Esopus Creek

About

Esopus Creek, New York — Ashokan Reservoir, NYC Water Supply. The USGS gauge 01362500 records an average flow of roughly 680 cubic feet per second, and paddlers find the creek most inviting between 300 and 2,000 CFS. Those numbers describe a stream with two distinct personalities. The upper reaches, fed by portal releases, run fast and technical; the lower valley widens and slows as it approaches the reservoir. The Shandaken Portal to Phoenicia section covers eight miles of Class II–III portal-release whitewater. From Phoenicia to Mount Tremper, ten miles of Class I–II water threads a scenic valley. The final twelve miles, Mount Tremper to the Ashokan Reservoir, settle into Class I through a wider valley.

The name and the water both belong first to the Esopus band of the Munsee Lenape, who inhabited the Catskill region for thousands of years before European contact. The creek gave them trout and a travel corridor between the Hudson Valley and the Catskill interior. That long tenure was broken by conflict: fighting with Dutch settlers in the 1650s and 1660s — the Esopus Wars — devastated the Esopus people. By the seventeenth century the Esopus Colony had become the third settled by the Dutch, drawing settlers dissatisfied with the restrictions of New Amsterdam or Beverwyck, or Albany. The surrounding country split into the "grotte Esopus," or greater Esopus, and a southern "klyne Esopus," the lesser.

Industry followed settlement. From the 1830s through the 1920s the watershed was logged to supply the regional timber industry and the railroad expansion of the 1860s through 1910s, worked by local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations. The exhaustion of the old-growth stands around 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale logging.

The defining chapter came with water. Between 1905 and 1916, construction of the Ashokan Dam — the largest dam in the United States at the time — impounded the creek and created the Ashokan Reservoir, New York City's first major water-supply reservoir. Completed in 1916, it holds 122 billion gallons and supplies about ten percent of the city's water system. The cost was borne locally: the 1915–1916 work required the condemnation of 12 villages and the displacement of 4,000 people. In 1924 the city completed the Shandaken Tunnel, diverting Schoharie Reservoir water into the Esopus through the Shandaken Portal — the engineering that still governs the creek's flow. The 1955–1956 construction of the 22-mile Catskill Aqueduct extended that supply toward the city.

Today the creek sits within Catskill Park and the New York City Watershed, and it is a designated New York State Wild and Scenic River. It runs 65 miles from its headwaters at Winnisook Lake in the Slide Mountain Wilderness to its confluence with the Hudson River at Saugerties, draining 420 square miles. The upper five miles are catch-and-release trout fishing, and the Phoenicia and Boiceville sections draw fly fishers; the river is the principal hatchery stream for the Catskill wild trout population. Outfitters like Town Tinker Tube Rental in Phoenicia put visitors on the water that a city and a fishery both depend on.