The thousand-year-old Native footpath — the 'Great Path' between the Hudson and the Connecticut — that the Mohawk Trail was laid upon.
Now here's the truth of this road, and you ought to know it before you drive another mile. Long, long before there was pavement, before there was a wheel anywhere in these hills, there was a path. A footpath, worn into the mountains by moccasins over ten centuries or more.
It was one of the great trails of the eastern woodlands — a highway of the wilderness that connected the valley of the Hudson River, out west in New York, to the valley of the Connecticut, right here. The Mahican people, the Pocumtuck, and yes the Mohawk, walked it to trade and to hunt and, when times turned hard, to make war. It was a working road for a thousand years, and it went exactly where you're going now — because when you're on foot in mountains like these, there's only one sensible way through, and the people who lived here found it long ago.
So when the surveyors came in nineteen-fourteen to lay out their brand-new scenic motor road, they didn't have to figure much out. They just followed the trail that was already there — the one the deer made, and the people made after them. Every curve you take today, somebody's ancestor took barefoot. That's what you're driving on. Not a modern road at all, really. The oldest road there is, with asphalt poured over the top.
Photo: vastateparksstaff · CC BY 2.0
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