This story starts with Rosie, because it cannot start anywhere else. Rosie is the kind of person you can't miss. She pounces at you like a fishing cat, with a toothy smile fast and low. She asks who you are with, why you are with them, where you are going, and the piste you have just skied on.

The last question is not easy to answer on Belial Mountain, the oldest operating ski area in the Catskill Mountains of New York and one of the oldest ski areas in the United States. Of the 51 runs that dropped 1,400 feet vertically, most looked the same. Belleayre's footprint comes from a different era, four years after the end of World War II, when it was a feat to simply reach the bottom. The trail does not meander back and forth in the woods. They start from the top, descend directly, without turning, without doglegs, only in straight lines, one by one, stacked on the north side like cigarettes in a box. This is how they are in Catskills, straight up, straight down, straight to you, no nonsense. Can you play it? From the big top? What is your name?

64-year-old Rosie Kelly made an introduction at Belleayre’s Zhongshan Bar: Duff, her "friend"; Bobby, her "lover"; Barb, her bartender. She said Duff was the most important person because she needed friends when she moved from Brooklyn to Pinehill in 1984.

Pine Hill is the name of a group of about three dozen buildings three miles down the hill from Belleayre. It is one of the oldest towns in the Catskills, where the natural snow is thin and the history is long. The British built fortresses throughout the mountains during the War of Independence to control trade in the mountains. In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed half of the earth, then sailed the "river of the mountains" and discovered the Catskill Islands.

Before the Rocky Mountains, Mountains, Cascade Mountains and other large western mountains were discovered and inhabited by European immigrants, the Catskill Mountains were the roof of the New World. Three centuries later, as photographer David Redick and I discovered last winter, they still insist on their position.

The anvil-shaped plot of the mountain range is located at the northeastern end of the Appalachian Plateau, stretching more than 700,000 acres between the flatlands of the leather goods district of northern New York and the deep gully of the Hudson River. The 35 peaks in the range are more than 3,500 feet above sea level. This is more than 6 million acres of land in Vermont.

In 1935, when New York's first ski resort, Simpson Ski Resort near Phoenicia, opened, thousands of skiers boarded the New York Central Railroad to the Woodland Valley. At that time, skiing was heating up in the United States. The Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York in 1932 sparked an upsurge, with small ski resorts all over the area. At the peak, hundreds of people traverse the hardwood forest between Albany and Newburgh-from mature destinations to Horse and Papa Mountain to the 300-room Borscht with solo runners such as Grossinger's and The Concord (The source of inspiration for the movie "Indecent Dance"). Then it happened in the 1970s; jet planes replaced cars and trains, and the great migration from East to West began.

Most small Catskill resorts are dead. (There are only four left: Belleayre, Plattekill, Hunter and Windham.) Even Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Joan Rivers and Jerry The borscht belt resort where performers such as Jerry Seinfeld started is also gone. By 2018, skiing in the Catskills has become the memory of most people-except for a few thousand locals and urban residents, they are now skiing in the open corduroy and knee-deep backcountry all day, not every day. Worried that the first mountain range in the United States has been almost forgotten.

This is what Rossi wants. A forgotten place where you can hide, ski and raise children. More than thirty years later, her first songs are countless-songs with friends, songs with strangers.

When she asked us what song we were making, it was already 3:10 in the afternoon. At 3:50 pm, she introduced us to her life story, the complete history of Catskill skiing, her plans for the next ten years, the resort map, three hot discussions, and the promise of meeting again.

The day is over. The ski patrol started sweeping the trails, and the sun swooped down and bombed the dark side. This is Rossi's moment. She said goodbye to the bar-damn friends and lovers. With golden light passing through the birch forest, a lifter walked across the muddy grounds, and from his gym bag a lifted-off root beer sticks out.

Rosie fastened her restraints and pushed away, and ran again. Crystal flew into the air from the tail of her snowboard. Her knees bend because she bends her plank into an arc, making a slender S shape along the hillside. Raising the pole, the snow gun, the tycoon, and the tail of the whale, she slid around them in a circle. With each circle, she walked home with the straight line of the cigarette, instantly returning to weightlessness.

