Forever Wild

Photos by David Reddick

THIS STORY BEGINS with Rosie because it can’t begin anywhere else. Rosie is the kind of person you can’t miss. She comes at you like a fisher cat, quick and low with a toothy smile. She asks who you are with, why you are with them, where you’re going, and what trail you just skied.

The last question is not an easy one to answer at Belleayre Mountain, the oldest operating ski area in New York’s Catskill Mountains and one of the oldest in America. Of the 51 runs, descending 1,400 vertical feet, most look the same. Belleayre’s trails are from a different era, four years after WWII ended, when simply getting to the bottom was a feat. The trails don’t wind back and forth through the trees. They start at the top and drop directly down, no turns, no doglegs, just straight lines, one after the other, stacked up on the north face like cigarettes in a box. That’s how they do it in the Catskills, straight up, straight down, straight at you, no bullshit. You gonna skeeit? From da top? What’s ya name?

Rosie Kelly, 64, doled out introductions at Belleayre’s mid-mountain bar: Duff, her “friend”; Bobby, her “lover”; Barb, her bartender. Duff was the important one, she said, because she needed to have friends when she moved from Brooklyn to Pine Hill in 1984.

Pine Hill is the name of a cluster of about three dozen buildings three miles downhill from Belleayre. It’s one of the oldest towns in the Catskills, where natural snow is thin and history deep. The British built forts throughout the range during the Revolutionary War to control trade over the mountains. In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed halfway around the world before sailing the “Great River of the Mountains” and discovering the Catskills.

Before the Rockies, Sierras, Cascades, and other great mountain ranges of the West were discovered and populated by European immigrants, the Catskills were the roof of the New World. Three centuries later, as photographer David Reddick and I discovered last winter, they still hold their own.

The anvil-shaped massifs of the range sit on the northeastern terminus of the Appalachian Plateau, extending more than 700,000 acres between the flatlands of the leatherstocking region of upstate New York and the deep cleave of the Hudson River. Thirty-five peaks in the range reach over 3,500 feet. That’s more than in all of Vermont’s 6 million acres.

After the first ski area in New York opened in 1935—Simpson Ski Slope in nearby Phoenicia—thousands of skiers boarded the New York Central Railroad for Woodland Valley. Skiing was heating up in America then. The 1932 Winter Olympics in New York’s Lake Placid sparked the craze and small ski resorts spread throughout the range. At their peak, hundreds sliced through hardwood forests between Albany and Newburgh—from full-blown destinations to ma-and-pa hills to 300-room Borscht Belt one-runners like Grossinger’s and The Concord (that inspired the film Dirty Dancing). Then the 1970s happened; jets replaced cars and trains, and the great exodus from East to West began.

Most of the small Catskill resorts died. (There are only four that remain: Belleayre, Plattekill, Hunter, and Windham.) Even the Borscht Belt resorts, where performers such as Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Joan Rivers, and Jerry Seinfeld got their start, were gone. By 2018, skiing in the Catskills had become a memory to most—except for a few thousand locals and city dwellers who now skied wide-open corduroy and knee-deep backcountry runs all day, every day without a worry in the world that America’s first mountain range had been all but forgotten.

Which is all Rosie ever wanted. A forgotten place to go, hide out, ski, and raise her kids. After more than three decades, she’d had too many first tracks to count—tracks with friends, tracks with strangers.

It was 3:10 p.m. when she asked what tracks we’d been making. By 3:50 p.m., she had given us her life story, a complete history of Catskills skiing, her plans for the next decade, a map of the resort, a three-drink buzz, and a promise to meet again.

The day was done for. Ski patrol began sweeping the trails, and the sun dive-bombed for the dark side. This was Rosie’s moment. She bid farewell to the bar—friends and lovers be damned. Golden light splintered through the birch forest and a liftie walked across the dirt lot with an empty liter of root beer sticking out of his gym bag.

