[00:00:00] In West Shokan, there's a bushkill valley. In the bushkill valley, there is a cemetery, the bushkill cemetery that has a mass grave for about 300 people who were still left, that their families hadn't moved them. And the two men from the town of Olive contracted with
[00:00:21] the city that they buried these people themselves. So there's no marker that says that this is the mass grave. And you have to go to the back of the cemetery and you have to look over the
[00:00:32] embankment. And then there's about 300 small, like the size of a shoebox, headstones that just have an alphanumeric code like ST2. And those are the people who were still remaining, that their loved ones had either died or moved away. And that some local people took it upon themselves.
[00:00:53] And these guys were in their 50s and 60s and they moved everybody. And I've been going back and forth with the archivists for the New York City DEP about trying to figure out who is in which grave. There's a local community in Washington, that I'm not sure of.
[00:01:14] The bushwax were some of the worst days I've ever had in the mountains or life, really. Whereas Pansom Mountain is totally opposite to Samelton, on top of a faith. I think the weather challenges on this incident were particularly difficult.
[00:01:32] It is really the development of New York State. Catskills were responsible. How you're listening to Inside the Light. Catskill Mountains Podcast. So, episode 130 here with April Bisa talking about Reservoir Ghost Town. So I screwed it up last
[00:02:00] time by the way. I said 130 on our last episode. I was very tired. So it's 130 now. I know April shaking her head. She's just like absolutely ridiculous. Yeah. All I know is that means I've
[00:02:11] gained one episode on you because I counted it as 129 whatever last time. So now I'm up to 142. So I've gained 12 on you. I'm closing in. I'm only like four episodes behind you. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, for some people maybe. All right. So crazy
[00:02:33] incidences have happened over the past couple of weeks here. Here in all around the world basically. So up near me about 20 minutes away this Sunday, June 30th, a plane crash happened around Sydney Center area, which is one of the again 20 minutes
[00:02:54] southwest of me. A couple of family was from Georgia was visiting up here in Cooper's town for the baseball tournament. We have a bunch of different baseball parks up here in Onianta and Cooper's town and they were headed back home. They were going to stop in West
[00:03:10] Virginia for a refill and then go down to Georgia for the end of their flight. And unfortunately, they crashed. Now we recently had been on Sunday. We had some severe thunderstorms here, a couple actually one that happened down that was a possible tornado but it was some
[00:03:26] firm that it wasn't a tornado down in Roscoe area. But the Piper Malibu Mirage took off from Nader Regional Airport in Onianta around 140. Data was lost about 12 minutes later. So it was ascending around 9,000 feet when it crashed to the ground. This was a mile long
[00:03:46] debris fields and all five passengers were killed. Two adults, three adults and two children. Very, very unfortunate event. Now at the time it happened I was at home so I was walking the
[00:03:59] dogs but to the southwest I could see that there were some rough, rough weather, high winds and stuff like that. So at the time when I heard about it, I got messages from a lot of people
[00:04:09] right away and just kind of looked into it and my initial thought was that they hit some bad weather down in that area and they just couldn't recover from it because we have bumpy hills all over the place here but unfortunately investigation is still going on
[00:04:29] and we have yet to find out what caused the crash or what actually happened and unfortunately maybe you never know just because of how quick it happened. It happened very quick. So what else did I leave out Ted? You want to fill me in with some other stuff?
[00:04:48] Yeah, so as you indicated there was five passengers on board. The pilot was Roger Beggs, 76 and his daughter Laura Van Epps along with her husband both 42 years old. They were traveling with their sons James, age 12 and Harrison, age 10. Apparently James was
[00:05:12] playing in a baseball tournament in Cooperstown over the weekend. They had flown up on Thursday stopping in Charlottesville, Virginia to refuel. Spent the weekend in Cooperstown playing baseball and then for reasons unknown we all saw the bad weather, the stormy balmy weather on Sunday. For
[00:05:33] reasons unknown they left shortly before 2 p.m. our time and about 12 to 14 minutes in flight the data was lost. Like you said, leaving a mile long debris field and the tail rudder has yet to be found and I was speculating that that might explain that erratic turning
[00:05:57] maneuver that you and I saw on that flight tracking data that we pulled up. Yeah, I wish, April, I wish I could show you this but it was a very, the flight pattern was a very wicked flight pattern. Like he, the person,
[00:06:14] Roger looks like he was heading exactly south, kind of southwest a little bit south-south west and then he did a full 180 and it looked like he was actually headed more to the east and
[00:06:28] all of a sudden they look like to the upper or to the north west is a small municipal airport, Cindy, Minnesota Airport and I look like they were trying to make a run for that airport
[00:06:41] and data was lost after that. It was definitely a wicked flight pattern to look at and to see the, there wasn't much, what was crazy is it happened Sunday and we didn't get good like data about it until Saturday evening and you know I was wondering what happened
[00:07:02] the whole time and unfortunately we don't know if they hit weather, if there was a pile, if there was a malfunction with the plane, if you know something happened and they just couldn't recover but it was pretty crazy. Yeah, I know on some of the trails
[00:07:18] in the Catskills there's debris from plane crashes in the past, right? It's not an uncommon thing for there to be plane crashes at least in the distant past in the Catskills and what had happened to those people back then. Was it similar things as far as the unpredictable
[00:07:37] weather in the Catskills? Did that contribute to it? Yes, yeah, mostly all the plane crashes happen to, well I wouldn't say unpredictable weather but just nasty weather and such like that. A lot of
[00:07:52] the plane crashes back in the days were just because of people flying under what they called the F-R Visual Flight Radar so they were just like, hey there's fog but I can beat it or I can get above
[00:08:03] it and such like that and they unfortunately didn't or there's a storm coming I can fly around it and they went right through it. So I wonder if this was the same exact instance that they had
[00:08:13] back in the days, you know back in the 80s and beyond every four of where they're like, hey we can get around this or get out like Tads said they left early, you know could they
[00:08:25] fly before it and get ahead of it and they unfortunately didn't so. I call the Catskills the rain forest because even when there's zero percent chance of rain it seems to rain every time I go into the Catskills so that was my definition of unpredictable is kind of
[00:08:40] predictably unpredictable and that will rain whenever I'm trying to go hiking in the Catskills so you know anybody who's not familiar with the Catskills might think that it's not going to rain there or the weather will be better than it is but you never know. Yeah, they actually
[00:08:55] did a study on Slide Mountain in that area to see if it was an actual rain forest with Dr. Kudish, I remember that. Yeah, I read the same thing where it's really cool. Yeah, it has a high percentage
[00:09:06] of rain activity and moisture. I also just want to ask April then if it always seems to rain when you go hiking in the Catskills just post your hiking plans on the internet so we don't
[00:09:17] go out the same day as you are. Correct. We can have some better weather. So April's a hiker that's good to know. Yeah, we try to get the people hiking more hiking people onto the show
[00:09:29] and stuff. Most of the people that do kind of the history in the Catskills don't really hike that much unless they're going out to survey the trees and stuff like that. Yeah, the students who sign up for my research project I put on the job description must be
[00:09:45] able to hike six to ten miles a day and of course we never get in six to ten miles in a day because we're stopping to record things but usually the people who sign up after I give them
[00:09:55] the job they're like, oh what's hiking and do I need special shoes so they just pretty much lie on their applications. But then I could torture them to hike six to ten miles a day because I set it
[00:10:08] in the job description. And then sometimes with you with your knowledge of hiking you can be like, you know, we've only gone three miles but lied to them like, oh yeah, we're only
[00:10:17] like a mile in so you guys need to pull it off, push it off a little bit further. Come on, stop being wussies. Yeah, they generally have no sense of distance when they first start working with me
[00:10:28] or navigation. You know, we hike off trail it's all bushwhacking so, you know, they can't like predetermine how long it's going to be and pretty much our stomachs tell us when it's time
[00:10:38] to go home. That's true. It's actually, I like that. That's a new one, Ted. I like that. I can tell you, you're hungry. Hunger hiking. Hunger hiking. Yeah, it's a new thing, I guess, hunger hiking.
[00:10:52] Yeah. So also on Saturday June 22nd at 4.30 p.m. a group of five hikers called Sullivan County 911 report that they were lost in Rosa Gap State Forest. Now this is in town of Mamakking.
[00:11:06] Is that how you say it, Ted? Mamakading. Mamakading? Oh wow, that's not fun at all. It should be Mamakking. Mamakading. That's Mamakading. And it always has been. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not. It's okay. That's too far south into the city for me. That's below
[00:11:25] upstate for me. Right? Yeah, it's right on the Schwann-Gunk Ridge, right where I live. Not even five miles from my house. Oh wow. So at 6.30 p.m. Forest Ranger Russia reached the group from Queens approximately 2.5 miles from the trailhead. The group had thought they were on
[00:11:44] a long path that was a one mile loop and not prepare the outside extremely hot weather. The group had only bought one water bottle for each person. One member of the party was dizzy
[00:11:54] and nauseated due to heat exhaustion. Now this was during the time of when we had that huge heat rush down here. Russia provided food, water and electrolytes to help everyone in the group so they can continue hiking down. 8.10 p.m. Summit Field Fire Department hiked
[00:12:07] in with additional water for the group and at 8.45 they reached a trailhead and were checked out by EMS. So I thought they were on a one mile loop on the long path. That's what, like 0.05% of the
[00:12:22] long path? 375 miles? Yeah, I know where they must have parked on Cox Road. And there is a loop hike there. It's hard to mistake it for just being a mile or a mile and a half long.
[00:12:36] But it is a nice quick hike. It's a great place to go and catch the evening sunset or the morning sunrise. It's like they have open summits there too. Like was there fires previously up there?
[00:12:48] Yes, yeah. We last had a fire there. It was two summers ago I remember because my daughter was actually camping out in that very state forest when the fire was literally just a few miles away
[00:13:02] on the other side of Route 52. So yeah, it's a lovely area. It's got that gunk's pitch pine vibe going on. And it's one of the only places you can actually overnight on the Schwann Gunk Ridge. Oh nice. Oh wow. You actually gave that away? Like...
