Three state forest rangers cover one of the most heavily hiked corners of New York, down from five, and local police and fire crews are reaching hikers before the rangers do, Hunter officials said last week.
The officials called on the state Department of Environmental Conservation to assign more rangers to Greene County, citing the number of rescues both rangers and local first responders have run in recent weeks.
The state agency isn’t putting enough rangers in the county or scheduling the ones it has well, Hunter Police Sgt. Robert Haines told the town board on July 28.
“The DEC has been very accommodating in certain respects but lacking, in my opinion, in the number of forest rangers that are here and the scheduling they have for them,” he said. “There’s been multiple days where there’s no forest ranger available for an hour to attend to things that are clearly their business.”
The department manages the 700,000-acre Catskill Park, which covers the entire town of Hunter, including the villages of Hunter and Tannersville. In Greene County, the preserve also includes the whole town of Jewett and parts of the towns of Ashland, Cairo, Catskill, Halcott, Lexington, Prattsville, and Windham.
Most of the preserve is in Ulster County, where it contains the entire towns of Woodstock, Shandaken, Olive, Kingston, Denning, and Hardenburgh, as well as parts of the towns of Hurley, Saugerties, Ulster, Rochester, and Wawarsing. The preserve also includes parts of Delaware and Sullivan counties.
The DEC had five rangers in Greene County but “allowed two of them to transfer” and hasn’t filled the open positions, leaving some calls to local first responders, Haines said.
Supervisor Sean Mahoney, who called on the DEC to improve signage in April after the death of a teenage boy at Fawn’s Leap, said last week that the agency needs to assign more rangers to Greene County given the amount of tourists visiting the region.
“Being that this is the top visited location anywhere in the forest preserve, it seems sort of ridiculous that they’re allowing the schedule to have nobody on any of those spots at any given time,” he said. “It should be rotated through.”
Local emergency crews have reached the scene of several recent rescues in Hunter before rangers did, Mahoney said. The Twin Cloves Technical Rescue Team, which included the Centerville-Cedar Grove Fire District in Saugerties, went to Fawn’s Leap on July 8 to free a woman and a dog stuck on a ledge. Neither was injured.
Tannersville Rescue and Windham Ambulance were dispatched alongside the technical rescue team to the Laurel House Trail near Kaaterskill Falls on July 27, where they treated a 32-year-old with a leg injury. The patient was sent to Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson for treatment.
Mutual aid fills the gap when the department can’t respond immediately, Mahoney said.
“The rescue that I was at in the clove, they brought in Centerville, Greene County Sheriff’s Office, Ulster County, their dive team, their rescue team,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of great support in the cases that don’t. But unfortunately the rangers, which this is state land, they came late to the party.”
Rangers have taken part in multiple rescues over the past two weeks, according to press releases from the department, On Saturday, July 25, the agency responded to a hiker feeling dizzy and lightheaded on the Becker Hollow Trail on Hunter Mountain. The hiker was given “electrolyte liquids” but refused further medical treatment.
They treated a dizzy, lightheaded hiker on the Becker Hollow Trail on Hunter Mountain on July 25 with “electrolyte liquids.” The hiker refused further treatment.
A day later, rangers gave a glucose packet and water to a severely dehydrated hiker near Kaaterskill Falls, who walked out on their own
Kaaterskill Falls is estimated to host over 200,000 visitors each year, according to the Catskills Visitor Center.
Rangers went out again that night for a hiker with a leg injury near the summit of Hunter Mountain and turned the patient over to the Lexington Fire Department, which drove down to the base. Friends then took the patient to the hospital.
Given the number of rescues in Hunter, Haines said the DEC should be sending rangers to the area first.
“This is one of the most intensive-use areas in the entire state,” he said. “Even if there’s only 15 people coming out of the academy, four of them should be dedicated to Greene County, without a choice.”
A spokesperson for the DEC, Jomo Miller, declined to answer questions regarding the names, schedules, and areas covered by the county’s three rangers. He also declined to confirm or deny Haines’ assertion that the county goes stretches with no ranger on duty, or to say when those stretches occur.
Miller also wouldn’t say whether two of the five rangers covering the county had transferred out, or how that process works. He also declined to say whether the volume of rescues or the region’s draw for tourists factors into where rangers are assigned.
In a statement, Miller said 17 new rangers will graduate from the Basic Training Academy in September, with two rangers assigned to Greene County.
Miller said the DEC “adaptively manages the Ranger force to ensure appropriate coverage across the state.”
Connor Greco is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Windham, Hunter, and surrounding Greene County communities. Send correspondence to connor@theoverlooknews.com.
