Skinners Falls is not a waterfall. It is a ledge of tilted bedrock that crosses the Delaware River at about river mile 295, dropping the water a few feet through a set of chutes and standing waves that rate Class I to II depending on the gauge. The beach sits on the New York bank just upstream of the drop, a wide shelf of river gravel and flat rock reached from the access road off Milanville Road in the town of Cochecton. People have been stopping here to swim for well over a century, and on a hot Saturday in July the pools above and below the ledge fill with tubers, swimmers and canoe traffic waiting their turn at the rapid.

The falls take their name from Daniel Skinner, a timber rafter who ran the first log raft down the Delaware to Philadelphia in the 1760s and was known afterward as the Lord High Admiral of the Delaware. Rafting crews used this stretch as a marker, and the rapid was one of the places where a badly steered raft came apart. The river here is the state line, New York on the left bank and Pennsylvania on the right, and the whole corridor from Hancock down to Sparrowbush is managed by the National Park Service as the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River.

Swimming works best at low and medium water, roughly from mid-June through September, when the pockets between the ledges hold chest-deep green water over clean rock and the current in the chutes is strong enough to be fun without being dangerous. There are no lifeguards anywhere on the Upper Delaware and no rangers stationed at the beach. The Park Service requires anyone in a boat or tube to have a life jacket, and requires it to be worn from mid-September through mid-May. Check the Callicoon gauge before you go; above about five feet the ledges wash out, the current gets pushy, and the rapid becomes a boater feature rather than a swimming hole. The rock is slick with algae in every season, and the shin-barking edges under the surface are the most common injury here.

The iron truss bridge that stood beside the beach for more than a hundred years is gone. The Skinners Falls-Milanville Bridge, built in 1901 and carrying traffic between Sullivan County and Wayne County, was closed in October 2019 after inspections found the structure failing, and it was demolished in April 2025. Photographs of the beach taken before that date show the span framing the river; the view now is open water and the abutments.

Access is by a short gravel lane down to a small parking area and a canoe launch, which is also where the liveries running the Narrowsburg to Callicoon stretch put boats in and take them out. There are no services at the beach beyond a portable toilet in season. Lander's campground sits a quarter mile upstream, Narrowsburg with its restaurants and the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance is six miles south, and the Zane Grey Museum and the Roebling Aqueduct, the oldest wire suspension bridge in the country, are further downriver.