Fjord Trail: Access Would Be Limited if Overrun Highlands Current Audio Stories

'Heart' of trail to lie north of Breakneck
Officials from the Hudson Highlands Fjord Trail on April 3 expressed a willingness to limit access to its planned Cold Spring-to-Beacon connector if visitors overwhelm it and threaten the environment or local communities.
In a two-hour program, staff and consultants for HHFT, a subsidiary of the Poughkeepsie-based environmental group Scenic Hudson, outlined potential ways to reduce the impacts of the planned 7.5-mile linear park paralleling the Hudson River, Metro-North train tracks and Route 9D, a state highway.
They said the path's "heart" and focus would lie between Breakneck Ridge and Dutchess Manor, at the southern tip of the Town of Fishkill, although plans call for a trail to begin in Cold Spring.
The discussion, held at Dutchess Manor, centered on "visitation management," which John Moss, a consultant from ORCA (Operation Research Consulting Associates), said entails "balancing supply and demand. We don't want attendance to ever outpace the ability of the park or trail to support it."
He added that "we recognize that it may be necessary, in a worst-case environment, to control entries into your trailhead, into your parking lot, to manage demand."
Moss said he came to Cold Spring for firsthand research on busy weekends in 2023 and saw the crowds exiting Metro-North trains, the overflowing sidewalk trash cans, the long lines at the public restrooms on Main Street near the train tracks, and the traffic. "I completely understand what we've been up against," he said.
Along with the other HHFT representatives, Moss suggested strategies to alleviate problems, such as signs to guide visitors; bathrooms at Dockside Park, Little Stony Point and the Breakneck and Notch trailheads; a visitor center at Dutchess Manor; 600 parking spots (including 235 new spaces); and a trailhead shuttle.
"No Fjord Trail parking is intended in Cold Spring" and more parking between Cold Spring and Beacon will ensure that "it's not one big, aggregate mall parking lot in the middle of the trail corridor," Moss said. He said HHFT will manage and maintain the restrooms, shuttle operations, parking lots and other trail facilities.
Al Shacklett, also with ORCA, said that, even without the Fjord Trail, heavy tourism is expected to continue and "conditions you see today are going to get worse" outside the Cold Spring restrooms. At present, about a third of village visitors are hikers, Shacklett said. He said that, in recent years, interest in Breakneck Ridge has appeared to drop while increasing at the Washburn trail, opposite Little Stony Point, just outside the village limit.
With the Fjord Trail, he said, hikers will be steered toward picking up the trail at Breakneck, where the train stop is being upgraded. With those changes in place, Shacklett estimated that 50 percent of the hikers who now take the train to Cold Spring will instead continue to Breakneck. In that case, "we still have a surge, but the surge is much mitigated by the shift" from one station to another, he said.
Shortly after the meeting, members of a Visitation Data Committee established to help HHFT with analysis issued a statement that outlined its concerns with recent Fjord Trail materials, including a claim that visitation to Hudson Highlands State Park Preserve had increased by 7.6 percent between 2016 and 2023, although, the committee members said, the state parks department reported a 10.7 percent increase.
The five committee members, who include Nelsonville Mayor Chris Winward, argued that HHFT and its consultants had inadequately considered the effects of social media and marketing on visitation and the Highlands' proximity to population centers. "We hope that HHFT will revise their research" so that future reports can be "more reliable," the committee said.
Responding on Monday (April 8), Amy Kacala, HHFT's executive director, called the committee's reaction "premature" because its "discussion and review of the visitation projection