A creek near Slide Mountain. we stopped for cokes at a little roadside place. It was August and the day was sunny, hot, and luminous. Under the trees it was like being in a cool, shady room lit with so many greens. I noticed a lot of little frogs there and was able to catch and hold one for a moment to look at it closely. All around the base of slide mountain are beautiful creeks and wooded areas. Slide Mountain was made famous by naturalist John Burroughs. here he describes the view from the summit.
We saw the world as the hawk or the balloonist sees it when he is three thousand feet in the air. How soft and flowing all the outlines of the hills and mountains beneath us looked! The forests dropped down and undulated away over them, covering them like a carpet ...
All was mountain and forest on every hand. Civilization seemed to have done little more than to have scratched this rough, shaggy surface of the earth here and there. In any such view, the wild, the aboriginal, the geographical greatly predominate. The works of man dwindle, and the original features of the huge globe come out. Every single object or point is dwarfed; the valley of the Hudson is only a wrinkle in the earth's surface. You discover with a feeling of surprise that the great thing is the earth itself, which stretches away on every hand so far beyond your ken.
~ John Burroughs (b. April 3, 1837 in The Catskills)
