Bear Mountain State Park & Trailside Museums and Zoo
Bear Mountain Trailside Museums: rescued animals (bears, coyotes, eagles) along a paved Appalachian Trail stretch past four stone museums from 1927.
Trailside Museums and Zoo is a uniquely American institution, founded in 1927 with funding from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation and built as a partnership between the Palisades Interstate Park Commission and the American Museum of Natural History. It was the nation's first self-guided nature trail.
The trail follows a paved stretch of the Appalachian Trail past four small stone museums. The oldest, now the Reptile and Amphibian Museum, is the original 1927 building; the History, Geology, and Nature Study museums came a few years later, built by WPA crews during the Depression to match its stone style.
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