NewsShed: Calling all ski bums

Above: Belleayre Mountain looking good on the first ski weekend of the season. The Catskills' three large ski centers -- Belleayre, Windham and Hunter -- all opened for ski season last weekend. Plattekill Mountain in Roxbury is slated to join them for the upcoming weekend, with a Dec. 7 opening day. 

Season's greetings, Catskills. It's that time of year again: The Thanksgiving leftovers are all but polished off, the Christmas carols have begun in earnest, and if you've got a pair of skis buried in the attic, it's high time you exhumed them. 

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Happy Thanksgiving

Above: Cherry tomatoes at Newtown Farm, photographed by Heather Phelps-Lipton and submitted to our Catskills Farm Photo Contest.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Watershed Post and our new Catskills Food Guide. For a partial list of businesses serving Thanksgiving meals today, click here

We've updated our list of over 100 places to find the print version of the Catskills Food Guide -- available in NYC and in the Catskills. Online, use our searchable online database to find local Catskills food and farm businesses. Adding a business is free.

Here's to celebrating and enjoying local food this holiday season. 

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Rain will go away -- but not before changing to sleet and snow

Above: Rainfall totals for the storm so far, posted to Facebook by the National Weather Service station in Albany around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday morning. 

Rainfall has been heavy in the Catskills during the storm that began Tuesday afternoon. Most areas in the region have received 1 to 2 inches so far, with localized rainfall of around 3 inches in higher elevations in Ulster County. Rain will continue into the afternoon, with about another half-inch expected to fall. 

A flood watch issued on Tuesday is still in effect for Ulster and Greene counties in the Catskills region, along with a portion of the mid-Hudson Valley and parts of New England.

Drivers should watch out for fast-changing road conditions. Through the afternoon and into the evening Wednesday, roads in the area may ice over as the temperature drops quickly and rain shifts to sleet and snow.

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Catskills dairy farmers forge a local market

Above: A selection of Catskills dairy products. Photo by Toni Brogan.  

The locavore movement has made a celebrity of many a humble ingredient, sparking a renaissance of old-fashioned vegetable varieties and elevating the lowly pork belly to the level of haute cuisine. But through it all, milk has mostly remained, well, milk—and the local-food revolution has left most dairy farmers behind.

For farmers in the Catskills, once a proud and prosperous dairy region, the modern milk market is a tough one. In the world of commodity milk, where the milk from many farms goes into a single vat for processing and prices are set by federal law, small upstate New York dairy farmers have a tough time competing with vast feedlots in the midwest and California.

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Palenville Pagans win tax battle against town of Catskill

The Maetreum of Cybele, a former inn in Palenville that is now the spiritual home of a Cybeline Pagan group. Photo by Julia Reischel.

A group of Pagan adherents in Palenville won a major victory in a New York State appellate court last week, when a judge ruled that the town of Catskill was incorrect in denying the group a property tax exemption.

Under U.S. law, a religion's a religion, no matter how small. And as religions go, the Cybeline Revival is one of the tiniest. It's a monastic branch of Paganism founded in the late 1990s by local priestess Cathryn Platine, the Reverend Mother Battakes of the Maetreum of Cybele. The Maetreum -- a three-story former inn in the little Catskill hamlet of Palenville -- serves as the spiritual home of the Cybeline Revivals's handful of followers. Several followers of the religion live at the Maetreum, including Platine.

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Winter weather in the forecast for Tuesday

The Northeast is currently bracing for a midweek storm that threatens to dump snow, ice, sleet and rain on Thanksgiving plans. To the south and west of New York State, snow and rainstorms that will fuel what the National Weather Service is calling a "complicated" storm system have already claimed over a dozen lives, and left thousands without power.

The latest forecasts from local National Weather Service stations predict that the storm will reach the Catskills region by Tuesday afternoon, and continue into Wednesday, with initial snow and sleet shifting over into heavy rain as the storm moves through the area. With about 1 to 3 inches of precipitation in the forecast for the event, some flooding is possible.

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NewsShed: Nor'easter takes aim at Thanksgiving

Above: AccuWeather graphic showing potential scenarios for a storm that's slated to move up the coast toward the Northeast next week, just in time for Thanksgiving. For more on that, see AccuWeather's Friday story about the storm.

Hang onto your Pilgrim hat: Forecasters say a couple of storms headed for the Northeast could combine forces to form an intense nor'easter by the middle of next week. Whether the storm takes the form of snow or rain depends on the track it takes, Hudson Valley Weather explains, but several major forecasting models are all predicting that a powerful storm is likely.

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WIOX to be acquired by WSKG

Above:  WIOX station manager Joe Piasek speaking at the opening of the Roxbury radio station on August 27, 2010. Photo by Julia Reischel. 

Roxbury public radio station WIOX, a nonprofit high-powered FM station that has been operating since 2010 on 91.3 FM, announced Thursday that they are merging with WSKG, a larger public radio and TV corporation run out of Binghamton.

The two radio stations have been planning for the merger for some time. In April, WIOX began broadcasting some programming from WSKG under a more limited partnership between the two stations. In September, the Roxbury town board passed a resolution agreeing to transfer WIOX's broadcast license to WSKG, subject to approval by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Food Less Traveled: Restaurants Built on Local Ingredients

Above: The Phoenicia Diner serves a variety of skillet breakfasts using local eggs. Photo by Richard A. Smith.

Over two decades of driving back and forth between Brooklyn and Margaretville, Mike Cioffi noticed an odd traffic pattern.

“I’d see these big, mass-production food company trucks driving up here and delivering to all the Catskills restaurants,” he said. “And then I’d see the farm trucks driving the opposite direction, going down to the city.”

That just didn’t make any sense to him. So when he opened the Phoenicia Diner (5681 Route 28, Phoenicia, 845-688-9957, phoeniciadiner.com) on Route 28 in September 2012, he let the cargo on the farm trucks guide his menu.

“I didn’t want to do a big 50-page menu, because you can’t offer that many things without a lot of it being frozen,” he said.

The Phoenicia Diner’s menu fits on one paper placemat that changes daily. It stars meat, fish, eggs and vegetables that travel only a few dozen miles to the kitchen of chef Mel Rosas.

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Every vote counts: Absentee ballots flip results in local races

In the rural Catskills, 2013 was the Year of the Absentee Voter.

On Nov. 5, Election Day, dozens of races around the region were too close to call from the machine count alone. In a few of them, a count of the absentee and affidavit ballots reversed the results of the initial count -- and revealed some surprising differences of opinion between voters who cast their ballots at the polls and those who mail them in. 

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