[00:13:26] Yeah. You know, our listeners are cool. I got it in there. They're cool even though they voted down stomp stosh and I'm taking that one to the grave that's really hurtful. I've been in therapy
[00:13:37] all week but we've been making progress. Yes. I'm just going to keep bringing that up because it really was hurtful. Oh well. Oh well. So once again, an instance that people have one water
[00:13:49] bottle going out and hike. It's just crazy. I find out it's crazy with all this information we have on the internet that people will do even a one mile, two mile hike without more than one
[00:14:00] bottle of hydration. Yeah. When most folks seem they can't even drive around in their car with air conditioning without having a bottle of water at hand then when they're going to go out and do
[00:14:11] a hike of indeterminate length on the long path emphasis again on the phrase long path they run out of water. They only bring a single pint bottle of polar spring water. To some people one mile is long. That's true. Yeah. You're students, right? Exactly. It goes back to,
[00:14:36] you know, a lot of people don't grow up hiking so when they think that they're going to go out for a hike they think 20 minutes, 40 minutes, right? Two miles. What's two miles? I don't
[00:14:46] know what two miles is and then they get into trouble but it's good to know that there's people out there helping them. But it seems kind of excessive to keep bringing them water and you know, not convincing them that they should stop and come back.
[00:15:02] Allowing them to continue when clearly they don't know what they're doing is a little questionable. Yeah. We talk about that. Let's flip it over to a different topic that happened a couple of years ago. So the monolith has reappeared in the United States now. I don't
[00:15:21] know if it has reappeared anywhere but it has been found once again in Colorado and Las Vegas. If you don't remember this, two years ago in Utah this just massive mirror monolith that was a triangle
[00:15:35] over 10 feet tall appeared in the middle of nowhere. Some person found it. Let's just say that and there was no trace of how it got here. Now this reminds a lot of us, I don't know of my age
[00:15:50] of 2001, a space odyssey of the monolith just appearing in the middle of the jungle or something, the monkeys going at it and stuff like that but this happened in Denver where it started to
[00:16:04] make a comeback I guess. A Reddit posted in the Fort Collins subreddit over the weekend saying that they went through a structure near Bellevue and they spotted the monolith again. Now once again
[00:16:17] this happened on June 15th and June 16th and it happened also again in Las Vegas on June 21st and if you look at the pictures I'll have the link online. This thing is 10 feet tall,
[00:16:30] it is a mirror shape, there's a mirror object. It looks unreal. No connections have been made and this is I think it appeared seven times over the course of the world in 2020. Now it happened over in California, New Mexico, Japan, Russia. Once again it's pretty freaking crazy
[00:16:51] to see this and I did a meme a long time ago that had one up on Hunter Mountain. That was pretty funny but that was when I was a rookie. Speaking of pretty funny April if you would
[00:17:03] just with me look over Stosh's right shoulder do you see those mirror plates they're about 10 feet tall they kind of look like a monolith. Do you see them behind him? Right? Just make sure during
[00:17:17] the show tonight you don't mention to the listeners that there's a stack of mirror shaped monolithic type mirror components behind Stosh. We don't want to figure it out. Yeah we don't want anybody to make that association with our host.
[00:17:34] Yeah they don't care. So what do you guys think of this? What's your thoughts April first? What do you think? I think you're an archaeologist and you don't know it because that's what archaeologists
[00:17:46] do, they find things or discuss things that have been found but have you been to Dia Beacon recently the art museum in Beacon on the east bank of the Hudson River? I haven't been there in many years. I'm embarrassed to say it's been so long.
[00:18:04] Yeah they have an exhibit right now for an artist whose name is Michael Heiser H-E-I-Z-E-R and he does these sorts of things like he creates these very large stones and like kind of like stone
[00:18:20] hinge and he excavates large open areas so like one of the exhibits at the Dia Beacon is like a big hole in the ground inside the museum and another is just this big stone. So it sounds to me
[00:18:36] like a you know contemporary art in the in the form of Bansky but instead of 2001 Space Odyssey it reminded me of the old Land of the Lost TV show from like the late 70s early 80s. Wasn't
[00:18:49] there like a monolith that they they were lost in a different time and they would find this monolith and they could communicate with somebody or something like that? You lost me on that. Yeah. You didn't see the show? No. I was too busy out milking the cows
[00:19:11] on the farm where I grew up. It was 1974 to 1977 there was a remake of it as a movie in 2009 so maybe somebody that's listening knows that I'm not hallucinating this but yeah.
[00:19:29] Yeah it's definitely cool and it's definitely fun to wonder what it is and how it got there. Yeah just imagine walking upon that and there's like a like you know I mean 10 feet tall
[00:19:43] you know just and to see like no trace of it like that's gotta be so crazy. And it's mirrored so you could fix your hair in it and stuff. Yeah I so here you are you're lugging this these components of this structure out
[00:19:58] wherever it is and then you have to erect them on site. I would think that there's a high likelihood on a smooth mirror like surface that somebody's gonna leave fingerprints. Wouldn't you think so April? I mean you're the you're the you're the sleuth here
[00:20:14] the investigator wouldn't you think that there's gotta be some type of evidence left behind if that's there's always evidence. Yes yeah I mean I would seriously just be like hold like it would be
[00:20:29] absolutely insane to walk upon this and like I said 2001 A Space Odyssey is a really crazy trippy movie. It's not it's not the greatest but I think as of the time that it was brought
[00:20:40] out that it was just like is this what it's gonna be like and to have that happen you know you're hiking in Colorado or Utah or Las Vegas and all of a sudden your next turn there's a big huge massive
[00:20:53] three-sided mirror although this one in Colorado wasn't was rectangular so it wasn't a triangular so maybe they're doing away with their the triangular and going with rectangular throughout the world. So the one in Las Vegas was triangular though so it's definitely an odd instance that's come up. So
[00:21:12] if you have the time check out what happened back in 2020 I remember the craziness that that went around and all of a sudden they started to appear and I wouldn't say all over the world but at different
[00:21:22] places in the world and it's very cool to watch or wonder where they would appear next. So also now we've been talking about Everest the past couple episodes like like 10 episodes and they have started a cleanup on Everest so the dead bodies are gonna be starting to be
[00:21:43] cleaned up on Everest because of climate change now. Thinning snow and ice has made it has made it easier to see the bodies now and they are going to be trying to get as many
[00:21:54] people as they can off of this massive peak of course the most highest peak in the world off of the Everest. Now as of yet they said five teams are going to be going up there so they have people up there it's like 12 military personnel and 18 climbers
[00:22:14] are gonna go up there because of global warming they're becoming more visible and now it's starting to kind of make the the trek up Everest a little bit more less desirable even though there's more people doing it every damn year. So more than 300 people have been
[00:22:31] perish on the mountains since the 1920s and eight this year alone many of them remains colorful climbing gear of course everybody has to have a colorful climbing gear to see the next person on a trail in case of bad conditions and such. Now they're not gonna
[00:22:49] take away green boots so what we talked about before which is kind of like the first dead person a climber sees when they climb up Everest and then there's also another one
[00:23:00] called Sleeping Beauty they're not gonna get rid of but they're gonna try to get rid of as many people as they can. So one body in case an ipos up to its torso took the climbers 11 hours to free
[00:23:15] so think of that one person 11 hours extremely deaf and cold getting the body out there is one part bringing it down is definitely the next challenge based on where their zone is so most
[00:23:26] of them are up in the death zone some of them are drawn to the Kalamadu Icefall I believe that's what it's called is where they have to cross cross glacier glacier and stuff like that
[00:23:38] a lot of these people that have climbed this are on have been untouched left there of course because they got to either summit or get off themselves they gotta save yourself that's the big thing
[00:23:46] on Everest is if someone is in distress you have two options help them and die or save yourself so now when they get the person off of there now this is talking in of course in
[00:24:00] UK terms not in American terms body can weigh 100 kilograms which is like you know like 100 hamburgers what do we do that in in American terms since like hamburgers right we compare the hamburgers
[00:24:14] and sodas did did you really say somebody weighs 100 hamburgers yes wow that's that's so bad these are American terms no it's not it's not at all the hell is a kilometer I don't know what the
[00:24:26] hell a kilometer is no kilometer 100 kilograms is about 200 over a little over 200 uh of pounds so basically they a lot of the the the Nepalese have said this basically has turned into a graveyard
[00:24:40] now because of of the amount of climbers that we see going up there I mean we see this all on Facebook and Instagram the amount of people climbing up three 400 people climbing up at one time
[00:24:51] is just absolutely insane but you know and they're all standing in the line right exactly they get to a certain spot they got to stand there in the line apparently they're standing in the line next to
[00:25:03] dead frozen bodies that have been up there for years decades whatever obviously that's kind of haunting and sad on the one hand but then on the other hand it kind of cements the concept
[00:25:15] that what you're doing entails really grave risk well to me I think the the real benefit is to some folks this is a family member a loved one a son a daughter a mother a father
[00:25:30] that are being retrieved and brought back I wonder what they're doing with the bodies when they get them down the mountain if they're flying them home or cremating then you know what
[00:25:41] is the the plans after the recovery yeah because that's that's a you know they're not when you're at base camp you're not right next door to I forgot the nearest town that they fly into and stuff I
[00:25:56] forgot what that's called can't a man zoo is that it yes that's and that's what like a 20 mile truck to get there go more than that wait a minute yeah I think on foot it's it's like
[00:26:07] a weak hike and yeah but then you know they must have some way of getting provisions out there whether it's by helicopter or something else you know frankly I think we'll see in our lifetime
[00:26:19] some type of airstrip or landing launching pad whatever at the Everest base camp or nearby it's just becoming more and more commercialized more and more gentrified if you will and you look back at the day when these the first expeditions went up there with really no beta
[00:26:39] how to do it and without the technology that folks have now I mean what pioneers they were now now if you have the money and you're in the physical shape you can buy your way to the
[00:26:49] top of Everest it seems you don't need any skill whatsoever just well yeah wait you got to learn how to put in your foot into the ice and put the ax in the ice but other than
[00:26:59] that yeah I would assume that the the folks that run these expeditions want certain requirements like you have to have a certain climbing pedigree to become part of that expedition because otherwise
[00:27:12] if I was running the expedition I wouldn't want to take on the likelihood that I'm going to have to rescue you off the mountain and if I don't then my exhibition business is going to go down
