Bear Mountain-Harriman State Park contains an extensive web of paths, trails, and old roads across an eighty-square-mile area in the scenic Hudson Highlands, including hundreds of miles of marked trails and the Appalachian Trail. The New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, established in 1920 to voluntarily construct and maintain hiking trails of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, built the local section of the Appalachian Trail in 1923 in cooperation with the Commission and continues to manage the trail in New York and New Jersey, while also helping build more than 370 miles of foot trails on Commission lands. The parks' trails cross 1.3 billion years of geological history, including rocks transformed into banded gneisses by a major continental collision 1.1 billion years ago, magnetite iron ore bodies formed about 850 million years ago and later mined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, repeated uplift and erosion, and glacial action over the past 2 million years that left u-shaped valleys, bare hilltops, erratics, pot-holes, boulder fields, large swamps, and the Hudson River fjord. A road built by hand in 1932 by the Civil Work Administration leads to Perkins Tower, a stone tower honoring George W. Perkins, Sr., first president of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, with views of the Hudson Highlands and beyond. Major William A. Welch, appointed in 1912 as the Commission's General Manager and Chief Landscape Engineer, designed the park's bush and forested environments, co-founded the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference and served as its first chairman for ten years, chaired the newly organized Appalachian Trail Conference in 1925, and helped establish natural and state park systems across the country. Nearby Iona Island served in the eighteenth century as a strategic Hudson Highlands site in the independence struggle, became the Hudson Valley's earliest and best known nineteenth-century vineyard through the Iona Grape, later drew thousands of excursionists to a summer resort, then became a major naval ammunition depot during both world wars before the Palisades Interstate Park took jurisdiction in 1966 and emphasized its role as a wildlife and bird center.
