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Palisades, formerly known as Sneden's Landing (pronounced SNEE-dens), is a hamlet in the Town of Orangetown in Rockland County, New York. It is located north of Rockleigh and Alpine, New Jersey ; east of Tappan ; south of Sparkill ; and west of the Hudson River .
Palisades Region. On the west side of the Hudson River, the Palisades region is rich in history, diverse habitat, and jaw-dropping views.
- Overview
- History of the Palisades
- Creating Palisades Interstate Park
- How to visit the Palisades
Hike, bike, or kayak at Palisades Interstate Park, a rare goldmine of geologic history that’s a stone’s throw from midtown Manhattan.
I first encountered the Palisades, a set of massive cliffs overlooking Manhattan from across the Hudson River, out of desperation. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I felt an all-consuming urge to get out and explore. For me, that meant jumping on my bicycle and riding deep into the city and then out of it.
One spring day, I rode across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. Ten minutes after rolling into the town of Fort Lee, I found myself engulfed in dense woodland abutting a soaring rock wall. Cyclists sped past me as I slammed on my brakes to gawk at a bald eagle’s nest with a million-dollar view of the Manhattan skyline.
Palisades Interstate Park emerges suddenly out of a section of industrial sprawl and covers around 2,500 acres of riverfront forest. Rising about 500 feet from the water’s edge, the park’s namesake is a line of diabase (a dark-colored igneous rock) and basalt cliffs that run along 50 miles of the Hudson River. From the western edge of Manhattan, the National Historic Landmark looks like giant wooden fences, hence the cliffs’ Indigenous Lenape name, wee-awk-en or “the rocks that look like trees.”
Around 201 million years ago, as the Triassic gave way to the Jurassic, and the Pangaea supercontinent began to break apart, a series of dramatic volcanic eruptions took place. The activity was spread over less than a million years—a blink of an eye in geological terms. This led to a major upheaval in geology, climate, and biology covering a 4.2-million-square-mile area known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, or CAMP.
(In 250 million years, this may be the only continent left on Earth.)
The Palisades are within that zone, at the eastern edge of the Newark Rift Basin that was once a body of water “more like present-day Lake Tanganyika or Lake Malawi than anything else nearby,” says Sean Kinney, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
As North America began to tear itself away from North Africa, lava intruding into the sedimentary rock under the Newark Basin formed the Palisade Sill, a kind of container of magma that slowly cooled, altering the size and makeup of the rock. Kinney uses the analogy of a doughnut being injected with jelly, as he points out the clear contact point that can be seen along the base of the cliffs, where blocky lake rock gives way to the sill’s massive trunk-like basalt.
Because of the speed and scale of the volcanic activity, the Palisades are an ideal place for geologists to read rock. By drilling out cores and looking at the mineral deposits over time, they can get a clearer picture of how the Newark Basin’s water levels changed over time. The unprecedented scale and speed of volcanic activity during the CAMP event means the geological record, layer by layer, is spread over shorter time scales than what most geologists are used to having at their disposal.
Paul Olsen, a professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, became fascinated by the Palisades as a teenager, when he and a friend made headlines for their discovery of dinosaur footprints at a quarry near Livingston, New Jersey.
Geologists—including Olsen and his team—often depend on controlled quarrying operations to gain access to layers of exposed rock. But runaway mining over a century ago almost obliterated the Palisades, taking the geological record and natural splendor of the area with it.
The Palisades was a source of rock for use in roads and railways, both of which were spreading across New Jersey and New York at a rapid clip at the end of the 19th century. To obtain the rock, miners would blast the cliffs with dynamite, collecting the broken-up boulders left behind when the smoke cleared.
The first mumblings of discontent about the frequent explosions across the Hudson came from people with deep pockets and coveted backyard views. But the Palisades Interstate Park Commission (PIPC), established in 1909, is really the direct result of lobbying by the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs, a civic organization. The geological value was not the main focus. Instead, activists were concerned about losing one of the few natural refuges within an afternoon’s trip from New York City and the surrounding towns.
“A lot of people look at open space as unused land,” says Carol Ash, who was the PIPC’s executive director from 1999 to 2006 and is now the chairperson of the nonprofit Palisades Parks Conservancy. “The Palisades is special, and it needs to be kept special, which has always involved a bit of a fight.”
One of the first things you notice on a visit to the Palisades is how little information there is on the region’s history. Signs are rare and many sections, while manicured, feel wild, making the transition from city or suburb to nature all the more abrupt. While that may not be intentional, it’s clear that exploration is the point.
(Here’s how to explore a billion-year-old volcanic mystery along Lake Superior.)
“There’s no visitor center or signs explaining what you’re seeing along the way,” says Joshua Laird, the current PIPC executive director. “I think that’s at least partially a function of the fact that the park was founded so early and we were inventing the model. There was no National Park Service to look at when we were starting these parks.”
In all, the park is home to more than 30 miles of interconnected hiking trails, which are well-marked and—with the help of a map—can lead to a customizable day along the cliffs, into the woods, and down to the shoreline. The most popular and most challenging route is Giant Stairs, a rock scramble over the very boulders that early industrialists and miners coveted so dearly.
There are also opportunities to get on the water. Outfitters like Hudson Kayaks offer rentals from the Alpine Picnic Area, which is easily accessible by car or bicycle. Cyclists flock to 9W, a road with wide shoulders and formidable climbs, and to Henry Hudson Drive, which skirts the bottom of the cliffs and is closed to car traffic on certain holidays.
(This New York State rail trail isn’t just epic, it’s also accessible.)
- Sebastian Modak
A natural barrier between the Hudson and Hackensack rivers, once thought to have been a single waterway, they began forming 200-250 million years ago, when the Earth’s land mass was concentrated in a single supercontinent known as Pangaea. Drone footage of Palisades in summer.
The Palisades, basalt bluffs 200–540 feet (60–165 meters) high along the west side of the Hudson River, southeastern New York and northeastern New Jersey, U.S. Rising vertically from near the water’s edge, they are characterized by uplifts, faults, and columnar structure developed by slow cooling.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Oct 8, 2019 · With autumn leaves now turned, hiking in the Palisades region of State Parks offers spectacular views of the Hudson Valley and the Catskills to go with a fascinating history that includes an outlaw’s lair, the state's early iron industry, and a traitor’s secret meeting place.
Closter Road–Oak Tree Road Historic District is a national historic district located at Palisades in Rockland County, New York. It encompasses 18 contributing buildings and one contributing site. The district consists of 19 properties that reflect the historic core of the hamlet.
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