Caged Eagle
The lowest point on the Appalachian Trail is a zoo. Sigh. Zoos always make my skin crawl and I can’t go to them.
This zoo is located at the base of Bear Mountain on the New York Appalachian Trail. The trail literally passes through the zoo, snaking its way past cages of animals that you find along the New York AT.
It really is the lowest elevation on The Appalachian Trail at 124 feet of elevation.
You could walk 2 miles from the Bear Mountain Zoo and see these same animals in the woods, free and dignified, but instead they’re housed here in cages that are so small, you wouldn’t keep your dog in them.
I think the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference that oversees that Appalachian Trail here should reroute the trail around the zoo. Hiking through it is just a bummer and contradicts everything I think the Appalachian Trail stands for.
What do you think?
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Hmmm. Hadn’t actually thought about this. I remember coming through this zoo on my thru-hike. I was hiking with a bird lover (an authority on the Finch family) and we both thought the zoo delightful and a welcome change from the usual routine.
I hiked through the Bear Mountain area on a busy spring Saturday last April and maybe the sound of all the motorcycle mufflers roaring the mountain made me doubly grumpy. Zoos just bum me out, and being literally forced to walk through one – you can’t really walk around it – was an emotional low for me.
I hiked that section in 2010 and waited for the zoo to open so I could walk on the lowest elevation point on the AT which is in front of the bear exhibit. Being the first person in that morning it was just me and the animals and a few zoo keepers. At that time the zoo was free to long distance backpackers, I think it still is. The only section I walked was the AT section, I didn’t go inside any of the buildings.
There is a trail, blue-blazed I think that will route you around the zoo if you don’t want to go inside or it’s closed and you don’t want to wait for it to open.
I got this off their website if it makes people feel any better about it:
“Trailside only houses animals native to New York State. All of our animals are either permanently injured or orphaned and would not be able to survive in the wild”
I personally don’t like zoos either, it would be horrible to live in a cage.
That helps – I didn’t stop to read any of the “interpretation,” just blew through and tried not to look at anything. Thankfully the bears were not on display when I walked through.
There’s a nice statue of Walt Whitman along the path. I’m not that crazy about zoo’s in general but it is a pleasent little walk for families with little kids or lovers. Not everyone can hike the AT.
Sadly whether we are out on the AT or in a zoo – in some ways we are all in little cages.
Whoa! I suppose you’re right. Thank god there’s prosac in the water table.
Hiking through the zoo is definitely a surreal experience. But so is the whole Bear Mountain section, especially on a Sunday afternoon. I had a mail drop to pick up in Fort Montgomery Monday morning, so not knowing the area I thought I might be able to stealth camp on Bear Mountain Sunday night. Big mistake. On the backside of Bear Mountain were busloads of Japanese tourists picking blueberries. The top has an observation tower and a steady stream of motorcycles. Coming down the mountain on the new stone paved path opened out onto a park with hundreds of families from a variety of cultures having their Sunday picnics. Then there was the bridge and the zoo. That day really was one of the weirdest on the trail.
I ended up staying in a little hiker friendly hotel that night and thoroughly enjoyed BBQ, a beer (or two), a shower, and getting out of the rain.
Good you had a mail drop there – the food supplies in town are terrible, but that barbecue is good, especially the sweet potato fries!
Too bad you you didn’t camp on top of Black Mtn, just south of Bear Mtn. great view of the NYC night time skyline, sunset, sunrise and a nice stealth camp too. The Bear Mtn summit was crowded with touri when I hiked through there too, glad to get away from there.
Hats off to the many volunteers that installed the granite steps leading from the zoo side up to the summit…beautiful the way they worked them into the hillside.
Philip- I ate at that BBQ place too, the manager even made a special pot of sweet tea southern style (yes there’s a special way) just for me.
JJ, you sound like a died in the wool sectionhiker like me and the rev!
I’m a section hiker to the core and proud of it! :-D))
Go Girl!
Unfortunaty, Zoos are probably here to stay. Here in the USofA, we get spoiled by the large volume of open land, freely available private property and parks that we use. Perhaps with deep regret I have read stories of wild terrain where no one has permanently settled. The US and Canada have a lot of open land, yet. In other countries this is not the case. Africa has less wild country than we do, as does Asia, South America, Australia, and Europe. Zoo’s and preserves are the only real place for the Animals to exist. We, as a species, have simply pushed them off their native lands. Antarctica is, of course, uninhabitable by most species and I am sort of ignoring that.
Anyway, I do not share you revulsion at zoos. Most of the creatures there are not truely wild and could not survive in their natural habitat, if it existed anymore. Bars are to keep people out, mostly. Some of the more dangerous species are protected for safety, but this is generally the exception. Birds are far more difficult. Some can be dangerous, and do not breed well in captivity. The zoo in Bear Moutain is no exception. They have orphans, or injured animals that would have otherwise died. Good? Maybe not. We are preserving the less capable members of the species, though, at no fault to the offspring. This simply keeps the status quo. Species NEED pressures on them to provide a stimulus for natural selection. Much as Malthus’ thesis is subverted by ferilizers, this may not be a good thing. (Now mankind has a glut of people on the planet, using resources at a far greater rate than it is being restored.) Anyway, zoo’s today will provide the history of tomorrow, protecting the more fragile of the species, and, the more natural forms of the species in them as they adapt to presures people put on them. Black bears for instance, are graduating from all around natural “grubbers” to feeding as much as possible from our cast offs. Docility, aggresivness, reactions to people, and learning ability are all being influanced by people. Not well understood nor well researched in the scientific community.
Zoo’s are generally a relativly recent occurance. I tend not to visit them. But I recognize that they have an imprtant value in plotting out evolution as it occurs. Both behavioral and physilogical. As a backpacker, I simply observe what goes on. There is a distinct difference between the truely wild creatures (little or no contact with humans) and those that have learned to avoid (or in the case of black bears, pursue) contact with humans and the behavior of animals in a zoo. Good or bad is not my place to say. I simply note that there ARE differences. Maintaining a baseline, or status quo, for every species is not yet possible. But, it is certainly going that way. Frankly, I would much rather meet a wild bear in the woods than one that is in the zoo. One will likely just avoid me. The other will likely approach me..
This is a local area for me and was the starting point for a section of my AT hike. There IS a way to avoid going through the zoo (it was actually locked and inaccessible at 8:30 in the morning when we started north); we walked out to the road on a park path the trees of which were white blazed! and across the Bear Mountain Bridge.