New York's Once-Thriving Quarry Under Two Hours From NYC Is Now A Preserve With Trails And Abandoned Ruins

Abandoned sites can make for compelling hiking destinations, if not for the history they contain, then simply for adding something unique to see along your trek. There's a particularly scenery-rich example of such a spot in the hills of the Hudson Valley called the Sylvan Glen Park Preserve. The park is full of hiking trails with lookouts over quarry ruins and distant hills. One of its added draws is being easily reachable from a major hub — just a bit over an hour by car from New York City, depending on traffic. Another is that it's owned and managed by Yorktown as a preserve, making it publicly accessible and its historic features protected from private development.

Something you'll encounter around the Sylvan Glen Park Preserve is granite — and an abundance of it. Naturally, this is what fueled the quarry that once existed here, the Mohegan Quarry, which operated from 1890 to 1941, according to Yorktown Trail Town. The granite excavated at the site was supplied to buildings in New York City and various other cities around the Hudson Valley. Along trails in the preserve, you can see remnants of the quarry's rock-cutting machinery, building foundations, and tons of granite chunks. Beyond the quarry site, trails weave through woods and wetlands for a peaceful nature escape.

There are over a dozen trails in the Sylvan Glen Park Preserve listed on a map of the park, but if you want to focus on those that include views of quarry ruins, you'll want to look for the red-, white-, and blue-marked trails. These are clustered around the southern side of the 350-acre preserve, offering the most quarry remnant sites in close proximity. You can see both large and small quarry basins, foundations of a stone-cutting shed, and derrick machinery remains. On the blue-marked trail, specifically — a 0.8-mile stretch called the High Quarry trail on the preserve map — you get several interesting landmarks within a short distance, including views of both quarry pits and a rock railway bridge you can walk under.

These quarry sites were once suppliers for state-wide buildings, including the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the world's largest Anglican cathedral that's hidden in NYC. They produced a particularly treasured, golden-hued variety of granite. When it hit its highest demand, the quarry employed up to 200 people at once, but it was abandoned by 1941 after other construction materials took favor over granite.

Though the quarry-adjacent trails are fascinating, the preserve's other trails are worth exploring, too. There are some ponds and streams throughout the preserve, including one cascade that's easy to miss along the white-marked trail. The landscape can be quite hilly, so be prepared for some inclines (albeit with rewarding views).

The Sylvan Glen Park Preserve has two entrances: one at Morris Lane on its west side and one on Stony Street on the east, with a parking lot available at both. If you want a quicker route to the main quarry remnants, the Morris Lane entrance is a little closer. There's a total of 6.8 miles of hiking trails through the park, according to Yorktown Trail Town, though the individual trails are all quite short — mostly under a mile or just over a mile, all densely branching off from one another, so you can easily shorten or extend your hike as you continue along.

From Midtown NYC, drive about an hour to reach the preserve, located in the hamlet of Mohegan Lake within Yorktown. The route follows the Taconic State Parkway, one of the best scenic byways for an unforgettable New York road trip. Mohegan Lake is a small community with not many attractions for travelers beyond the preserve, but the larger town of Peekskill, an artsy and charming city on the Hudson River, is just a 10-minute drive away.