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...
Tagged: Catskill Mountains
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...
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...
On Paths
A path or trail is an expression of relationship, an accord between those who use it—and thereby maintain it—and the region it traverses. Paths made by deer and fox express something different from those...
The Ghost of a Waterfall
This might be a fish story—you know, about the one that got away. Or it might be a tale of buried treasure. Either way, because it happened in the old air of the Catskill...
The Forgotten Gas Well of Fox Hollow
It happened on a February night in 1955, in the heart of the Catskill Mountains. A large group of locals had gathered in Fox Hollow in the town of Shandaken. They stood in a...
Penetrable Olana
Hoping to investigate matters pertaining to landscape and art, I drive down from the Mountaintop, cross the Hudson via the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, and arrive at Frederic Church’s place, Olana, which sits above...
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...
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...