to offer. Sloan Gorge Preserve is a great example: an absolutely delightful, short, and family-friendly nature walk.
Kenneth L. Wilson State Campground Nature Trail
This kid-friendly nature trail winds through mature hemlock, spruce, and red/white pine woods between Ticetonyk Mountain and Mt Tobias. There are views of Wittenberg and Cornell, and the campground amenities are top notch.
Slabsides / John Burroughs Nature Sanctuary
Slabsides is the rustic two-story cabin hand-built by famous naturalist John Burroughs at the end of the 1800’s. It is preserved just as he left it, including its personal contents. A series of short interconnected trails wind through hemlock-heavy woods and a swamp, past dramatic rock outcroppings and magical waterfalls, and alongside peaceful lakes. The terrain is rugged but the trails are appropriate for well-managed children.
Hike Windham High Peak from Peck Road
This is the hike I recommend to anyone who’s never hiked in the Catskills before, or is wondering if they’d even be able to handle a mountain hike. (Yes, you can.) It’s a short and easy hike — but it’s also very beautiful and so rewarding.
Hike Onteora Lake (3 Loops)
Just a 10 minute drive from both Kingston and Woodstock, Onteora Lake is a fantastic set of three interconnected loop trails that are perfect for a hit of the real Catskills. Its lake, ponds, streams, trails, old quarries, hemlock and oak forests on gently rolling hills — with occasional cliffs — are ideal for hiking, mountain biking, fishing, hunting, and cross-country skiing.
New Hiking Trail: Ashokan Quarry Trail
The Ashokan Quarry Trail is a brand new, short, but highly entertaining hike most people will be able to do in under an hour. It’s so varied in terms of terrain, flora, views and ruins, I suspect it will be a hit with younger hikers, too.
Hike Rochester Hollow
An easy hike through beautiful woods leads to a series of magnificent stone fences, ruins, and a memorial to John Burroughs. This is an underutilized and under-appreciated trail. Especially suited to skiers, trail-runners and animal track lovers.
Kelly Hollow Loop: An Easy & Exceptionally Beautiful Hike
Short and easy, but thoroughly absorbing, Kelly Hollow Loop is one of the most beautiful trails in the Catskills. It came highly-recommended to me from several friends and it really delivered.
Hike Balsam Lake Mountain
This route combines the easiest ascent to any summit in the Catskill Park with a much more interesting (and far less trafficked) descent down the south side of the mountain. I also tried to find the scenic view, and visited a lean-to. It’s quite easy to drive past the parking area for Balsam Lake because it’s directly after a curve on Millbrook Rd.
Ashokan Rail Trail Now Open
The newly-opened Ashokan Rail Trail on the north side of the Ashokan Reservoir is ridiculously wonderful. Ulster County and the DEP have absolutely aced this project. If you’re a walker, runner or cyclist, this is nine miles of absolute heaven. And unlike other promenades around the reservoir, dogs are allowed.
Hike Vly & Bearpen
Personal opinion: these are the only two boring Catskill 3500 hikes. Vly has a few small ledges to keep things interesting, barely, but I swear the trailed route up Bearpen has almost nothing to recommend it. Luckily, you can bag both of these hills together on a single, easy out-and-back.