Catskills swimming hole dip now costs $10
DEC: Fee will protect safety, environmental health of beloved spot
For those who know of the stunning blue spring-fed waters of Peekamoose Blue Hole in the Catskills of Ulster County, you may have noticed some changes in the past few years.
Once a local spot to cool off in the summer heat, this swimming hole became a viral sensation around 2015. Everyone wanted to snap a shot of the Blue Hole for themselves, then share it on Instagram for all their followers to admire.
To curb the sudden swell of people, in 2018 the state Department of Environmental Conservation rolled out its first day-use permit system for a swimming hole on DEC land, in which free permits were required on weekends and holidays between May 15 and Oct. 15, and reportedly only 40 permits were issued daily. But a May 14 news release announced that the permits would now cost $10.
“This expanded permit system for the Peekamoose Blue Hole and Rondout Creek area will both protect public safety and the environmental health of this unique and irreplaceable resource,” DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos said in the news release.
At its peak in 2017, up to 1,000 people a day were visiting the suddenly overwhelmed Blue Hole alone, not including other areas. Executive director of The Catskill Center for Conservation and Development Jeff Senterman said that people were standing shoulder to shoulder in the water and “the shores would be all people.”
That same year, Senterman said the Catskill Center and the Adirondack Mountain Club, among others, reached out to the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics — an international organization focused on protecting the outdoors through education and research — to nominate Blue Hole for a Leave No Trace Hot Spot designation. Alongside 40 community members, the Leave No Trace team descended on the park and led a large-scale cleanup.
Later, at a meeting with 15 stakeholder entities, the team recommended the implementation of a stewardship program, and a free permit. Two seasonal, full-time stewards were stationed at Blue Hole to educate visitors on proper park etiquette and to facilitate the free permit rollout. Also in the new stewardship program were the Kaaterskills Falls and the Platte Clove Preserve, though only Blue Hole had a permit system.
Even with the permits, stewards picked up approximately 4,600 pounds of trash in 2019 and 7,200 pounds last year. The permit was meant to address the garbage left behind by visitors as well as stream bank erosion caused by constant foot travel. With the permits in place, the number of visitors to Peekamoose did drop, and crowds were diverted to other Catskill Park locations.
Most Peekamoose visitors had a permit, and the educational measures were proving effective. In 2019, instead of 1,000 daily visitors at Blue Hole, the single busiest day was shy of 500 people, with a comfortable season total of 10,796. In fact, the permitting process was almost working too well.
“What the state found,” Senterman said, “and what we found being there, was that (for) almost 50 percent of the permits that were requested, people weren't showing up for. And if the permits weren’t being used, then sort of half the capacity was not being used, and we were turning people away that didn’t have the permit, even though there was space at the Blue Hole … but then 2020 came along, and kind of blew everything out of the water, so to speak.”
Like many parks and hiking trails during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, the Blue Hole saw a massive spike in visitors. Total visitation more than doubled to 24,281 people, according to the Catskill Center and the highest single day climbed back to around 1,000 people for the season.
“Parks and public lands, national parks, are all really grappling with how do you protect the natural resources, but also allow accessibility and have people there to responsibly enjoy it,” Senterman said. “And so there’s a host of ways that land managers are responding.”
Still, of those 24,281 visitors, 49 percent of people (11,891), were turned away, and the free permitting system was not only inadvertently affecting visitation, it was also costly. Senterman said that per a contract between the state of New York and Reserve America — a website used across the country to manage online park reservations — all the free permit transactions were costing the state a significant amount of money. Each permit amounted to $7.25 in fees.
With so many registered people not showing up at the Blue Hole despite having permits, the DEC realized it needed to incentivize visitors to follow through on their reservation while the DEC covered expenses. Hence, the $10 permit was born.
Along with a new price tag, these permits are required seven days a week, up from only weekends and holidays, and only 60 are issued daily to hikers, campers, picknickers and anglers. Senterman said the permit is now required for people to park their vehicles along the Peekamoose Valley, not just to grant access to swim at the Blue Hole. Permits, which can be reserved online, can only be obtained up to a week in advance.
The DEC reported that 1,206 permits were purchased in six weeks, from system implementation May 15 until June 28. Visitors are showing up in larger numbers, too. The attendance rate per registration has shot up from 50 percent to 85 percent, according to the DEC, and stewards interacted with 685 visitors during the weekend of June 25 to 27, the Catskill Center said.
“I don't think that the permit system would work without the partnership of the Catskill Center and our stewards there,” Senterman said. “You know, managing visitor use can’t simply be an enforcement exercise. It needs to be an educational one, too. And we need to give people the tools in order to recreate responsibly.”