It is hard to say whether the Catskills created the Hudson River or the river created the mountains. They are a package; they would not exist without the other. Water can be seen everywhere in the entire mountain range—through mountain peaks, gushing out of waterfalls, and down culverts under the highway to a diversion canal system that reaches 100 miles south to the Great Estuary in New York City.

In fact, it was the Big Apple that ultimately protected the Catskills and brought them skiing. After loggers felled thousands of trees to satisfy the city’s construction boom-eventually silting up the Hudson River and threatening freight traffic there-state legislators passed "forever wild" laws to protect Kazakhstan. The large forests along the Derson River include 286,000 acres in the Catskills. Decades later, when the state legislature needed to create new jobs where hundreds of people were lost, it built the first major ski resort in the area.

Belleayre is the natural choice for the first resort. New Yorkers have been skiing since Newburgh’s Maltby Shipp and his son used 7-foot-tall hickory planks to level the entire 1,400-foot mountain in 1929. Four years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) began building huts, elevators, and walking trails in the area. More than 2,000 private resorts, ski clubs, backyard rope trailers, and hotel hills followed, and the New York ski resort was born-a scene that is surprisingly flourishing today. New York still has more ski resorts (43) than any state in the country, and it ranks fourth in skiers.

After a long sleep at the modernist Scribner's Catskill Lodge in Tanneville, we drove from Belleayre to a hill in the throat of a long, frosty valley. The valley walls that line the Lower Mickel Valley Road are planted with birch and maple trees, long red barns, and hay bales nailing frozen farmland to the ground.

Two lifts rise 1,100 feet vertically from the bottom of Plattekill Ski Resort to the top of the mountain at 3,500 feet. Between them are several elevator fences — designed to mimic the roof of a barn in a valley — an oversized base hut, a dirt parking lot, a dirt driveway, and about 200 skiers glide across the trail as fast as possible.

Plattekill is the Alta of Catskills. Little Ski Area That could have fewer trails, but it snows more than most resorts in the range, averaging 150 inches per year. It is easy to forget that New York State borders two Great Lakes (Ontario and Erie), and lake effect storms usually carry all the way to the Catskills. Plattekill sits on the northwestern edge of the mountain range and absorbed most of the water before the storm warmed up and dried out.

The 38 trails of this mountain are only open from Friday to Sunday. (You can rent the entire place mid-week for $3,500/day.) If it snows 12 inches or more, the staff will also rotate the chairs mid-week. Last year, "Platty" opened on Monday after four feet of snow in a garbage dump. This is not a fluke, the resort owner Laszlo Vajtay told me when he called up the storm radar image of the National Weather Service. In the image, the precipitation stretches from Manhattan to Albany. The red dot in the center of the whirlpool is right on his mountain.

Vajtay, 56, started skiing in Plattekill at the age of 7, and has never left since. He teaches skiing, meets his wife Danielle (also a coach), proposes and gets married there. In 1993, he bought this place. Vajtays had no financial resources, so when their ancient DMC 3700 beautician broke down, they hired a nearby mechanic named "Macker", and he learned how to fix it. He repaired all the beauticians on the mountain, and then refurbished the old model Vajtay bought for a song. In 2014, Plattekill became the only authorized Bombardier service center in New York and Pennsylvania.

At the same time, one of their snowcat customers asked them to also work for their snow guns. When Vajtay bought Plattekill, it did not make snow; Platy's staff used old guns and pumps they salvaged from an old fire truck to piece it together. They took over the job, and now part of Plattekill's business also includes repairing snowmaking equipment and lifts throughout the northeast. "We run this place like they run a farm in a valley-no debt," Wajitai said. "Once we had to borrow, we asked the skiers to pool the money to buy a new elevator. We repaid their interest on time."

Vajtay's standard appearance is one of excitement or shock. His clear blue eyes are thorough, and his white hair is usually messed up with a ski hat or helmet. The "shock" part is real. He was really surprised that he and his team did so well on a small ski resort in an era that many others were tired of. According to data from the New England Lost Ski Area Project, 65 New York resorts have closed in the past 40 years.