[00:27:25] the tubes because you know I've got some fatalities up there but true I don't know I just think it's crazy that people spend all this money to to soak in the sun for 30 seconds on the top of Everest
[00:27:39] I don't know I can just I could think of more epic things that I would want to do with that kind of money maybe and maybe it entails you know I don't have a fun well no if I look if
[00:27:50] I had the time and the money to take six weeks off I'd rather go to some impoverished country and build houses or dig wells or do something like that I think that would be pretty cool if you had
[00:28:05] you know what does it cost 60 80 100 000 dollars to do this and I think minimum is 60 yeah and it's a it's a it's a multitude of weeks if you're going to take that kind of time off then you
[00:28:17] know why not go to some village and help some kids some guys yeah kids kids that yeah well I don't know I mean I'm look then I'm gonna go out hiking this weekend and I'm not going to go out and
[00:28:27] collect food for the needy so there you go I am a hipic deep down I am a hypocrite yeah so another thing to add is that I found out that the cleanup campaign has a budget of over 600
[00:28:41] 000 dollars also employed 171 Napoli guides and porters to bring back over 11 tons of rubbish or as garbage we call that in America or the hamburger buns or whatever but all right enough
[00:28:58] with all the death and stuff thank you uh April one question before I edit this out is this is this professional for you is this for you can I can we swear a little bit not in the bad terms
[00:29:09] sure like okay yeah of course like throwing out a few f bombs and stuff no I mean that we all right guys thank you for shooting the shit with me I really appreciate it so uh thank you to the monthly supporters Darren Vicki John Betsy Denise Vanessa Joseph
[00:29:28] Jim C Michael and David thank you guys very much for supporting the show thank you for believing in me also discovered camp Catskill in Tarrinville your ultimate hiking store find top quality gear apparel accessories for all your outdoor adventures expert staff is here to
[00:29:43] help every hiker from beginning to season or pros we also carry a variety of unique Catskill souvenirs and gifts visit us online at campcatskill.co and in the store for come into the store for your next journey adventure starts at Camp Catsville also embark on a transformative
[00:29:59] journey with another summit another summit is dedicated to certain veterans and first responders with free outdoor activities activities like walks in nature paddling hiking or even backpacking join us port of community through ejuvenate and nature's embrace experience camaraderie
[00:30:15] adventure and healing at no cost take your next step with another summit and ascend to new heights of resilience and joy apply today on another summit.org so mentions so we have overlook outdoors co mentions us doing uh morning paddle on Alder Lake over the beaver kill range
[00:30:33] and then going over the beaver kill covered bridge and at the Roscoe diner so they did a whole western Catskills adventure over there on Alder Lake that's an awesome spot Alder Lake is just stunning indeed yeah um Roscoe diner is very good too i've stopped there many times
[00:30:50] April have you been over there in the western Catskills Roscoe is like my favorite place i will drive from Poughkeepsie to Roscoe to have the world famous pie at the world famous Roscoe diner
[00:31:03] just for like it's like a two two hour half hour drive and i'll drive there for pie and turn around and come back when i've had a very stressful day i would love to live in Roscoe
[00:31:13] it's a very nice town oh yeah yeah yeah also pink pony 818 uh tracy rincon said uh today was a delight i don't remember when she posted this but i think it was on saturday uh she circled north
[00:31:28] southlake campground the escarpment trail and mary's gun trail and she said who's mary that's a good point uh tad i don't know if you have more on this but hold on what stop we mary's no longer have
[00:31:40] stump stash so we're not going to start having stump tad i'm just oh i'm making that rule that's rule number 15 in my rule book there's no rules here oh there is no stump no stump tad so tracy
[00:31:55] also hit uh laban's monument inspiration port otters rock split rock boulder rock catskill mountain heights house site sunset rock newman's ledge bedman's cave and up and down north point which is one of her new favorite places 10.5 miles amazing weather is amazing views a lot of trail runners
[00:32:12] of course the carbon trail is a very popular pace for trail runners a lot of campground hikers once again north south lake is one of the most popular plates in the state most of them had
[00:32:22] water bottles of course i mean they're they're going out for a short day hike but then it turns into a six mile hike that they think is a mile long like some of the others that we talked
[00:32:30] about today uh most of them didn't go know where they're going and she said they smelled a lot like a bottle of perfume yeah that's that's basically that area uh she stopped the day at the
[00:32:43] circle w uh said it was a five star day so circle w is down in the uh socrates right well if you consider uh what is it palinville palinville okay yeah okay my best it's just just before you get out of that little
[00:33:01] hamlet and start heading up the cove it's circle daffy's yeah it seems like a neat place i've never been there it's kind of got that throwback uh 40s 50s vibe from the outside but usually by
[00:33:14] the time i get there on my way home i just want to gas and go yes hit the gas yeah i will admit though if if anybody like feels this i i will stop in the speedway in socrates to get like a cold drink
[00:33:34] no i don't feel that i don't go that way so i can't say that again no it's when you go when you go in that speedway and in socrates it kind of has this breaking bad feel to it if you know what i'm saying
[00:33:45] it's not good that was very wrong let's just cut that part out no no all right so advanced the ball yes uh what are you guys drinking tonight uh april you have anything to drink i didn't know i was supposed
[00:33:57] to have anything to drink i have some beer in the fridge but i didn't break it out oh okay that's fine what's the beer what's local uh it's uh it's a vienna beer because i'm all about vienna
[00:34:13] right now i'm gonna grab it nice see what you're doing to me bad influence no this is what we want this is this is this show is is 100 percent uh spontaneous events spontaneous bad bad events so it's uh vondtrap brewing vondtrap brewing vienna lager
[00:34:40] we'll crack it open and tell us what you think i think it it's thankfully a dark beer you think dark beer is anymore anywhere everything is an IPA i don't need to go to a restaurant and have 10
[00:34:53] choices for IPAs i think it's very refreshing excellent excellent nice tad you're probably having coffee unfortunately yeah i actually i i put out the uh preview story post that i do have
[00:35:09] the trusty yeti cup full of my home roasted home brewed coffee um and actually a couple of my instagram pals have uh sent me messages one of them asked me if we could go because they're driving apparently
[00:35:25] they belong drive up and back this weekend so they'd like to know if we can leg it out for four hours on the show tonight no no no i gotta wake up at three o'clock tomorrow
[00:35:36] no i'm good so they'll just have to replay replay it it'll be that good you'll want to listen to it three times yes they can they can do that that please do please do that get us more views actually
[00:35:49] so yeah i just i just finished my awestruck homicider so it's called a homicider is last year's uh cider for of course halloween's hometown homicider it's good stuff guys a
[00:35:59] little pumpkin in it and stuff so tad you got a question for apal tell you who's that i do what what's that's that the matthew lasar who is matthew lasar oh oh oh now yeah now she's smiling
[00:36:13] we'll see well do you know who uh matthew vassar is matthew vassar was a brewer that's why you have to drink beer when you're talking about matthew vassar he was a brewer and and he was also
[00:36:27] he started vassar college where i work there you go okay and he died while reading his retirement speech for vassar and i do the the vassar ghost tours and i read his retirement speech
[00:36:43] right next to the statue of him next to the building that he supposedly haunts so i i know his speech very well where he said that he regrets that he would not be meeting with
[00:36:55] these people again it was during a board of trustees meeting and he dropped dead and they continued the meeting afterwards it was around noon when he dropped dead but this is why i'm going
[00:37:08] to retire early because i'm not going to die while giving my retirement speech well i would avoid the retirement speech altogether what i would have asked for college okay that's okay yeah recorded in
[00:37:21] advance get get the hell out of there and then have him play it like a few days later you know what's your long gone in roscoe eating pizza for the rest or eating pie for the rest of your life
[00:37:35] blueberry pie at the roscoe diner cool that good stuff so uh previous hikes uh april you've been done any previous hikes lately not lately unfortunately i have developed a uh skin condition
[00:37:50] where i have psoriasis on the bottom of my feet so this is very non conducive to hiking so for the last two years i haven't been hiking much but uh for my research prior to that i would
[00:38:03] you know hire students to just hike with me all summer long um so i've i've been hiking everywhere in the new york city watershed on both sides of the of the Hudson river for the last 10 years
[00:38:19] there's no place i haven't hiked pretty much i love it i the appellation trail is near where i live here so you know i would get up in the morning and decide not to go to work and go
[00:38:31] hike on the appellation trail for half the day and then say okay well now i have to go to work so yeah i've been hiking everywhere but uh in this region but not not for the last two years unfortunately
[00:38:44] sorry to hear about that definitely hopefully everything works out and you get that healed yeah i think more beer yeah is that the cure i mean that's what they they would say back in
[00:38:55] the days you need whiskey yeah rub some beer on that a little yeast will help it it didn't keep Matthew Baster from dying so i'm not sure that that's the solution i think matt worked too long sounds
[00:39:07] like matt had made a lot of money in his lifetime and he should have punched out you know a decade earlier yeah so tad what about you what what have you been up to anything uh so this past weekend was
[00:39:18] my daughter's graduation party on saturday it was fun and sunday was ride the bike for about 45 miles and then clean up after the graduation party so i did not get out this weekend i am right now
[00:39:35] narrowing down my plans for this coming weekend and i hope to squeeze out a few high quality hikes nice nice uh so i on sunday i went hiking up bramley mountain uh it was just a nice i i
[00:39:52] wanted something local i wanted to sleep in a little bit and just do something and bramley mountains 30 minutes away from me i got good gain around 900 feet 3.7 3.8 miles awesome view i saw i got up there like three quarters away up i hit some rain uh i threw on
[00:40:13] the rain cover for the the pack and then i threw on my my raincoat and it was insanely human out there so like everything was sweating it was disgusting i was just like i'd rather soak in
[00:40:24] the rain than soak in this freaking raincoat it was disgusting so do you ever try a poncho like what we're going to achieve ponchos well it doesn't have to be cheap or expensive but just
[00:40:37] the whole concept behind a poncho is it keeps the rain off of you but it's open at the bottom so it's very breathable and it's it's not like you're in a sauna you're not walking around
[00:40:49] in your own personal sauna you're getting a lot of ventilation true i mean i might look into it but i have like a really nice raincoat that i have from sarah that has like the breathable
[00:41:00] pockets and everything on the side and stuff but it was just it was 100 humidity it was like 83 degrees i think for that day on sunday so i know what i know what april's thinking she just
[00:41:10] doesn't want to ask it's you went out on this three mile hike did you just bring a single water bottle one bottle or did you bring no or no i gotta you know i've i've been yeah i
