Work on clearing path for trail to begin
Officials have finished marking a trail leading to Bristol Beach and expect to begin clearing the half-mile-long path in the coming week.
Town officials have finished marking a planned trail from U.S. Route 9W to Bristol Beach on the Hudson River and expect to begin clearing the half-mile long path in the coming week.
At a Town Board meeting last week, Parks Superintendent Greg Chorvas said the trail will extend from a recently completed parking area to the beach.
“We did go in there and mark the trail and tape it,” Chorvas said. “We’re going to go through there with a forestry cutter. That new trail will be open from the new parking lot that ... the Highway Department put in down to the gravel road, which leads to the grassy meadow adjacent to the Hudson River.”
The parking area was constructed earlier this year about 150 feet from Route 9W in an area that was formerly used as a road to bring farm equipment onto the property but has largely been overgrown.
The 65-acre Bristol Beach property features roughly 1.1 miles of Hudson River shoreline but has no formal trails and can be hazardous because there are rock ledges hidden by overgrowth and fallen leaves.
In 2016 the town received grants of $15,000 and $42,500 from Hudson River Valley Greenway and $10,000 from the state Department of Environmental Conservation toward planning and development of the site. Another $73,000 has been made available from the former Winston Farm Alliance, which donated the funds after it closed. The organization had been dedicated to keeping county officials from using the Winston Farm property as landfill for solid waste.
Councilwoman Leeanne Thornton said the trail is an important part of an overall project that has been planned for decades, beginning with three people who have since passed away.
“The notebooks that Cliff Tienken Sr. and Bill Trumpbour kept from Town Boards go back over 30 years,” she said. “Josh Randall was really looking at the history of the brickyard and getting kiosks down there and signage so that it would be a great place to learn about the history of Saugerties...and everything on the river.”
Thornton noted that efforts to have the property become a state park were hard to get support for until officials were convinced to visit the site.
“Cliff Tienken and Bill Trumpbour were going out on Cliff’s boat with Bernadette Castro from the governor’s office and they pulled into the (Bristol Beach) cove area...and she said ‘this is such a great place for a park,’” Thornton said. “Cliff said ‘you do realize this is on the bottom of the list of New York state park? It’s always been listed, it’s just been undeveloped.’”