Delaware Water Gap

The Delaware Water Gap is a place where a river cut straight through a mountain. The Delaware River runs between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and at the gap it slices through the long Kittatinny Ridge, leaving steep walls on both sides. Mount Minsi rises on the Pennsylvania side and Mount Tammany on the New Jersey side.

Gaps like this were important long before anyone came to admire them. They gave Native peoples, then settlers, traders and armies, a way through the ridges of the Appalachians without climbing over. Later, roads and railroads used the same openings for the same reason.

In the 1800s, the gap became a resort. Painters came first, drawn by the view, and their pictures helped make the place famous. Then the railroad arrived and brought visitors from New York and Philadelphia in a few hours. Large wooden hotels went up in the village of Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, with long porches facing the river. For a few decades in the late 1800s it was one of the most popular summer resorts in the East, a place to escape the heat of the cities.

The resort era faded with the automobile, which let travelers go farther, and many of the big hotels burned or were torn down. In the 1960s, the federal government planned a large dam on the Delaware above the gap, at a spot called Tocks Island, and began buying up land in the valley. Thousands of people were moved out. The dam was never built. The land became the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area instead, now a long stretch of protected river valley.

The Appalachian Trail crosses the river here too, on its way from Georgia to Maine. When you look at pictures of the gap, notice the angle. Nearly every view is taken from upstream or downstream, looking through the gap, with a mountain wall on each side and the river in the middle. That composition was set by the painters of the 1800s, and the photographers who came later kept it.