Rosie clicked into her bindings and pushed off, one more run. Crystals launched into the air from the tails of her skis. Her knees flexed as she arced her boards and made elongated S’s down the hill. Lift pole, snow gun, mogul, whale tail, she glided around them all, rebounding into a moment of weightlessness between each turn as she followed the cigarette-straight line toward home.

IT'S HARD TO SAY WHETHER THE Catskills made the Hudson River or if the river made the mountains. They come as a package; one doesn’t exist without the other. Water is everywhere throughout the range—carving through the peaks, launching off waterfalls, cascading down culverts under the highway to a system of aqueducts that leads 100 miles south to the great maw of New York City.

It was, in fact, the Big Apple that ultimately protected the Catskills and brought skiing to them. After lumberjacks felled thousands of trees to satiate the city’s building boom—eventually silting in the Hudson River and threatening freight traffic there—state legislators passed the “Forever Wild” law, protecting swaths of forest alongside the Hudson, including 286,000 acres in the Catskills. A few decades later, when the state legislature needed to create new jobs where hundreds had been lost, it built the first major ski areas in the region.

Belleayre was a natural pick for the first resort. New Yorkers had been skiing it since a Newburgh man, Maltby Shipp, and his son postholed all 1,400 vertical feet of the mountain in 1929 with seven-foot hickory boards. Four years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) went to work building lodges, lifts, and trails throughout the area. More than 2,000 private resorts, ski clubs, backyard rope tows and hotel hills followed, and the New York ski scene was born—a scene that is surprisingly robust today. New York still has more ski areas (43) than any state in the country and ranks fourth in skier visits.

After a long sleep at the modernist Scribner’s Catskill Lodge in Tannerville, we drove a stone’s throw from Belleayre to a little mountain caught in the throat of a long, frosted valley. The valley walls lining Lower Meeker Hollow Road were laced with birch and maple, long red barns, and hay bales pinning the frozen farmland to the ground.

Two lifts rose 1,100 vertical feet from the base of Plattekill Ski Resort to the 3,500-foot summit. Between them were a few lift enclosures—designed to mimic gambrel barn roofs in the valley—an oversized base lodge, dirt parking lots, a dirt driveway, and about 200 skiers lapping trails as fast as they could.

Plattekill is the Alta of the Catskills. The Little Ski Area That Could has fewer trails but gets more snow than most resorts in the range, averaging 150 inches annually. It is easy to forget that New York State borders two Great Lakes (Ontario and Erie), and that lake-effect storms often carry all the way to the Catskills. Sitting on the northwestern fringe of the range, Plattekill rings out most of the moisture before storms warm up and dry out.

The mountain’s 38 trails are only open Friday through Sunday. (You can rent the whole place for $3,500/day midweek.) If it snows 12 inches or more, the staff will get the chairs spinning midweek as well. Last year, “Platty” opened on a Monday after receiving four feet of snow in one dump. It wasn’t a fluke, resort owner Laszlo Vajtay told me as he pulled up National Weather Service radar images of the storm. Precipitation spanned all the way from Manhattan to Albany in the image. The red dot in the center of the maelstrom was positioned precisely over his mountain.

Vajtay, 56, started skiing at Plattekill when he was 7 and never left. He taught skiing, met his wife, Danielle (also an instructor), proposed and got married there. In 1993, he bought the place. The Vajtays didn’t have deep pockets, so when their ancient DMC 3700 groomer broke down, they hired a nearby mechanic, named “Macker,” who learned how to fix it. He fixed all of the groomers on the hill, then refurbished an older model that Vajtay bought for a song. In 2014, Plattekill became the only authorized Bombardier service center in New York and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, one of their snowcat clients asked them to work on their snow guns as well. There was no snowmaking at Plattekill when Vajtay bought it; the Platty crew cobbled one together from used guns and pumps they salvaged from old fire trucks. They took the job on and now part of Plattekill’s business is also repairing snow-making equipment and lifts throughout the Northeast. “We run this place like they run farms in the valley—no debt,” Vajtay said. “The one time we had to borrow, we asked our skiers to chip in for a new lift. We paid them back on time, with interest.”