[00:41:23] have the through hike in like two weeks less than two weeks over the presidential range up in new hampshire so i've just been putting weight and weight in my pack i think it was 33 pounds for
[00:41:35] this short of a hike and i got up there and i don't know how many like probably like under 30 minutes and i was just pushing it and i got to watch the storm go over the southern part
[00:41:48] of capsules uh it was really neat a beautiful spot once again uh somebody on bramley mountain i think it was jaymie meyers said that they were up on their sawing morning like mo you are morning
[00:42:01] one one warblers and five mountain lions on bramley mountain just five five usually you find more up there yeah bramley mountains filled with mountain lions yeah the d ec pushed them outside
[00:42:14] of the the blue line and they've taken up residents in the western cat skills and that's that's why they're building a fire tower so when you were up there you have a chance to escape from the mountain
[00:42:26] lions correct correct so jaymie uh i wish i could have saw you on a trail but unfortunately they must have went this the same clockwise way that i did and they came down the other way so but
[00:42:38] awesome hike at the end of the day of course you you get up to the top you can see partial views and then when you're on your way down the freaking skies open up and it's beautiful that's
[00:42:47] what happened it was on the way down skies opened up it got hotter and it was the it was clear so but today today i went hiking as well i had trained in the morning i decided that i wanted to get
[00:43:00] somewhere close i was gonna hit bramley again but i was like you know what i know the place closer and that's pretty good i went to platycle ski resort and hauled my ass up that really quickly i
[00:43:14] threw 37 pounds in my pack to see what i could do and i got up to the top in 38 minutes so i felt good you stayed on the ski slope itself i went on the overlook trail yes okay and that's
[00:43:29] and that's on the ski slope side of the mountain yes yeah yeah it's on the outer edge to the left mm-hmm you were up there recently weren't you yeah i was up there this past winter it was a
[00:43:38] fantastic hike i started out in the platycle forest on the opposite side a little bit south of yeah and then i i hiked the um the ridge line around um to i guess it's called round top on the other side
[00:43:53] and it was it was a fantastic day it was one of those days in the winter where you could have justified wearing your snowshoes and you really didn't need them it was like you know
[00:44:06] 50% use them 50% don't but it was a fabulous winter hike i enjoyed it tremendously there was a lot of on the side of the ridge that i was on there was just a lot of those little young birches growing
[00:44:20] i mean the the birches that are you know a little bit bigger than like a fence post in terms of their diameter or thickness they were yeah they were tall but that that area was heavily logged and
[00:44:32] there was just a lot of trails over there it would have been a great place for backcountry skiing if it had a little more snow so yeah good i'm glad to see you're like working out and trying
[00:44:42] to get in shape i just trying to get in shape i am in shape well trying to get in better shape i guess i should say all's i know is i'm i mean i'm a little i'm a little had trepidations
[00:44:52] here because i remember last year after your new hampshire excursion when i was a mere listener and not a guest in perpetuity that um you came back and for it seemed like eternity you were
[00:45:05] talking about your feet and it was horrible well yeah i mean two straight days pouring rain i mean your your boots never dry your feet near socks never dry and it's it was horrible
[00:45:18] but i mean this this is just i'm the views were absolutely phenomenal i don't know if you guys have ever i mean tad you've probably been to the top there it has i didn't go over to the
[00:45:27] north peak i was on the south peak but i could see so many different high peaks and of course hundred highest peaks you could see the burrows range when you went down part of the overlook
[00:45:37] trail you know there's there's i don't know i mean it's maybe it's way too far drive for most people but it's definitely worth it yeah it's a it's a nice mountain and frankly before i was a
[00:45:47] Catskill mountain hiker i was a Catskill mountain skier and i've skied platykill mountain countless times uh going back to um i'm gonna say the early well the um i guess mid 90s when it reopened i skied there and through and through the early 2000s
[00:46:09] that's a great great ski area and those western Catskills have a certain charm to them in part i think it's because you just don't run into as many people when you're out there
[00:46:20] yeah they're putting in new snow machines up there too on the uh on the the northern slopes of there their time to the right so that's pretty neat pretty neat to see construction with a family
[00:46:32] owned ski resort so yeah still going which brings up one of my peeps about being a ski area owner operator in the Catskills your competitor is the state of new york and Bel Air ski area
[00:46:47] yep they have you know basically an unlimited budget they don't have to show a profit they don't have to go out and get financing borrow anything a bad season doesn't kill them private operator like the folks that own and operate platykill one bad winner can put them in
[00:47:04] the red yeah yeah so kudos to them uh i'm gonna reach out to them see if they want to get chat on the show so get us some free lift tickets yeah right yeah we'll go make some turns is that how
[00:47:16] you seeing this i just want them to be on the show to talk about their awesome life come on i want free lift tickets where they're not where they're not on the show that you don't make
[00:47:24] that call well i'm gonna make this call all right i'm gonna i'm gonna call them now good call all right so uh once again volunteer everybody 3500 club is the trail herds stewards catskill trail
[00:47:37] crew is doing some work around the catskills uh i got their email from i'm not sure where they are next but uh i will post it in there catskill mountain club the visitors center jolly rovers
[00:47:49] trail crew bradley mountain fire towers looking for some volunteers and of course if you want stickers send me an email hit me up on any social media page or go to camp catskill so weather forecast
[00:48:02] or the weekend let's check it out now i gotta refresh this why is this i feel it's always these tactical difficulties she is showing like tuesday so like tuesday has already happened so
[00:48:14] friday it says that uh we'll have light rain showers in the morning uh little light rain showers in the afternoon as well a high of 64 and a low of 63 so not a much wind chill so that's
[00:48:27] pretty neat um saturday uh risk of thunderstorms uh same temperatures high of 66 around uh low of 63 a little bit more wind 20 mile per hour but that's all day long is definitely a risk of t-storms
[00:48:41] so saturday is going to be a tough day to get out sunday looks actually to be a beautiful day a high of 63 a low of 57 with rain showers early very early in the morning it's around three dead
[00:48:53] five a.m and then becoming clear uh for the rest of the day so get out this weekend start to hike have some fun and uh get to it all right so i'm gonna break into our last sponsors april and
[00:49:08] then we'll head up your interview sorry it's taken this long long as shooting this shit it's always fun all right so discover the beauty cat skills adorondacks and hudson valley with scenic route guiding our expert guides to ensure a level of safe unforgettable hike experience tailored to your
[00:49:26] skill level from back taking vistas to hidden gems or if you're peak bagging into simple day hikes will lead you on the best spots in back book your adventure today and book nature's wonder
[00:49:37] with scenic route guiding check them out on all social media platforms also if you mentioned the podcast you can get 10 off use the code mountain line also catch your love story against beth taking backdrop with outdoor chronicles photography molly specialized an adventure
[00:49:53] couple photography and she'll immortalize your moments and miss the stunning landscape with the cat skills adorondacks and white mounts she'll craft timeless images that respect your unique bond with nature's grand door embark on an unforgettable photographic journey with
[00:50:06] outdoor chronicles photography don't hesitate to get ahold of molly on about all platforms discover hiking discover the wilderness with trailbound project our expert led hiking and backpacking education programs offer unparalleled outdoor experiences whether you're a beginner
[00:50:22] or a seasoned adventurer join us to learn essential skills exploring stunning trails and connect with nature start your journey today with trailbound project and a lot of wonders with the great outdoors they are on all social media platforms and they have a
[00:50:34] website so let's move on to the guest of the night so tonight april b saw joins us to talk about ghost towns in the cat's go reservoirs so ghost towns in the cat's go reservoirs what does that mean
[00:50:50] we'll get to that a little bit so uh if you want like whatever will there just go down there and swim down there and you'll find out so april what about a little background about yourself
[00:51:00] uh okay that's very general a little background um i'm a professor of anthropology at basher college been there since 2012 i'm a native new yorker but i've lived all over the united states
[00:51:17] coming back to new york every couple of years i just can't seem to stay away for too long i'm a registered professional archaeologist which is actually a credential that requires a lot of
[00:51:31] proof that you can do archaeology in the way that the government approves of archaeology being done so that there's a secretary of interior standards for what a professional archaeologist is so i have met that and i write books i'm currently writing a book on the archaeology of
[00:51:51] american protests um my specialty is actually the identification of animal bones um which is very fun when you're out hiking and you find uh you know skeletal material i can tell you exactly
[00:52:03] what it is and and what side of the body it's come from and whether it's a juvenile or an adult and and that's a fun thing to do i've written a book about that um as well but uh yeah i think
[00:52:15] that's enough isn't that enough i yeah um so well you say you're a native to new york where were you formerly of i was born in brooklyn raised on long island and i did my graduate work
[00:52:30] at binghamton nice no nice that's somewhat southern tier upstate so i mean it's upstate to me vassar college where's that at vassar college is in peckipsi last stop on the metro north so easy
[00:52:46] to get almost anywhere i'm actually taking the train back from chicago to peckipsi next week and it's one train you get on the train in chicago and then you wind up in peckipsi
[00:52:59] you know 18 hours later um so yeah new york is just kind of my playground in a various i i'll go anywhere in new york and and enjoy it nice nice i i've never heard of vassar college sorry
[00:53:12] i mean for my that's okay my unknowable stuff uh so also you said that you you like hiking have you previously been involved with hiking in the cat skills before your archaeology stuff
[00:53:24] yeah well um i it was kind of contemporaneous um that when i was a graduate student at binghamton i would drag my husband and on the weekends to go hiking in the cat skills which was a good two to
[00:53:36] you know three hour drive just to get to a trailhead you know you're on the western side so we would go to like margaretville and we'd go to roscoe and we'd hike and then we would drive back and
[00:53:47] it would be like an all day long thing um so my archaeology training and my spending as much time as possible in the cat skills hiking kind of go hand in hand nice now that those western
[00:54:01] cat skills are absolutely studied they uh they have their own touch over there so that's i mean my friend uh he listens to the show darin white i've had him on the show and he's he's a listener of
[00:54:13] the show lives over in the bigamton area and he knows your pain of traveling to the you know the more eastern parts and the northern parts is is a long distance for them yeah yeah and
[00:54:24] you don't want to spend a lot of money staying overnight you know on top of all your hiking and then it turns into a huge thing right you want it to kind of be a thing that you could just run off
