Most of what people hike in the Catskills goes up. The Hunter Regional Trails don't.
These are old railroad grades. The Ulster and Delaware Railroad ran through here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hauling an enormous number of tourists up to the grand mountain hotels. The hotels burned or came down, the rails and ties came out, and what's left is the grade itself: level, wide, and laid out by people whose entire job was making sure a locomotive never had to climb anything steep.
That grade is the reason these walks work for someone who doesn't want a thousand feet of elevation gain, and for anyone who'd rather talk to the person next to them than gasp at them.
What it doesn't mean is that the whole system is smooth. Flat and easy aren't the same thing. The surface changes segment to segment: the Huckleberry is the one you can reasonably push a stroller or a wheelchair on right now, and the rest runs from gravel with the occasional leftover railroad tie to genuinely rocky wooded trail. Worth knowing which you're getting before you load the car.
The vision is roughly nine miles, from the Kaaterskill Falls side in Haines Falls west to Dolan's Lake at the base of Hunter Mountain. Not all of it is trail yet.
Two honest things about that number.
It's a system, not a single walk. There are road connections between the segments. Some are short. The gap between the west end of the Huckleberry and the Hunter Branch is not short, and we wouldn't send you off to link those two on foot expecting a nice afternoon. Closing that gap through the woods someday means a creek crossing, which means a bridge, which means real money. It's on the list.
The mileages are approximate on purpose. The segments don't have tidy beginnings and endings. Anyone who quotes you an exact figure for this system is rounding something.
So treat it as several good walks that are gradually becoming one. Pick a segment, park at it, walk it, and come back for another.
Listed east to west, the way someone would have traveled home on the train after a stay at the Catskill Mountain House.
Kaaterskill Rail Trail runs about a mile and a half through Kaaterskill Clove, with a trailhead near the Mountain Top Historical Society and good parking. Creek views and a few bridges. Its eastern end puts you at the Laurel House lot and the observation platform for Kaaterskill Falls, which makes it the easiest way in the Catskills to pair an easy walk with a genuinely famous waterfall.
Cortina Connector (Not Open Yet) is the newest piece and the one that ties the eastern half together. About a mile and a quarter of woods trail, then the Cortina Mountain Estates dirt road over to the Huckleberry at Clum Hill. Not a stroller route. It's walkable now, though not officially open: there are sidewalks still to build and a crossing to sort out over Route 23A at Peace Village, and nobody wants to cut a ribbon on a trail before it's safe enough to access.
Huckleberry Rail Trail East runs from Cortina Valley west into Tannersville, ending at the playground by the Boathouse side of Lake Rip Van Winkle. Flat, forested, and it delivers you to a village lake with a playground on it, which is a genuinely useful thing to know if you're walking with kids who need a reason to keep going.
Huckleberry Rail Trail West picks up on the far side of the park and continues out to Bloomer Road, where there's a lot that doubles as the access point for the Colonial Trails mountain bike network. You can walk the whole Huckleberry end to end at roughly 2.7 miles. We've split it here because the park in the middle makes them feel like two different walks, and because either half on its own is a reasonable outing.
The two Huckleberry halves are the most stroller-friendly walking in the system, and the part that runs closest to the Village of Tannersville. You can get a coffee, walk a mile of old railroad, let the kids tire themselves out at the playground, and walk back.
Hunter Branch Rail Trail opened in April 2023, with Luke's Bridge dedicated to Luke Patterson. It runs from Clove Road off Route 214 in Hunter, west through the woods and alongside Ski Bowl Road, as far as Evergreen Mountain Contracting at 300 Ski Bowl Rd. Reaching Dolan's Lake is the goal, but the stretch along Ski Bowl is currently a roadside walk along a 55 mph road. Treat Evergreen as the end of the trail for now, particularly with kids or anything on wheels.
The Hunter Branch passes through what was once Camp Jened, and there's a state historical marker at the trail's western end:
Former site of Camp Jened from which grew the disability rights movement, the fight for justice for all disabled people. Camp Jened, 1953 to 1977.
Jened was a summer camp for disabled teenagers, and what happened there fed directly into the American disability rights movement and eventually the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's the subject of the documentary Crip Camp. The site is Evergreen Mountain Contracting now.
Funding is in place to start bringing the Hunter Branch up to full ADA compliance, and the ambition is bigger than the word compliance suggests. The goal is a trail that's a real example of what accessible outdoor access can look like, on the ground where some of that movement's founders first met.
We're on Main Street in Tannersville, a short walk from the Huckleberry and about ten minute drive from the Kaaterskill Rail Trail. If you're not sure which segment fits your group, stop in and ask. It's a five minute conversation and we'd rather you end up on the right piece of trail than the busiest one.
