Welcome to the Hyde Park Explorer. We’ve produced this series of podcasts to help enhance your hiking experience, and bring you closer to some of the special places along the trail. The Hyde Park trails will lead you through National Park sites, a state park, town parks, and nature preserves.
Together, we welcome you to enjoy our trails and encourage you to hike safely and responsibly. Please respect fragile habitats and private property by staying on the trails. Take only pictures and leave only footprints. Hyde Park and the Hudson River Valley are steeped in American history. Over four hundred years ago, the Dutch explorer Henry Hudson first plied the waters of the river that now bears his name. In the mid-1800s, the breathtaking views of the river and distant Catskill Mountains inspired the first great American art movement—the Hudson River School of landscape painters.
Hyde Park was the ancestral home to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was deeply proud of, and connected to, his Dutch roots, its people, and history. FDR and his wife Eleanor were certainly famous local residents, but there’s more of the Hyde Park story waiting for you to discover. Trails can connect us with the past, immerse us in the present, and transport us to the future. The Hyde Park trails are officially designated as National Recreation Trails. This means that they are part of a larger family that includes the National Historic Trails, which retrace some of America’s greatest journeys, and the National Scenic Trails, which traverse some of America’s greatest landscapes.
We hope you will go on and enjoy many other trails, whether here in Hyde Park, elsewhere in the Hudson River Valley, or on any other America’s national trails. And we hope you will find ways to get involved with the trails and great places in your community.
