The Northern Catskills: Hunter, Windham & Tannersville

Where to stay

Tannersville is the answer for most people, and it is not the obvious one. The mountain’s postal address says Hunter, but Hunter village is a thin strip of motels and bars along Route 23A. Tannersville, five miles east where the road crests at around 2,300 feet, is the place with a Main Street you would actually walk down after dark. About 570 people live here year-round. There is a Tops supermarket on Main Street open until ten, a deli, a coffee shop, a handful of restaurants and two or three bars that are still open midweek in February. You can park the car on Friday night and not touch it again except to reach the lifts.

Hunter village puts you a mile from the base area and close to almost nothing else. Take it if all you want is the shortest possible morning drive; do not expect an evening out of it.

Windham, twenty-five to thirty minutes north over Route 296 through Jewett, is the other real village on the mountaintop. It is smaller and quieter than Tannersville, with a short Main Street on Route 23 and a distinctly more moneyed feel since the resort rebranded as a club. Base here if Windham is the mountain you intend to ski, and nowhere else if it is not — everything else in the matrix moves half an hour further away.

Haines Falls, Elka Park and Jewett are hamlets, not bases. They are where the rental houses are, and where you end up when you book late. Budget for driving to dinner.

Getting there

This is the section that justifies the destination. From New York City you do not need a car.

Urban Sherpa has run ski coaches out of Manhattan for decades and currently serves Hunter, Windham and Belleayre on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays from December through March, picking up at Union Square around 5.40am and Times Square around 6.00am, reaching Hunter at about 8.50am and leaving the mountain at 4.30pm. OvRride runs a comparable operation with Downtown Brooklyn, Union Square and Upper West Side pickups, serving Hunter and Belleayre and — unusually — Plattekill. Both sell bus-only seats as well as bus-plus-ticket packages, and both drop you at the base lodge rather than at a park-and-ride on the edge of town. There is no other mountain cluster in the Northeast where a carless skier can do this three days a week all season.

If you want to stay rather than day-trip, Trailways runs roughly one intercity coach a day between the city and the mountaintop, stopping at Tannersville, Hunter and Windham, in about three and a half hours. That is enough to arrive without a car. It is nowhere near enough to ski on.

Driving is two and a half to three hours from Manhattan in good conditions: Thruway to Exit 21 at Catskill and then Route 23A west, or Exit 20 at Saugerties and up Route 32. Both funnel you into Kaaterskill Clove, and that is the part to take seriously.

Getting around

Once you are on the mountaintop, the car-free story stops.

There is no ski shuttle. The New York coaches run city to mountain and back to the city; they will not take you from a bed in Tannersville to the Hunter base lodge, and nothing at all runs between Hunter and Windham for skiers. Greene County Transit’s Route 708 does physically connect Palenville, Haines Falls, Tannersville, Hunter, Jewett, Lexington, Prattsville and Windham for three dollars — but it operates on Wednesdays, it is built around shopping and medical appointments, and the loop is finished by mid-afternoon.

So the honest position is this. You can arrive without a car, live in the village without a car, and ski one mountain without a car. Skiing two different mountains in a weekend means driving, or paying a taxi fare each way that will overtake the cost of a rental by Sunday lunchtime.

Who it suits

• New Yorkers who do not own a car. The strongest case anywhere in the East. Two operators, three mountains, three days a week, five months a year, with the option of riding one-way and staying.
• Beginners and families on a short leash. Hunter’s learning area, Windham’s grooming and Belleayre’s pricing cover the whole first-season arc, and none of it requires a full week off.
• Weekenders who want a village rather than a base area. Tannersville is a genuine small town, which is more than most Northeast ski bases can claim at this size.

It suits strong skiers planning a week least. Hunter has real pitch and its West side rewards attention, but a week here is a week of the same 1,600 feet, and the alternatives are an hour away over mountain roads.

Living for a season

Hunter is a Vail-operated resort and the largest single employer on the mountaintop; Windham’s club conversion has added year-round hospitality and golf work at the other end of Route 296. Between them there is more off-mountain employment here than the population would suggest, and Tannersville’s Main Street businesses stay open year-round in a way that Haines Falls and Jewett do not.

Two things should give you pause. The first is housing: short-term rental demand out of New York City has taken a heavy bite out of the long-term stock across the mountaintop, and a seasonal worker looking for a winter lease should start in September, not November. The second is health care. There is no hospital up here. The nearest emergency departments are in Hudson and Kingston, three-quarters of an hour to an hour away, and one of those routes runs down the Clove.

What the town is like

Tannersville’s Main Street is painted — literally. The colour scheme was an artist’s proposal taken up by the Hunter Foundation in the early 2000s, and it turned a fading strip of storefronts into the mountaintop’s most recognisable place. A state Downtown Revitalization award has since paid for streetscape work a village of 570 people could not otherwise support. It is genuinely charming and it is also about three blocks long; do not arrive expecting Stowe.

The wider mountaintop is not a resort region in the Vermont sense. Between the villages it is second homes, hemlock, state forest preserve and a lot of closed summer businesses. Kaaterskill Falls and the Escarpment Trail are immediately behind Haines Falls, which gives the area a real summer and autumn economy, but the shoulder seasons here are genuinely quiet — in April and November a lot of Main Street simply shuts.

What you are buying is proximity, not scale. Two hours and a bit from the largest city in the country there is a village with a supermarket, a bar and a mountain you can see from the street, and a coach that will bring you to it without a driving licence. That is a specific and unusual proposition, and it is the whole reason this page exists.