June 15 and 16: One should never sleep on Clearwater. Over the years, it has quietly become the most inclusive and progressive of all the major New York summer festivals, belying its reputation as a weekend of Pete Seeger’s two favorite things: banjos and garbage cleanup.
One wouldn’t think that people in the business of hunting whales far out at sea would ever have imagined Hudson to be an auspicious place to set up shop. But they did, beginning in 1783, just as the Revolutionary War was drawing to a close.
The property is spectacular and for a long time has functioned as an off-limits recreation center for trespassing ATV drivers, who roar around the moonscape quarries on warm days.
Did you know that Schodack Island was the site of the central council fire of all the Mahican peoples? Or that British mystic Aleister Crowley claimed to be meditating and writing on Esopus Island, but he may have been spying on behalf of the US government during WWI?
Mohonk’s summerhouses were originally fashioned by “rustic carpenters”: farmers mostly, with good carpentry skills. The amateur artisans were instructed to use the materials they could find at hand and to use their imagination. No two are alike.
Guyot’s map of the Catskills radically redefined the physical and cultural understanding of the region. Before his work, the mountain known as High Peak was unanimously considered the highest in the range, and the region of the Catskill Mountain House (where the North/South Lake campground is today) was generally thought to be the only part of the Catskills of real natural and cultural interest – a misconception that the House owners had no interest in changing. Guyot set everyone straight, demoting High Peak, ultimately, to merely the 23rd-highest summit in the range and calling attention the natural treasures of Slide Mountain and the areas of the Catskills to the south and west.
The late Bill and Kay Spangenberger, the hardy outdoorspeople who conceived of the club (both lived to be centenarians), were already well on their way to qualifying when they came up with the idea in 1949.
Discarded food, buried in a pile with no oxygen, produces methane, a greenhouse gas about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, the most frequently identified culprit in climate change.
During special hours on Friday-Sunday, April 26-28: Passes must be picked up in person, with the exception of minors, whose parent or guardian may pick up a pass on their behalf.
Sunday, April 14: Come for an afternoon of presentations by community leaders and alternative energy experts at Basilica’s post-industrial space in Hudson. The fair features an intensive focus on exploring both community solar and bioenergy – the generation of energy from food waste and similar organic materials – as vital and viable examples of the move away from the archaic, destructive energy models that have left us in climate chaos.