Lake Sebago_
Climate change, recreation, and ruins at Harriman State Park
4/11/2025 (jump to writing)
I took these photographs on August 8, 2021 during my first solo bike camping trip to Harriman State Park in the summer of 2021. They became the last posts I did on Tumblr, which used to be a rather vibrant community of obsessive cultural curators. I got a good visual education from it, and it gave me only a small, perfectly reasonable addiction to the illusion of feeling seen by other people with good taste.
Alas, like so many once Good Things™ on the Internet, it enshittified and killed the community that built it.
It may have also been the last time I used my beloved Mamiya 6, which I now believe to be far too delicate and far too heavy for any kind of extended bike trip. (This in spite of the fact that I biked a Graflex 4x5, tripod, etc. with me from Brooklyn to Montreal and back.)
At the recent prompting of a talented photographer friend, my plan is to selectively move (or "port" in nerd parlance) posts from there to here and eventually switch it off.
My plan was to stealth camp at Lake Skenonto. Along the way, I passed by the ruins of the Lake Sebago facility, where there was a large group of car campers having a good time. I decided to bike down and ask if there was any drinking water. They said no, and kindly offered some of theirs. I said no, that I had come prepared to filter my own, but thank you.
I have been thinking a lot about these photos the past month because I was really quite emotionally overwhelmed while taking them. It probably had something to do with the fact that this was my first solo bike camping trip, and it had been hard. I was physically exhausted and emotionally raw.
It isn’t that I thought “What a shame, we need more recreational park facilities like this.” It’s that it made me think about all the future storms that will ruin public works, how fewer and fewer of them will get fixed, and how it will be harder and harder to get clean drinking water as a public utility. How easily we will let go of the simplest pleasures of civilization because we thought we should go it alone.
I was thinking, we’re gonna ruin it so bad we won’t have anywhere nice to sit anymore. Then I thought of that wonderful verse from Sun Ra’s Nuclear War.
If they push that button
Your ass gotta go
Whatcha gonna do
Without your ass?
The ride from NYC to Harriman is about 55 miles, and quite strenuous with a loaded bicycle, especially in the dog days of summer. If you take all the scenic routes (Palisades Park, Hudson river trail, etc.) it adds many feet of climbing to an already quite hilly route. And for all your trouble, the final leg into the park is another brutal 1,000 feet compressed into about 9 miles, with a final 400 feet of gain in 2 miles (Willow Grove Rd, aka "THE HILL").
I don't know that I care to do it again with good, as I've done it about 4 or 5 times since 2018. Well, I'd do it again with good friends. Good friends always make things better. Otherwise, it's fine to take your bike on PATH and NJT to Sloatsburg, which puts you half a mile from a well-paved road with a reasonable grade leading right into the park. Then you have the day to find and set up camp and explore!
On this particular trip, I got in too late to get a proper spot around Lake Skenonto (as mentioned) and ended up just taking my chances and making camp just a couple dozen feet from the trail. Actually, none of these spots are "proper" as it's against the rules to camp anywhere except at the 7 shelters or the official campgrounds. (Perhaps this is enforced more since the pandemic, but I haven't been back to camp since.)
I got in too late because I decided that I wanted to take the Old Croton Aqueduct trail to the Mario Cuomo Tappan Zee bridge. I sometimes become fixated on matters of process, and in this case I wanted to follow as much of the OCA as possible. This meant discovering its vague remnants inside Van Cortlandt park.
If you have never been to Van Cortlandt park, it's quite wild in a literal and figurative sense. For one thing, it's criss-crossed by several highways, so you cannot simply traverse it if you find yourself kettled into the wrong section. Planning a bike route through it sight unseen is difficult. I found myself on all sorts of trails, marked and unmarked, sometimes shared with joggers and dog walkers, sometimes the remnants of strange infrastructure and Gilded Age masonry emerging from the mud. I actually enjoy having seen so many weird corners of the park, but I wish I hadn't gone around in so many stressed-out circles in a fool's errand in order to do it. Then to find myself racing against sundown with a broken rack stay.
Anyway, I made camp and stripped down to my jock because it was so intensely hot and humid. I ambled down to the lake where I layed down on my stomach on a flat rock, filtering water with a hand pump while watching water skimmers by the light of my headlamp. I cooked and ate my dinner down there too. It was a satisfying end to a difficult day.
It's a beautiful place, one of my favorite places, and I hope I get to enjoy it for what remains of my life.