[00:54:34] and do and then come back home and and not have to you know plan a whole weekend around it but we made it work we spent a lot of time in the car listening to music going back and forth but
[00:54:45] yeah i really i'm in love with the landscape and and that's where why i love both archaeology and hiking excellent so your writings you want to talk a little bit about your writings that you've
[00:54:57] had oh my gosh uh sure um yeah you know as a as a professor i have to write you know academic articles journal articles that are more technical um you know to to get my promotions and and
[00:55:15] prove myself as a professional um but neither of my parents went to college so i i try to write you know the books that i write and and the more popular stuff i try to write that is you know not
[00:55:28] filled with jargon um so that i'm thinking of people who want to discover um you know what i've discovered through archaeology which is mostly just you know the things that you encounter like you know these monoliths and these bodies on Everest that's all archaeology right the things
[00:55:46] that are left behind on the landscape um that there is a way of studying all of that and understanding that um through this this discipline of archaeology so i've written about lots of different things i'm published on ghost hunting um in addition to animal bones in
[00:56:05] addition to the poor houses of new york state um you know a variety of things pretty much whenever something catches my interest i study it until i understand it and then i write something
[00:56:17] about it um but i also give presentations at local libraries and um all over youtube with some of these presentations and things so i'm really about sharing my discoveries um with the public and non non-professionals in ways that allows them to be part of of the adventure and
[00:56:40] when we were still doing the the research that became the the book about the new york city water system uh we advertised through the local libraries and museums in the cat skills that people could go out with us uh it was hiked with an archaeologist and and people
[00:56:56] showed up like sometimes we had 20 people who would just show up and what we didn't very well convey to them is that when you're hiking with us you're doing the research with us like we don't
[00:57:07] know what we're gonna find it wasn't like predetermined and we're just going off and they're like well what are we gonna see and i'm like i don't know we're gonna find what we find and
[00:57:15] then we'll figure it out um and some people you know weren't up to you know that kind of off trail hiking but those who were they loved it and now they they follow me around whenever they'll
[00:57:27] you know i go somewhere they they show up and and they want to be with us um to do it sounds like our our type of thing tad that's what we yeah it's what pushwackens about yeah sounds very cool
[00:57:39] so april before we move on uh why don't you help us understand uh the difference between archaeology and anthropology because as i recall you're a professor of anthropology yeah so in uh north america
[00:57:56] archaeology is a subfield of anthropology this isn't necessarily true in other places of the world like in europe it's often a subfield of history um but in north america the tradition is that when you have say you find native american artifacts um you have to understand human culture
[00:58:19] to be able to interpret those artifacts whereas in europe they have so much more like written history that when they find artifacts they consult the written history and in north america you consult more cultural anthropology ethnography is writings about how indigenous people lived
[00:58:41] on this continent before europeans came so in north america archaeology is a subfield of anthropology where anthropology is the study of what it means to be human or more generally the study of humans so there's cultural anthropology that studies living people um and how their culture
[00:59:00] dictates what they believe is to be normal um like how many people should live in a house and how often you should shower um there's linguistic anthropology which is about how you talk and communicate
[00:59:12] what things are jokes what things are not jokes right that that sort of things um and physical or biological anthropology is about the human body and uh physical and biological anthropologists often study all primates um like bonobos and various forms of chimpanzees and great apes
[00:59:34] to understand what makes humans different from these and the same as these other primate species so if you throw together this cultural anthropology this biological anthropology this linguistic anthropology and archaeology you have a holistic way of understanding
[00:59:49] all of human past present and future through space and time so that's why archaeology is a component of anthropology well that sounds like you've thought about this and have given this answer before that was good yeah so and you you somewhat covered it but just to
[01:00:09] put the spotlight on why is uh anthropology and archaeology important to us at the present time and important to future generations well to use the examples that you guys are talking about you know before we got to this part of the podcast you know finding plain wrecks finding
[01:00:30] bodies on Everest finding monoliths in the desert human beings have always found things and wanted to understand what they were why they were there what it means so archaeology is really just the profession of doing that the profession of building an understanding of
[01:00:49] things across space and time what they mean who they meant it to so that we could manage all of this so anybody who spends any time outside is finding things right and then who do you bring
[01:01:02] that to well you could just wonder about it and say I don't know what this was I wonder if anybody knows or you could bring it to an archaeologist who maintains that knowledge so they
[01:01:13] could say yeah there's a bunch of plane crashes in the cat skills right is this one similar to or different from those other plane crashes in the cat skills and why are their bodies on Everest
[01:01:25] and where else are their bodies that are piled up like that is that a unique thing or is that not a unique thing right so archaeologists maintain this kind of knowledge base that comes in handy whenever somebody finds stuff as long as people are still finding things or
[01:01:41] disturbing the dead or you know dying which is going to keep going as long as there's humans we kind of need archaeologists if you want answers right it's always fun to just wonder
[01:01:52] but if you want some answers that have some backing to them as you know we've seen this before then that's what archaeologists do so with all this this background and finding out what and
[01:02:05] why and such what got you inspired to do like this this study on ghost towns of the casco reservoirs that's it was literally I was you know this graduate student an archaeology graduate student at Binghamton I had gotten a bachelor's in in chemistry from Rutgers and decided that
[01:02:26] chemistry was not fun because it's inside with cancer causing chemicals all day every day that's not very life affirming career and I wanted to be outside more right so I I applied for graduate
[01:02:39] school for archaeology I applied to two programs I got into one and then I went to Binghamton to study archaeology and my husband and I were driving back and forth to the Catskills every
[01:02:50] weekend and I don't know you know you're history well enough but in the 1990s all of these little signs appeared all around the reservoirs and the Catskills that said former site of
[01:03:02] and then the name of a community and as a young archaeologist I'm saying how in the world was their community on this steep slope right like it doesn't make sense where these signs were
[01:03:14] so I would just talk to my husband as you're driving like where is this to me what how does it make any sense that these signs are here you know there's no evidence in the woods but yet
[01:03:24] we'd go on our hikes and there'd be stone walls and building foundations you know nowhere near these signs so I literally like was thinking about this when I was doing my masters and dissertation
[01:03:37] work at Binghamton but I did it on other projects and then in 2012 when I started as a professor at Vassar I needed a research project that I could take my students out into the field
[01:03:49] and I'm literally in Poughkeepsie in the middle of the eastern and western New York City watersheds so I just started taking intra archaeology students they had to do field work with me
[01:04:02] part of a graded activity and I would plan the day either in the Catskills or in the Croton reservoir area and if it was going to rain in the Catskills we'd go south to the Croton if it
[01:04:13] was going to rain in the Croton we would go northwest to the Catskills and I would take these students out who a lot of them you know had never been away from Poughkeepsie before
[01:04:22] right they're mostly from California and Florida and places like that and I just take them out hiking and we would record everything we saw and come back and talk about it and that's how my
[01:04:32] project got started it's really a hiking based project that was inspired by hiking and the methodology is hiking and we don't collect any artifacts we just take geotagged waypoints and photographs and we leave everything where it is so that anybody else who goes hiking in those
[01:04:51] areas can discover the same things that we discovered and you better not admit that you take anything from there DEC will snag you they will take you down well this is mostly DEP land
[01:05:04] so DEP sorry sorry yeah DEC is the state DEP is New York City that's good well that's even worse Department of Environmental Protection yeah oh yeah yeah they're very they're very stringent so I am fascinated with the reservoirs with the history of it and such like the building
[01:05:22] of the dams building of the aqueduct I've been I don't know I've done at least five or six episodes on this I've read so many books and I don't know how other people once again saw you
[01:05:33] you know if they see what you saw you know former site of a Shokin former site of olive bridge or something like that and they this doesn't spark their interest but it definitely
[01:05:44] would did with me so a lot of people don't know they know why these towns were there but because of the water New York City needed water but how can you explain how they got taken over
[01:05:57] that they were just told hey to leave yeah it kind of varies because this process happened over 150 years and that's not even including the places that that got demolished on Manhattan itself just moving to the first off Manhattan Island reservoir being the Croton in 1847
[01:06:19] literally the city just went to people's houses and told them that they had to leave and some people were able to stay in their house until literally the water was coming but for the most part it was just at like in the town of olive for the Ashokin
[01:06:35] some people only got 10 days noticed that they had to leave their house there wasn't really much of a formal process it was just a notification system we are notifying you that your house is being taken in olive for the Ashokin reservoir they got between 10 and 30 days noticed
[01:06:53] depending on where they work as the plans changed a couple of times and they were told that they would get half their lands assessed value for their property they would not get compensated for their business income at all just the lands assessed value they'd get half
[01:07:10] and that was based on New York City's assessment of their land it wasn't an independent system it wasn't based on what the owners wanted so the city would say your land is this by this
[01:07:23] we're going to give you this amount of money which is only half of what they themselves said it was worth and if you want more you have to sue us for it
[01:07:31] so there's like the New York State Archives has in linear feet that's how they calculate how much they have records of the testimonies of these people going to court trying to get more money
[01:07:45] from the city and they're saying things like you could read some of this on like google books they're saying things like oh i had a boarding house and i made like this amount of money per
[01:07:56] month and the city is like you didn't make that all year long so we're going to divide it by 12 and therefore you really didn't make any money so it doesn't matter and the people who did
