Thomas Cole’s Last Mountain
The artist Thomas Cole died at home in the village of Catskill on February 11, 1848. He had just turned forty-seven years old. Even by 19th-century standards, this seems young. Consider, for example, Cole’s...
Author: John P. O'Grady
Remembering Charles Dornbusch
You can still see it there along the side of a seldom-traveled road in the hamlet of Cornwallville, a haunted house of sorts, or rather a low shed “with a history,” green-shingled and isolate,...
Of Men and Wolves
The year 1815 was a difficult one here on the Mountaintop, both for human beings and for wolves. At least that’s the sense one gets from reading Reverend Henry Prout’s Old Times in Windham....
The Return of Rip Van Winkle
The most prominent landmark in the Catskills is not a mountain but a character by the name of Rip Van Winkle. It’s surprising how many take him to be an historical figure as opposed...
Names on the Mountains
The map, they say, is not the territory, but a map does come in handy when trying to find your way around the territory. The region of the highest peaks in the Catskills—including all...
Kaaterskill Falls in Winter
During the bitter winter of 1843, the artist Thomas Cole made an arduous day trip by sleigh from his home in the village of Catskill to the precipice of Kaaterskill Falls. He and his...
Unwritten in Stone
Mr. Tombeaux, an amateur geologist, directs our attention to this roadside Hadean outcrop. Few geological traces of the Hadean Eon remain on Earth. So we look to the Moon. The Lunar geologic timescale has...
Inundated in the Catskills
The collies wanted to go ghost hunting. So I took them down to the impoundment called Schoharie Reservoir. There they saw the ghost of a creek, drifting wavering deep in the abyss just past...
Bodega Head: An Excursion in Nuclear Shamanism
They called it the “Glory Hole.” Seventy-three feet deep, one hundred forty-two feet in diameter. It took two expensive years of excavation to open the hole, the work being...
The Big Game
Somebody phoned in an order for pizza but Mr. Tombeaux delivered a sentence instead. It tasted like a heavy chain of words. Oh how it clanked going down, going down.