Crags and crumpets - hiking in the Shawangunk Mountains of New York State - includes related information

Sierra, May-June, 1995 by Patti Hagan

BEING A NEW YORKER, MY LIFE IS VERY pedestrian. I walk a lot, but it would never have occurred to me to test my ambulatory skills mid-December in an ex-urban wilderness north of Central Park. Sensible urbanites spend hunting season at the theater, the dance, or the opera, and leave the woods to the deerslayers.

Nevertheless, on being asked ever so nicely to brave the dangers of a hike beyond the Bronx, I dusted off my New York Walk Book to check the operatic crags of the Shawangunk ("shon-gum" to locals, "the Gunks" to us) Mountains, just 90 miles (and 450 million years) removed from Carnegie Hall. I knew vaguely about the Gunks, but, having been raised between the Cascades and the Olympics, I had serious reservations about calling 1,500-foot drumlin bumps mountains.

Rising above my western-mountain chauvinism, I hiked forth from the NYC subway, through the tawdry wilderness of Times Square, and caught the 7 a.m. Adirondack Trailways bus north, on assignment to the Gunks. Whereas it took the Wisconsin ice sheet a thousand years to melt from Manhattan to the Shawangunks, I did the distance in 90 minutes, cool; a driver from the Mohonk Mountain House collected me in the old Huguenot village of New Paltz, and by 8:30 we were in the mountains doing a sedate 20 m.p.h. in accord with Mohonk's polite road signs--"SLOWLY and QUIETLY, PLEASE."

Rarely is it possible to change wildernesses in under two hours. I felt like a Rip Van Winkle in reverse waking in the late Silurian environs of the high-Victorian Mohonk Mountain House. My fantastically turreted and gabled base camp was the 275-room architectural equivalent of a glacial erratic come to rest on the western shore of Lake Mohonk, a pristine alpine fjord at altitude 1,250 feet. Where the white Shawangunkconglomerate cliffs leave off, the Mountain House takes up.

In 1869, a Quaker family named Smiley fell in love with the Shawangunks and purchased 300 acres around the "sky lake" of Mohonk. The preservationist Smileys quickly discovered, however (according to Frederick E. Partington in The Story of Mohonk), that "no amount of moral force could preserve the character of Mohonk and keep away nuisances" --that is, the Smiley's neighbors, people with habits of casual deforestation, pyromania (to stimulate wild berry crops), and blowing up historic precipices when in need of building stone. Consequently, the Smileys of Mohonk (as they came to be known) made "over one hundred distinct purchases" and established a 7,500-acre "state of immunity." Another branch of the family bought up 10,000 acres and built two more Mountain Houses at Minnewaska, a sister sky lake further west on the Shawangunk ridge. This property is now Minnewaska State Park Preserve.

Today, 126 years later, the Smileys of Mohonk still have stewardship over the Mountain House and 2,200 acres immediately surrounding. "Since its beginning in 1869," says the official House map, "environmental awareness and responsible stewardship have allowed Mohonk to preserve the surrounding wilderness while providing a restful retreat for guests." Since 1963, perpetual open-space protection has been afforded 6,200 acres of adjoining land by the Mohonk Preserve, making it New York's largest private nature sanctuary.

I had laced up my boots in the city so as to hit the ground walking. The Shawangunk Mountains cover some 100 square miles, but given Mohonk's miles of antique carriage roads--many a century old--and well-mapped footpaths and hiking trails, I would not be bushwhacking. As the Mountain House bulletin board declared all Rock Scrambles "CLOSED for the Winter," I would confine my rambling to the lands of the two Mohonks, Preserve and Mountain House, and the "recommended walks" looping out from the latter.

Another bulletin board advised hikers to "please use caution," since deer hunting is in progress, Monday through Friday, on the adjacent Mohonk Preserve. (Orange safety vests were to be had from Guest Services.) Suitably vested, I strike out from the East Porch for the top--Sky Top, elevation 1,550 feet, walking a fine, rugged line above the boulder-chaos known as the Labyrinth. The micro-mountain scale of the Shawangunks registers like an optical illusion; I have entered an exquisite minimontane Lilliput, an Alps as ruggedly and asymmetrically neat as a Japanese temple garden. The mosses, lichens, ferns, and bonsai pitch pines are ubiquitous on the caprock, in clean, elemental design.

Achieving the height of the Albert K. Smiley Memorial Tower atop Sky Top, I am suddenly dwarfed, engulfed, in an infinity of blue-purpling space extending over six states. I confront geologie verite. The adamantine Shawangunks are an island surrounded by valleys: The Great or Wallkill Valley to the southeast, the Rondout Valley to the northwest, and the Hudson River Valley to the east. I look west down the 20-mile length of the Shawangunk ridge, taking in the white Moby Dick headlands of The Trapps cliffs and Millbrook Mountain. The scene is oceanic, an uncanny reprise of the shallow Ordovician sea, Iapetus, that covered this place 500 million years back. I make my descent, unable to improve on the journalistic rappel by the New York Independent reporter in 1870 who "came down from Sky-Top with enlarged ideas of power and sublimity."