[01:08:09] win these lawsuits it was years later that they won the lawsuits and a lot of these people had already died before they won their lawsuits and according to bob student who looked at more
[01:08:21] of these than i did he wrote the the last of the handmade dams book about the ashokan there are still millions of dollars that were awarded to these people that the city was supposed to pay
[01:08:35] that the city never actually paid so when you say the words like eminent domain people think well the city just bought their property you know some people made money because the city took land
[01:08:47] that they weren't really using so they got some assessed value and that's it but lots of these people lost everything and there were lots of people who were just homeless and if you read the
[01:08:59] official city histories they say people moved to the midwest with the money that they got from the city but i've studied where everybody is as far as in the cemeteries they're still buried in the
[01:09:11] same town right they didn't move to the midwest they stayed there and the local history is that people gave up their barns to turn them into houses for their family members who were then homeless so it was this very horrible series of just dismantling taking everything and even
[01:09:32] the people who didn't lose their properties they lost their school they lost their church they lost their community they lost the railroad they lost the roadways like it totally uprooted everything so if you just look at well who lost their property how much money did they make
[01:09:50] right you're not really considering the large scale of this kind of devastation in the town of olive alone they demolished eight schools right wow wait how do you have any sense of community
[01:10:04] can you imagine if somebody came to your community now and just took most of it away and then said okay you're fine you keep going the way you're going but how are you gonna do that
[01:10:15] and a lot of these people were related to each other so like i tracked family names and some family names lost 20 30 parcels of land but then if you track the marriages they're all
[01:10:27] intermarried so like the same family lost dozens and dozens of parcels of land and they also had to reburied their loved ones some of these people had just died and were just buried
[01:10:39] and they had to dig them up out of graves and move them elsewhere to the point that their descendants nowadays still don't know exactly where everybody wound up so that's one of the common things that
[01:10:51] community members ask me is they asked me to help find their ancestors because they don't know where they're buried so the city gave you half your land assessed value for the Ashokan reservoir and then they gave you $15 to dig up your ancestor and bury them somewhere else
[01:11:08] which wasn't enough money to bury them anywhere else so you still had to pay right so it was so disruptive that some of the local people who wrote about it wrote about people committing
[01:11:20] suicide because it was so disruptive and so upsetting like it was a very traumatic process specifically for the Ashokan reservoir which was the biggest one that had the most amount of demolition but it happened throughout time so the process changed for each reservoir a little bit and the
[01:11:40] number of communities that were impacted changed at the Boyd's Corner Reservoir that's on the east side of the Hudson River they only took a couple of parcels of land to build the reservoir
[01:11:51] but then 50 years later the New York State Board of Health gave New York City the power to condemn all of the farms around that reservoir so it seems like they only took a couple of parcels of land
[01:12:06] but basically the whole entire town was repurposed you were not allowed to be a farmer in that town anymore even though you didn't live next to the reservoir so the process is much more convoluted than just eminent domain were they justified in the money that they received?
[01:12:25] Wow. So with the data you collected the information you gathered from the local ancestors of the displaced families what is it from your perspective as an anthropologist as to the cultural significance of these lost villages what occurred during this process? What's the takeaway?
[01:12:52] The takeaway is that most people, most Americans at least do not know where their water comes from and therefore they don't value their water like how many people do you know that don't even drink
[01:13:05] their tap water right they're like oh that's not good water I have to get bottled water that's good water right so I think the most important thing is that this story isn't necessarily
[01:13:15] unique right it happens all over the world but most people are taught to not pay any attention to not care you turn on the tap and water comes and you get a bill for it and that's it
[01:13:28] but that everything that's provided to us has this history to it and there's this cost to it there are people around some reservoirs who have no water themselves because the water is not
[01:13:40] for them it gets shunted to somebody else so the things that we take for granted that we should not take these things for granted the people who built the New York City reservoir system were then
[01:13:53] hired by other cities around the United States to build their reservoir systems the Boston reservoir system was built by the people who built the New York reservoir system so it's not
[01:14:04] just a cat skill story it's not just a New York story it's a story for all of us to think especially in this time of climate change right climate change is really a water crisis that there's either
[01:14:15] going to be too much or too little water and where there used to be water there's not going to be enough and where there used to be not enough there's going to be too much so thinking
[01:14:23] about what our future is when it comes to water we have to kind of understand what our past is instead of just assuming oh don't worry about it the water will come it's it's not a given
[01:14:36] so with that context do you look at the current situation in the American southwest and the Colorado River and the depletion of those reservoirs and what's occurring out there yeah the Las Vegas is kind of a crazy situation right Las Vegas is just it's in the desert
[01:14:56] and people are like getting green lawns and things and it's just growing and growing and it's if you look at old aerial photos of Las Vegas it is completely the desert and now there's all of
[01:15:09] these like golf courses like it's so green where is this water coming from right so when you start thinking about how we were talking about the landscape this landscape is being totally transformed that there are other people whose water is going away so lake Powell is very
[01:15:29] very low right where where is the water going to come from when are we going to stop building in the desert especially during climate change right the American ideal seems to be just do it until
[01:15:42] it breaks right instead of preventively thinking about what you're doing and the situation in Vegas can be compared and contrasted to the situation of the American farmer in southern California who's not getting that water that's going to the golf course
[01:16:02] and the lawns in Vegas and people that pay more yeah and this is where food comes from so where's where's our priority I I view the takings and the Catskills is kind of this utilitarian
[01:16:15] thing where the greater good was defined as being New York City and displacing the the homesteads the families the people in the Catskills for this perceived greater good of the growth of Manhattan and the boroughs so what's the greater good in in Vegas versus you know California that
[01:16:36] does the farmer prevail or the casino operator it's all about making money that's right so and that's that's that's the whole whole thing about this whole upstate New York with the reservoirs
[01:16:47] it's all about making money and that created a better New York City and did it create a better Catskills I like looking at those reservoirs from the top of mountain but I don't think it
[01:16:59] really did much up here did it yeah when you think about one of the probably the overlooked aspects is that when you built the reservoir you took away the low-lying flatlands which were more suitable for you know hamlets villages farming and for living in versus the
[01:17:19] slope sides that were rockier less fertile less tillable land up there and you gave these people extollers to move out of the valley and then they were probably all competing for farmland elsewhere that unnaturally drove up the prices yeah that's another big question how did
[01:17:37] like how were they how did they find land after they were told to get out of their land for the reservoirs like how is did they have to like go purchase it from another person or did they
[01:17:49] like find parcels for them or something that's really people would people subdivided their own land and gave it to their family members or sold it to friends so the farm you couldn't farm anymore because you weren't allowed to do these sorts of activities near new york city water
[01:18:06] so in 1899 the state board of health approved that you could not do any activities that would have animals within a certain number of feet of any water body that flowed into a new york city
[01:18:19] reservoir and the number of feet depended on the topography of the area so let's say 800 to a thousand feet that you couldn't have any animals within 800 to a thousand feet of any body of water
[01:18:31] that flowed into a new york city reservoir that's the entire watershed right we're in the cat skills and can you do any farming without having animals within 800 to a thousand feet of water right it
[01:18:44] all flows to the reservoir that's why they put the reservoir there so farming was basically limited to little corners and valleys that were for one reason or another cut off from the new york
[01:18:57] city reservoir system that flowed away from it so a lot of the poverty that we see in the cat skills I think is a result of the demolition of the the rail line to create the ashokin right to cut
[01:19:10] off the rail service that went through the southern cat skills for like six years before it was rebuilt and at that time automotives had came into prevalence that this whole railroad economy
[01:19:24] had gone away so I don't know if you guys know the cute little hamlet of pine hill sure I was just there last weekend that used to be a major railroad destination and now you go there and
[01:19:37] literally in the downtown pine hill the buildings are falling down yeah like the used to be some massive pine hills yeah yeah there's no massive hotels because the railroad went away yeah it's so if you see like this ripple effect of the water system the water system
[01:19:57] really made the cat skills into what it is now which is both beautiful and tragic at the same time yep that's the way we see it so like we talk about you know all these different hamlets all
[01:20:10] these different towns you said kind of the ashokin reservoir was the area that was affected the most because like the the hamlets because there was the most reservoirs is do you think that's
[01:20:20] like what town do you think was affected the most had the had the worst possible outcome so for my research I use the municipal towns right so lots of these places are like hamlets
[01:20:33] or villages so I only count the larger towns like shokan west shokan those are all in olive so just giving you that kind of terminology that a lot of people say that there were like
[01:20:46] 11 towns demolished by the ashokin the ashokin for municipal towns was only in hurley olive and marbleton right so the other things are villages and hamlets within that but the ashokin was the largest taking and because they pretty much just took a swamp and the creek that flowed
[01:21:10] through it the esopus which was a river by any terms but called the esopus creek and they just demolished everything and after that rules and regulations went into place that they didn't demolish as much so if you define the the biggest impact by how much demolition and
[01:21:29] destruction there was it's the town of olive which is only half of the ashokin reservoir the western half the eastern half is in the town of hurley but that was mostly a swamp so yeah there was
[01:21:43] parts of west hurley was demolished and so forth but the heart of the town of olive was taken out which includes shokan west shokan olive bridge and all of those places that most people
