travel dates: July, 2021
A quick post today about Opus 40, a cool place we went that doesn’t really fit in anywhere as part of a longer post. We were in the area to tour Bard College with Milo, our current senior, and we had just enough time to fit in a visit to Opus 40 on the same day as our tour.
If you’re planning a trip to the area and have more than one afternoon to devote to it, I have a post about other stuff to do in Saugerties here (the KOA I talk about in that post appears to have closed).
Opus 40 is an outdoor sculpture park created nearly forty years ago by artist Harvey Fite. The stonework is all made from bluestone taken directly from the site, and the result is an elaborate, 6.5 acre sprawling earthstone sculpture that blends in with the landscape and is a lot of fun to explore.
It’s a bit of a drive on small, winding roads (don’t bring your RV) to get to Opus 40, but it’s worth the detour. Admission (if purchased in advance) is $11 for adults, $9 for seniors, students, and veterans. Kids under 5 are free. An hour or two should give you plenty of time to see the sculpture and the museum.
We were there on a wet, somewhat rainy day (we were pretty much everywhere on a wet, rainy day last summer), which made some low lying parts of the grounds inaccessible. Kids will have a great time here, but there are plenty of opportunities to fall off of walls and crack heads open on rock, so make sure to keep young kids close.
After you check out the sculpture and the grounds, there’s a small museum where you can learn more about the process of creating the sculpture and see some of the tools that were used.
All in all it was exactly the sort of quirky, off the beaten path place that we love to find!
Leave a Reply