Vajtay’s standard look is one of excitement, or shock. His clear blue eyes are penetrating, and his gray hair is usually messed up by a ski hat or helmet. The “shock” part is real. He is genuinely amazed at how well he and his crew have done with a small ski area in an era when many others have gone belly up. Sixty-five resorts in New York have closed in the last 40 years, according to the New England Lost Ski Areas Project.

In the new world of mega resorts, Plattekill is a time capsule of the way things used to be—steep runs, wild-eyed locals, friendly staff, boot cubbies, $2 frozen pizza slices, and an oversized base lodge bar, where auburn alpenglow settles on the last skiers of the day cruising down. The hand-hewn rafters, deer antler chandeliers, stained pine paneling, antique snowshoes and skis hanging on the wall reel the clock back to the 1980s, ’70s, ’60s —when televisions received three channels, every car had 300 horsepower under the hood, politicians were accountable for their actions, and all anyone in the Northeast wanted to do in the winter was sleep and ski.

It’s easy to fall into that world at Platty. The day we arrived was the Friday before the annual “Beach Party.” The ticket-seller-bartender-receptionist-office-manager-landscaper gal took a break from blowing up balloons and unfolding last year’s tiki decorations to give us tickets before Vajtay took us on a tour of the grounds. Here was the PR-mountain-ops-ticket-sales-manager’s office; there were the ski lockers; there was the cafe and the cabinet-sized ski shop run by George Quinn—who wrote two books about ski history in the Catskills and knows the range better than anyone since Rip Van Winkle. Lastly, Vajtay showed us the main eating hall, where a circular fireplace flickered in the middle of the room, itself an actual invention of the 1960s that now absolutely vibes the place with a ’60s aura.

Out the double picture windows at the northern end of the Blockbuster Lounge was a quiver of double-diamond runs Platty is known for: Blockbuster, Freefall, Plunge, Northface, all of which are pitched straight down. At the top, a long, wooded ridge hems in the resort.

Vajtay had rounded up a scrappy crew of locals who were anxious to go, including Scott Ketchum, a longtime local who moved to Phoenicia the same week that Jimmy Hendrix played at Woodstock a few miles away and grew up skiing Simpson’s rope tow. After a quick introduction, Ketchum offered to show Reddick some leftover powder in the trees while Vajtay and I talked.

Turned out that, at Platty, “leftover powder in the trees” was code for: traverse 45 minutes east across the ridge; find a foot of fresh a week after the last storm; plenty steep and plenty of vertical; bad route-finding at the top; a thicket of trees so dense it became impossible to simply get down; multiple over-the-handlebar moments; broken pole; run-in with an ornery neighbor who had fired a shotgun over someone’s head the week before; a few laughs; and, finally, a smelly pig-pile ride in a pickup truck back to the resort.

IT'S NOT JUST LITTLE GUYS IN THE CATSKILLS. There are some big fish as well, like the biggest fish of them all: Hunter. Or Huntah, as you’ll hear in the base lodge. Looking at the corkscrewing, terraced terrain on the hill, and the hundreds of skiers lined up to load onto its lifts, it’s easy to mistake the resort for an amusement park. There is that much going on.

Hunter was the first ski resort in the world to install snowmaking top-to-bottom and the first to cover 100 percent of the mountain. (Nearby Grossinger’s gets credit for making the world’s first artificial snow in 1952.) With a vertical drop of 1,600 feet on the 3,200-foot mountain, Hunter is a beast. If you know where you are going, it has some of the best lift-access backcountry you can find south of Vermont. It is also one of the few resorts in the region with an “uphill policy.” Two hours before the resort opens, you can skin up one of two routes and ski down. Once the lifts open, you can ski any trail.