[01:21:58] enumerate separately and then as time went on in the later like popactin and canonsville those were later there was much more control over what the city was allowed to do by the state but those people
[01:22:15] you know i'm sure they consider that the most traumatic when we were hiking at the never sink we had a gentleman with us who took us to the foundation of his childhood home that he remembers
[01:22:28] being kicked out of his home right and the ruins of his house are still there so in some ways you know they're all traumatic in different ways to different people but there are still more living
[01:22:42] people who went through the trauma at places like never sink where at places like the ashokin and the boy's corner reservoir those are older so the trauma is more in the distant past
[01:22:55] so with all this data that you've gathered do you have any kind of like data saying how many towns within the the katsuko reservoirs were actually taken over by the reservoirs can you take a
[01:23:08] little measurement it's hard to enumerate them based on towns um because of the municipal boundaries change over and over again so we had calculated the number of buildings and there's thousands of buildings that had been demolished to create the entire system but the problem is
[01:23:28] that there's new york city is still demolishing for the reservoirs if you know the the community of boy'sville which is on the northwest corner of the ashokin reservoir where there's a trail head for a rail trail now just the last two years new york city has been demolishing
[01:23:44] buildings there so it since the process is not over it's hard to say exactly what the number is right because it keeps going it hasn't stopped so you know how useful is it to enumerate um but
[01:24:02] just for the ashokin reservoir three thousand people were dug out of graves and another three thousand people were made homeless right so you multiply that there's 19 reservoirs and knowing that that one was the largest you've got i think we've got around 10 000 people lost their
[01:24:21] homes back when the reservoirs were initially constructed and people are still losing property to the reservoir system today wow now and all those all those three thousand people had they
[01:24:35] had to dig their up their own uh people's graves right the the new york city didn't do this for them if they wanted to they could do it themselves if they left them the city would take care of it for
[01:24:47] them but a lot of people wanted to bury their loved ones in a specific place right so some people contracted with people to move them at the western edge of the ashokin reservoir
[01:25:02] in west shokan there's a bushkill valley in the bushkill valley there is a cemetery the bushkill cemetery that has a mass grave for about 300 people who were still left that their families
[01:25:16] hadn't moved them and the two men from the town of olive contracted with the city that they buried these people themselves so there's no marker that says that this is the mass grave and you have
[01:25:31] to go to the back of the cemetery and you have to look over the embankment and then there's about 300 small like the size of a shoebox headstones that just have an alphan numeric code like sp2
[01:25:46] and those are the people who were still remaining that their loved ones had either died or moved away and that some local people took it upon themselves and these guys were in their 50s and 60s
[01:25:58] and they moved everybody and i've been going back and forth with the archivists for the new york city dep about trying to figure out who is in which grave right the local community wants to know
[01:26:10] is sp3 my ancestor and so far we know that there's a list of people who were moved and we know there's this alphanumeric code but we don't have any way of corresponding the two
[01:26:23] and some of them it goes up to like 35 40 so it's any of those people who were buried that might be you know number 35 and we don't think it's alphabetical wow that's pretty crazy yeah and if that were
[01:26:38] to happen today imagine the level of outrage if that occurred today right and so if you roll back the clock obviously the level of outrage was no less than but it wasn't as widely known as it could
[01:26:53] be today because it's up in the cat skills and their means and methods of communicating and let letting the people in the city or letting people in albany know what's occurring
[01:27:03] was was not what it is today so this these folks were just getting taken advantage of it seems by the the city of new york and the state of new york was probably the the the only entity that
[01:27:16] pumped the brakes on the city sat back and apparently didn't do much of anything well the the state stopped them eventually in the 1970s new york state said you can't build any more reservoirs and that's why they haven't built anymore i mean yeah i mean you
[01:27:35] said that they're still taking stuff down over in boysville let me tell you this if they even go near schniders there'll be a big fight for everybody schniders tavern will be defended by the whole
[01:27:47] upstate new york i guarantee that the bushkill rodin gun club whose headquarters is in and in the schniders saver yeah yeah exactly we should have done this podcast in schniders saver oh man and i've made that suggestion i've made a suggestion that we go live
[01:28:06] i need a helicopter for that man i can't that's a two hour two and a half hour drive for me well we don't have to do it on a tuesday i can tent out in their backyard they're not gonna care
[01:28:16] could just sleep you know that used to be a boarding house that was built during the construction of the ashokan reservoir i have a picture of it when it was originally built and it has one of the first state liquor licenses people argue about whether it has
[01:28:29] liquor license number one or number two but i swear it hasn't been painted since it was originally built but it looks quite beautiful when i drive by i want to play that uh that song by the eagles
[01:28:42] hotel california yeah it's it's definitely a majestical place uh in the catskills everybody should go there tap the special sniders tavern so with all this this like uh looking around and stuff searching and and digging did you find any like really shocking discovery something that you
[01:29:02] were like oh shit like besides that freaking gravesite over in the bush collapse insane yeah yeah well we don't dig so we don't like you know find artifacts um in that way
[01:29:15] um but you know we have lots of haunting kind of stories um so new york city paid a photographer to go around and take pictures of all the buildings that were going to be
[01:29:28] demolished for the ashokan reservoir and one of the people who did this his name was ira forbs he was a local guy who lived in shokan he owned multiple properties and he had to take
[01:29:39] pictures of his own houses before they were being demolished and one of the days in january of 1909 which is relatively early in this whole process right the shokan reservoir is fully functional
[01:29:51] in 1915 he got a injury to his leg and commented on it with people and he went home because he felt ill and he was dead within minutes according to his obituary and this guy a photographer
[01:30:10] there's not a single picture of him that i could find so like what happened to ira c forb so he's buried in one of the cemeteries near the ashokan reservoir with his parents who i believe were moved
[01:30:22] to that cemetery because of of the reservoir and i i think he might have actually been buried and then been moved as somebody who had to be moved because of the reservoir going in so there's
[01:30:35] all of these kinds of very intricate stories that come out when you start digging that really show how in the people were dealing with this in a variety of ways but i'd like to think that there
[01:30:47] was some sort of karma kickback that this guy was being paid by the city to take pictures of his family members and his friends houses before they were demolished and then he got hurt and
[01:30:58] dies himself and becomes part of this kind of mess of who's going to be buried where as we go around but we've also found the remnants of places that we thought would not
[01:31:12] be there anymore like over by the never sink there are tanneries from the 1700s that their ruins are still there that are kind of protected because they're on the new york city land and
[01:31:27] it's very hard to get to them because you know the roads have grown out years ago so we've found parts of the history of the cat skills that we never intended to find that are out there waiting
[01:31:39] to be found but if you go to the ashokan dam um so on the south side not the rail trail on the north side there's a parking area that is right kind of in the center where the bridge is what
[01:31:53] people call the lemon squeeze and there's now a trail system on the south side of route 28a so you park in the parking lot at the dam there's also another parking lot but you could park at the dam
[01:32:06] cross 28a going to the south and now there's a trail system and there is a whole complex of ruins in there from the quarrying to create the rocks that were the that created the dam itself and when
[01:32:22] the students and I first came across this i had no idea that it was there we were hiking the property it's known as acorn hill it's a new york city recreation unit called acorn hill and we hiked
[01:32:33] up to the top of the hill and we looked down and we could see all of this what archaeologists would call monumental architecture it looked like something from indiana jones right and i said to
[01:32:45] the students what that is that and they're like well you don't know we don't know right so you go down and it's very intricate all of this system of crushers and and there's this area for the
[01:32:57] trains to come in to load the rocks into it and it's just huge and it makes you feel so small and most people have no idea that it's there so there are some pretty amazing
[01:33:09] locations and some of them are on trails but a lot of them are not on trails now with this do you have to i know there's certain places within the reservoirs you have to get a permit to
[01:33:21] access correct now i'm not i do you need a permit to access that spot like like you do so i believe acorn hill is currently public access no permit needed but you're supposed to stay on trail
[01:33:37] and last time i was there this area was that has the crusher was not on trail but if you go online to the new york city dp recreation website all you have to do is fill out information that's
[01:33:50] your contact information and promise not to do things like dig or build fires and stuff and then you can just print out a permit and then that gives you a number and you carry it with you
[01:34:01] and it has a hang tag for your car and that way if you do anything theoretically they could rescind your permission there are some places it's property by property the rules and regulations there are places around the ashokan reservoir that are listed as public access
[01:34:19] new york city on land but it is landlocked by private property there's no way to get to it without trespassing so i would never give a blanket statement of you could do this you could do that
[01:34:31] the safest thing to do is just go get a permit right read all the rules and regulations because they're very interesting but in general around the reservoirs you are not allowed to go to the
[01:34:43] water right that is the most restricted unless you're fishing and you have to have a fishing pole and a valid fishing permit you can't just be like oh i'm checking out the water um that is a no no and
[01:34:57] a lot of that is post 9 11 if you remember the anthrax scares and the worrying that somebody was going to pollute the water system in the new york city so they police that more than they police
[01:35:10] the actual properties that aren't next to the water but i've had the new york city dp police confront us when we had all of our permits and tell us to go elsewhere so there is a control system
[01:35:24] and you know it is supposed to be a lot of these places don't have any trails so you can't actually hike on the trails but there is supposed to be that you know where you are even though most
[01:35:33] of these properties don't have a sign identifying what property you're at most don't have a parking area and most don't have any indication of why you would want to be there so you kind of have
[01:35:44] to pre-decide what you're doing and where you're going and then check what the rules and regulations are so tatt it sounds like you look like you were you've been there before have you