In the new world of large resorts, Plattekill is a time capsule of the past-steep runs, wide-eyed locals, friendly staff, boots, a $2 frozen pizza slice and an oversized At the base cabin bar, Auburn Alpenglow decided to cruise down the last skier of the day. Hand-hewn rafters, antler chandeliers, stained pine wood panelling, antique snowshoes and snowboards hung on the wall set the clock back to the 1980s, 70s, and 60s when the TV received three channels, each Each car has 300 horsepower under the hood, and politicians are responsible for their actions. The most important thing Northeast people want to do in winter is to sleep and ski.

It's easy to fall into that world in Platy. The day we arrived was the Friday before the annual "beach party". The conductor-bartender-receptionist-office-manager-landscape designer gal took a break while blowing up balloons and unfolding last year's tiki decorations, and then gave us tickets before Vajtay showed us the venue. This is the office of PR-mountain-ops-ticket-sales-manager; there are ski lockers; there are cafes and a cupboard-sized ski shop run by George Quinn-he wrote two books on the history of Catskills skiing , And know ski resorts better than anyone after Rip Van Winkle. Finally, Vajtay showed us the main dining hall. There is a round fireplace gleaming in the center of the room. This is an actual invention in the 1960s. Now the atmosphere of the 1960s has definitely infused this place with vitality.

Outside the double-screen window at the north end of the Blockbuster Lounge, there is a double-drilled quiver. Platy is famous for it: Blockbuster, Freefall, Plunge, Northface, all of which are tilted straight down. At the top, there is a long wooded ridge in the resort.

Vajtay assembled a group of aggressive locals who were eager to leave, including Scott Ketchum, a long-time local who moved to Phoenicia the same week Jimmy Hendrix was playing in Woodstock, a few miles away, and was in Simpsons. Grew up skiing on the ropes. After a quick introduction, Ketchum proposed to show Reddick some powder left on the tree when I was talking with Vajtay.

It turned out that in Prati, the code for "the powder left on the tree" was: cross the ridge east for 45 minutes; find a foot of freshness a week after the last storm; a lot of steepness and a lot of vertical; poor path finding at the top ; A dense bush of trees, it’s impossible to go down the mountain; multiple handlebar moments; broken bars; conflict with a grumpy neighbor who shot someone in the head with a shotgun a week ago; a few laughs Sound; finally, take a pickup truck back to the resort.

It's not just the little guys in CATSKILLS. There are also some big fish, such as the biggest fish: the hunter. Or Huntah, you will hear it in the base hut. Looking at the spiral terraced terrain on the mountain, and hundreds of skiers lining up to board the cable car, it is easy to mistake the resort for an amusement park. There are so many things happening.

Hunter is the first ski resort in the world to install snow-making equipment from top to bottom, and it is also the first ski resort with 100% mountain coverage. (The nearby Grozinger was praised 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 elevator access to remote areas you can find in southern Vermont. It is also one of the few resorts in the area with an "uphill policy". Two hours before the resort opens, you can choose one of two routes to ski and ski. After the lift opens, you can ski on any piste.

On the day we arrived, the mountain was quiet and the sky was blue like water glass. The weather in March was very cold, and most of the powder from the previous week remained in its attic. A remote local skier named Jamie Kennard said that no one found it in several places in the woods. In 2013, the 44-year-old Kennard became a member of the exclusive Catskill 3500 Club by climbing all 35 peaks above 3,500 feet. The following year, he and his brother created a new club and became the first person to ski all 35 peaks.

Kennard is a typical urban immigrant. After years of commuting from New York, he finally unplugged and moved to the north with his wife Tracy. They built a very beautiful bar in Kingston, Brunette, and continued their design work in this city.

Kennard’s Instagram feed makes him feel like a trailblazer on the Alaska border: catching plump trout on a fly rod in Esops Creek, picking mushrooms, hiking, on the side of a 4,000-foot mountain Cut skin traces directly. All of this is two hours away from the largest city in the United States.

