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...
Author: John P. O'Grady
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...
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...
Marker 123
It has been said—by a scholar who studies such things—that the function of a picture postcard is to make the unnoticed noticed. If nothing else, a postcard is a kind of mailable landmark—with graffiti...
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...