Earth Day Celebration has moved inside, into the lobby of the Orpheum Theatre

In cooperation with the Mountaintop Progressives, the Catskill Mountain Foundation and the Hunter Foundation, will be presenting the annual ENVIRONMENTAL CELEBRATION – EARTH DAY! The event is free! including the films presented at the Orpheum Theater. We invite you to share this special day.  Here are some details…

THE RAIL/TRAIL HIKE!  The 2019 event is being held at the Rip Van Winkle Lake/Park and begins with an environmental encounter with 4 hikes scheduled from 12 PM to 2 PM along the Huckleberry Rail/Trail.  Heading either east from the Park to the Cortina Ski site or west to the terminus at Bloomer Road, this often used and easy hike or bike path hike, will be accompanied by a geologist, a botanist, a forester, or another flora and fauna expert to provide both history and insight during the hike.

MUSIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENCOUNTERS/LEARNING! When you return, you can opt to experience yet another hike in the opposite direction. Visit more than a dozen displays and demonstration tables at the Orpheum Theater hosted by a variety of non-profit Mountaintop groups focused on a number of environmental issues including organic gardening, composting, our flora environment, water quality, global warming, recycling and solid waste, plastic pollution, and some outstanding public policy issues pending resolution.  You will receive a list of all those present and the focus of their efforts.  You can also receive a “grow-gift” from the MTP and the environmental sponsors of this event from seeds to seedlings to plants and trees so you can start a garden, plant a tree, and more. There will be a good number of performers who will entertain the crowd with a variety of music from jazz to folk music to rock. This runs 2-4 PM.

FREE FILMS!  A FREE Double Feature film presentation will be presented at the ORPHEUM THEATER from 4 PM to 6 PM.  Entry is FREE and… so is the popcorn!  Containing environmental entertainment, the films are “Fern Gully” an animated film that young folks enjoy followed by “To Be Forever Wild” a celebration of the Catskill Forest Preserve/Park that we all call home.  In this film, premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival in 2013 and later on PBS, you will encounter a good number of sites and places that you have visited, hiked, or admired.  It is a celebration of the place that we all call home.

This EARTH DAY event, which is generally held in entirety in the CATSKILL FOREST PRESERVE AND PARK, goes back to 1885 as the very first American environmental conservation and preservation action taken – following the portraits of our places of beauty by the Hudson River School of Art decades earlier by Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and others.  One message contained in the NY State 19th Century was “preserve and protect” and provide a generational gift to those who follow!