He was right. During the first run, he hid in the woods on the northwest side of Hunter, and then followed an ancient path to a series of openings in the woods. When we arrived, Ketchum was walking to participate in a big game, he and a young freestyler named Rob Sharp also participated in the competition. The snow is good, but the turn is tight, so Kennard led the crew to the gully on the other side of the mountain for a second run.

There are wide trees, steep winding chutes, pillow lines and many openings to speed up. The gully tightened along the stream to the foot of the mountain. Kennard jumped over a snow bridge near the end and followed a track all the way down. At the bottom, he led the crew across a wooden bridge and jumped from the woods onto a beginner slope crowded with skiers.

At 11 o'clock in the morning, we returned to the parking lot and set off. Platty’s beach party is only an hour away from the hotel and should not be missed, so we walked west along Schoharie Creek along Route 23A through the Rusk Mountain Wild Forest to reach Route 30.

The elevator was full, but there was no queue when we arrived. Thirty skiers with raccoon eyes wandered on the Adirondack chairs on the porch, and the influx of others made GS rejected Blockbuster. When we arrived, a little boy clung to the railing of the sidewalk leading to the hut and screamed that he didn't want to stop skiing. The crowd took pity on him; no one wanted to leave today, and neither did most people.

When the lift downloaded to the last chair, Prati's faithful gathered in the base cabin. Christmas lights surround the eve of the cottage. All the small rooms were full, and local historian/field master George Quinn and two friends played bluegrass music in the corner with violin and guitar. Danielle Vajtay said that they will not get paid and will not ask for tips. They just show up and play on any floor where there is no music.

Upstairs, the Bongo Surf band from New Jersey beat the beach hits of the 1960s in the bar. They are very good. The conductor-bartender-receptionist-office-manager-landscape designer gal, wearing a pink T-shirt with flowers hanging around his neck, and Hunter S. Thompson sunglasses, pours wine for the crowd. The Platy employees who skied with Redick on the first day put on a gorgeous Hawaiian shirt and tied a snorkel to the helmet and goggles. An hour after the beach party started, he acted as if he might have lost his mind-standing on the cafeteria table in front of the band, pretending to be doing breaststroke. He nailed real snorkeling fins to the beam, and then hung his little daughter's fins across from him.

Unfortunately, Rossi was nowhere to be found. But her friend Duff was there. He greeted me as if we were childhood friends. He said he saw me on the porch earlier, but when he came out to find me, I was gone. "You know that in Battlestar Galactica, when a character is looking for another character, he says,'My search is over', and then he turns around, she's gone, that's it, you know, Dude, it's like it doesn't exist anymore?" he said.

I don’t know—I was very happy when Vajtay showed up after skiing and introduced me to some friends: a father drove three hours one way to ski in Prati; and Harvey Road, the very successful editor of the New York ski blog, he said It was only 40 years old to get involved in binding. When Vajtay provided Road with free season tickets, Road created its own annual event. One day each year, he opens a label on his credit card at the bar and instructs the bartender to offer free beer to anyone who shows her a valid ski pass. "I came back after a run, and I have $235 on my credit card!" Dao said.

The beach party peaked at around 4:30pm. The paper pineapples and plastic flowers that had been hung the day before gleamed in the afternoon light. This is not a big party, there may be 150 people, but it seems more important. Everyone knows each other like a reunion.

As a master of the melee, Vajtay and his family were chatting excitedly with a group of friends in the picture window in front of the bar. Five years ago, Laszlo learned to ski on the mountain behind the window. He said that the T-bar at the time was an old steel coil type. When he was too light to press down, it could lift him and rotate it backwards.

He and his friends rode it over and over again, learning to put his old skinny board beside them and turn. As he got older, he learned to slide the zip line on the side of the Blockbuster, then slide towards Freefall and Plunge at the GS turn. He and Danielle took over this position, it was destiny.

Skiing at Catskills is about family, loyalty and endurance, as well as snow. This is an ancient place. One generation passes the key to the next. The cycle is like a snowy season that will last forever.

This story originally appeared in the December 2018 (47.4) issue of POWDER. To deliver such wonderful stories directly to your door, please subscribe here.

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