Old Tory Fort
We entered the woods armed with a treasure map of sorts. Or rather, we had a professional surveyor’s map to guide us to our destination. The spot we were seeking was high on an...
Category: Landmarks Revisited
Apple Blossom Time
Now is when they come into their brief visibility, the fragrant ghosts of May. They hover along the periphery of mountain roads and in the thick of second-growth forests where once the orchards grew....
Casa Susanna
No historical marker stands in front of the ramshackle boardinghouse formerly known as Casa Susanna. Perhaps that’s for the best. After all, this is more a place of memory than a site of history....
A Tale of Two Lean-tos
The old lean-to. For more than fifty years it stood, alongside the trail, near the headwaters of the Batavia Kill, providing shelter to innumerable backcountry travelers. In recent years it had been showing its...
Excursion to Shew’s Pond
I hadn’t been to Shew’s Pond in more than forty years. But after reading “Trouting Among the Catskills”—a little essay by Charles Lanman—I wanted to revisit the place. Born in 1819, Lanman was an...
Helderberg Castle
From a certain vantage point along the road coming out of New Salem in Albany County, you can catch a glimpse of them up there—the castle ruins. Perched on the rim of one of...
Cruger’s Folly
Proverbial wisdom has it that each of us is the architect of our own fortune. We build our houses and dwell therein, sleeping in the beds we have made for ourselves. Yet who among...
Maurice Gans #1
In May of 1882, William Morris Davis—acclaimed geographer and avid hiker—addressed a gathering of the Appalachian Mountain Club in Boston. The subject of his talk was the geology of the Hudson Valley. He opened...
The Old County Jail
A steep, narrow street in Catskill, New York, leads to a dead end. There stands the former county jail, built in 1803. Long gone are the prison cells with their iron walls and bars...
Austin’s Glen
In one of his books on the subject of Catskill Mountain geology, the venerable George H. Chadwick paused to reflect on this place he considered his home territory: “To all of us collaborators the...