[01:35:56] uh well no i haven't hiked in there but i know that that is an area that the dc opyr the dp opened up a few years ago and i've seen photos and and heard reports of people that have been
[01:36:09] there and i guess it's well worth the uh the effort it's a short hike it's not a strenuous hike which might explain why i haven't done it but everyone that i yeah everyone that i've known
[01:36:21] that's that's been over there is enjoyed it immensely sweet cool i have to check it out yeah while you while you train for your presidential traverse um so i've been dying
[01:36:35] to ask uh april uh with her background and and some of the books and uh journal articles like this one that's uh ghost hunting is archaeology archaeology is ghost hunting um you find any ghosts in these
[01:36:56] travels around the catskills any haunted houses any juicy stuff like that is sniders tavern not a haunted house correct depends how many sniders beers you have that that that and how many times
[01:37:10] you've seen the same guy there when you're gone there that guy's still here jesus yeah i don't hang out there that much my definition of a ghost is when you can imagine or envision somebody from
[01:37:24] the past in the present right so somebody tells you a really good story then like you know the lights go out and then there's a flash of lightning and you think you see something right
[01:37:35] that it's really the story that primes you right whether ghosts exist or not in the paranormal sense i don't really care but i know that if i tell a really good story and then put you in
[01:37:47] the right setting that you can envision that person and in that life so sniders tavern to me is a haunted place because i have seen what it looked like when it was beautiful and new
[01:38:00] and when i go there and it looks like a haunted house on the outside unpainted with vines going up the side but yet the sign that you know we sell beer we're open to me it's that lingering
[01:38:13] right so to me haunted places are places that seem to persist even though they shouldn't be there anymore right like the ruins of an insane asylum right why is it still there that's what
[01:38:27] makes it haunted and knowing these stories are just knowing just enough that you have questions that's what makes it have this aura of being haunted so that's why i see archaeology as a
[01:38:40] form of ghost hunting that when you go to places like sniders tavern and you wonder about a tistiary for me i've figured out through archaeology and that's how i'm hunting those ghosts and i'm
[01:38:53] bringing them to the surface and i'm telling people their stories right when i tell people the story of matthew vassar and you know reading his speech the same words that he read when he
[01:39:05] died um i'm kind of invoking him right it's kind of like a saiyan and we do it right there where he lived and worked at the place that he loved so if there was a place for him to haunt don't you
[01:39:18] think he would be there at that moment and and maybe smiling and or maybe laughing one of the things that i do on the ghost tour of the vassar campus is uh i read a story that mark twain
[01:39:32] read to the girls of vassar when he visited in the late 1800s i tell them the same story that mark twain told them in roughly the same place to me i'm bringing mark twain like a saiyans
[01:39:45] into the present so that's how i find ghosts and find haunted houses i have all the ghost hunting tools if you want to use them i have the emf detectors and things like that um but i
[01:39:58] i'm more kind of figurative in my um ghost hunting stash i mean seriously april just says she has all these ghost hunting tools she's like a ghost buster but then she's telling us that she hasn't looked for nor has she found ghosts in haunted places and the catskills
[01:40:17] do we believe her do we believe do we believe somebody who is admitted to having these these scientific ghost hunting instruments doesn't use them come on come on in april let's come on she needs to get her back i have another swig of that that vienna beer
[01:40:38] and and tell us yeah i notice that you're having to tip the can a little more each and every time so she's getting close she's getting close yeah she's almost ready for another we just
[01:40:48] so what so tell us where are those you come across any spooky or haunted looking type places that besides sliders yeah and we're not that's just april's view it may it's not the view of
[01:40:59] the host or the guest in perpetuity her views are hers and we're doing nothing to defame demean slander sniders or any other tavern and the catskills is being haunted okay so april where are some
[01:41:14] juicy places that our folks our listeners can check out that you haven't mentioned clearly the vassar campus right i've got two hour-long ghost tours of the campus so there's plenty
[01:41:27] of haunted places there but i kind of find the haunted house in almost every town that i go to has some place that just looks like it doesn't belong like something has happened there right and
[01:41:42] you kind of know so as far as like hiking um have you been to stetsburg state historic site it's on the east side of the Hudson river no i can't say that i'm a west yeah there's a you know gilded age mansion right in the front
[01:42:01] but then if you hike down to the river and you make a left there is an old mansion that has a fence around it that you know they're constantly saying that they're going to renovate this
[01:42:11] mansion um but that place is you know in all of the books of like haunted places um of the Hudson valley but they have on this fence for the renovation they have old pictures of what it used to look like
[01:42:26] inside and i swear that place is haunted like just like standing there and seeing that it's right on the river it used to be so beautiful time has kind of forgotten it and then this
[01:42:38] kind of well we're going to fix it up but maybe not really right like yeah i think that's a great place for hikers um to go visit especially you know people who hike like you guys do and you
[01:42:49] haven't been there it's a place to go discover i'm gonna go check out the bushkill place the cemetery that's yeah i gotta admit that's actually like like something that's i'm gonna call out to work tomorrow and go check that out that's absolutely insane yep that's i gather that's
[01:43:06] on the way out to the moon hall road to hike you know friday and balsam cap so swing by check it out pay tribute to the the folks that are anonymously buried there sp1 and sp2 that's that's insane and
[01:43:24] you referred to a mass grave did i hear that correctly yeah that's what this area that's what we call it there's 300 people buried in an area that's like the size of your kitchen
[01:43:34] our living room right it's kind of they're very close together but do you know whether they're individual grave sites or just somewhat sectioned off but not not really underground oh the exact
[01:43:49] how it is we were still trying to figure out going back and forth with the city archivist that's been trying to find information so i don't know 100 how it's laid out there's some weird things
[01:44:01] that um we're finding from the archives but not sure enough about anything to say anything publicly about it but there are headstones for that amount of people but it is a very small area nobody had
[01:44:16] a lot of space but if these individuals were totally skeletonized right if you've never had to move a skeletonized body it's amazing how small a skeletonized human person is as far as
[01:44:30] the volume that they take up so it is possible that every individual has their own box where you know like your femur your leg bones are your longest bits and you don't actually need much space
[01:44:48] i rarely move around skeletonized bodies what about you stash move around any recently it were not like a new shipment in a skeleton so while we're talking about skeletons and bony
[01:44:59] remains this is where i really want you to be just like gut honest truthful you say you're you have this capacity when you're walking through the woods to look down you see a pile of bones
[01:45:10] animal bones and you can identify not only what animal they're from but whether it's the left side the right side the thoracic spine the lumbar spine the femur and the cat skills
[01:45:23] and mount mountain lion bones how many times have you come across a pile of mountain lion bones in the cat skills never oh no we're gonna ask you one more time we want the truthful answer now
[01:45:39] more than 50 less than 50 it's mostly deer bone i think she said more than 50 stash that's April thanks for joining us tonight we have confirmation mountain lion remains from an expert
[01:45:55] phd on the show yeah see stash we were from the day i came on i told you we were gonna get to the bottom of the mountain lion story in the cat skills and april has now validated mountain
[01:46:11] lion remains i send it to the new jersey reporter that that got that new jersey woman that saw it on her french porch yep mine mine will be authenticated by a 2.5 year old toddler right exactly did you
[01:46:28] hear about that story let's go over that real quick so this lady's uh her two and a half year old toddler saw a mountain lion that said holy fuck or something like that what was it like holy
[01:46:38] shit it's a mountain lion two and a half years old i think it was holy fuck that man yeah something like that it's just it's it was crazy but anyway april i think uh we wrapped that up one last
[01:46:51] question uh post hike bruising bites like when you're you're coming from dighamton or whether i mean i don't know you met ross go diner or you're coming from the college is there any
[01:47:00] place that you would like to suggest for people to stop at to get something to eat after a good hike or a good you know searching yeah and there there's the gunk house right in the ridge
[01:47:13] they had a fire like two years ago i think they're back up are they back up and running now is that is that at the junction of 299 and 4455 it's in the sky yeah that's right outside of new pulse
[01:47:28] yeah it's outside of new pulse if you're at like the loaves and you go south on that road that's south from the loaves it's down there it's a beautiful bike ride area like the orchards
[01:47:39] yeah so it's it's like down ohioville road the ohioville goes to the north that's where the cider place is i'm just gonna do quick yeah quick search the gunk house in highland
[01:47:54] and yeah it looks like they're open again excellent german food and you sit on the patio outside and you can see the ridge right it's a beautiful place of course there's lolas in in new pulse
[01:48:10] if you're gonna go into the gunk as well good place for for a burger there and if you're gonna go all the way to to binghamton of course you're gonna get some chicken speedy pizza
[01:48:20] from nerches yes yes and speedy rip it speedy and rip it fantastic spots yeah binghamton has more restaurants named pit i think than any place it's not a very appetizing name yeah once again thank you april for joining us tonight uh like to thank all the monthly
[01:48:42] supporters and monthly sponsors really appreciate you guys sticking with the show uh thank you to everyone who is still listening to the show 130 episodes april joined us tonight to tell some amazing
[01:48:53] stories and amazing history on the ghost towns of the reservoir and i think uh there needs to be a definite part two for this we got to go more into this so hopefully you can come back yeah
[01:49:05] well we're gonna really learn about the ghosts the haunted houses and the piles of mountain lion bones yeah we'll have it we'll have it all over in a bush kill cemetery yeah we want more intel on
[01:49:19] all of this ghost finding gear that you apparently have purchased on it okay yeah awesome yeah i get it from a ghost hunters website so it's official oh sweet sweet we'll bring our co-host on that
[01:49:32] night will be uh dan acroyd okay hell yeah i'll get him yes all right april thank you for joining us hope you have a good night and uh hopefully we can get out in the trail and take on one of your
[01:49:44] your tours all right sounds good all right have a good night thanks april bye bye hey everyone i just want to thank you for listening to the show if you enjoyed the show subscribe and throw down a smooth review on spotify apple podcast or any podcast platform
[01:50:08] you can also check daily updates of the podcast hikes hiking news and local news on facebook instagram twitter and the official website of the show remember this you gotta just keep on the cat skills man and i'd be i wake it wake it wake it