Botanist John Bartram wrote a widely read account of an expedition there prior to independence, and a century later the North-South Lake area he had visited became home to a number of exclusive resorts, including the Catskill Mountain House.

Today much of it is New York State Forest Preserve within the Catskill Park, and a popular place for hiking, camping and other outdoor recreation.

To the west, with the exception of Kaaterskill High Peak, runoff feeds the headwaters and upper tributaries of Schoharie Creek, which rises at the height of land between Plattekill and Indian Head mountains.

Its limestone bedrock began forming 400 mya, during the Silurian period, when the Catskill region was a river delta and the shallow sea it drained into.

[5] Later, during the Acadian orogeny, the sea became the deeper Appalachian Basin, and the sand and clay from the newer mountains became the shale and sandstone found throughout the Catskills today.

The area of today's Escarpment and northeastern Catskills had been the river's distributaries and had the thickest layer of Devonian sediments, leading it to uplift as a whole and become a plateau rather than fracturing into mountains.

Not only did it scour and steepen its slopes, leaving the many bare cliffs found today, it carved out both Platte and Kaaterskill cloves from the narrower, shorter and shallower valleys of smaller streams.

[9] As the Escarpment began to revegetate in the wake of the retreat of the Wisconsin glaciation, its forests remained exposed to weather due to their location.

[13] No one would explore them for a century, until Johannes Hardenbergh secured the 2 million-acre (810,000 ha) land grant that bore his name from colonial governor Lord Cornbury in 1708, a patent later affirmed by his cousin, Queen Anne.

[15] The murky circumstances of the patent, likely involving official corruption,[16] compounded by litigation from a competing group of claimants[17] and interference with the crews attempting to survey the property[18] limited efforts to explore or settle the Escarpment, much less the whole region.

That began to change in 1741 when early American naturalist John Bartram climbed up to a "shady vale" around North-South Lake, where he collected samples of the resin of the "Balm of Gilead" tree (balsam fir) to send to his English patron, Peter Collinson.

[19] Collinson regularly prevailed on Bartram over the next several years to return for some seeds of the tree, which the former hoped to grow in England, and in 1753 he did, accompanied by a guide and his son William.

They made sure their estate houses, like Clermont Manor and Montgomery Place, both also NHLs, provided ample views of the Escarpment across the river, lands which the family had started to acquire.

"... [A] man looking toward the Catskills from the east bank could see a view the equal in almost every respect to the already famous ones admired by so many tourists to England's Lake District.

... the place I mean is next to the river, where one of the ridges juts out a little from the rest, and where the rocks fall for the best part of a thousand feet so much up and down that a man standing on their edges is fool enough to think he can jump from top to bottom.

Poet William Cullen Bryant similarly used his art to glorify the Catskills, helping to create interest in the region as a tourist destination.

Charles Beach took over a failing Catskill Mountain House in 1846 and turned it into one of mid-19th century America's most exclusive resorts, visited by presidents and other dignitaries.

Competing hotels in areas further inland now recognized as being in the Catskills claimed to offer a more genuine mountain experience, and purer air, to their guests.

Beach and the Mountain House made a long-planned joint venture to build an incline railway up the Escarpment to the hotel a reality in 1892, but it cut into their profits.

[38] The next year the state acquired Stoppel Point, complementing its purchase of Kaaterskill High Peak, most of Overlook, Plattekill and Roundtop in 1921, which had capped two decades of acquisitions on the northern Escarpment.

New owners also began building a third Overlook Hotel in 1927 and continued throughout the 1930s; however, their supplies were stolen during World War II and the project was abandoned.

[40] The Escarpment's transition from private paradise to public playground was complete, although the last mountaintop parcel, the summit of Overlook, was not fully acquired until 1996.

[41] Over the course of the rest of the century, the state developed North-South Lake into the busy campground it is today and cut new trails and marked old roads and paths throughout the range.

Today the Forest Preserve along the Escarpment is divided into several different management units and administered according to the Catskill State Land Master Plan.

As a result, the coniferous evergreen species characteristic of boreal forests such as red spruce and the balsam fir Bartram sought appear in much higher concentrations, and at lower elevations, then they do elsewhere in the Catskills.

[44] Several large areas of Norway spruce were planted on the north slopes of Windham High Peak during reforestation efforts following state land acquisitions in the 1930s.

They survived the era when tanners sought the species for the tannin in its bark since the steep and perilous nature of that terrain made them too difficult to profitably extract.

[45] Dominant fauna of the Escarpment are the species found elsewhere in the Catskills: white-tailed deer, porcupine, fisher, black bear and snowshoe hare.

The paucity of water on the ridgetops and the slopes means that there are few major fish or amphibian species in the Escarpment, save around North-South Lake.

Initially all of the state lands save North-South Lake Public Campground were classified as Wild Forests, a protection level unique to New York that is slightly less restrictive than wilderness.