Above: 17-year-old pro mountain bike racer Taylor Allison, a local athlete who's currently fundraising to enter the 2014 World Cup at Windham. Last month, Allison took fourth place in U.S. Nationals on Windham's rocky, slippery slopes.
Above and left: Outlaws fail in their attempt to steal a strongbox from the Delaware & Ulster Railroad. (Reenactment outlaws, that is.) Photos from the DURR website.
Like your railroading with a whiff of danger? Desperados from the 19th century have a habit of sticking up the Delaware & Ulster Railroad and absconding with chests of loot while passengers are aboard. (Lawmen always seem to appear just in time to stop the outlaws from getting away with it.) We hear that trains out of Arkville will be targeted by the unsavory gang -- known as the Catskill Mountain Bushwackers -- tomorrow.
Above: A patriotic parader gets the sweet seat at Jefferson's Heritage Day. Photo from the event's Facebook page.
If last week's Fourth festivities left you still hungry for parades, fairs and fireworks, fear not. This weekend will feature a couple of fun community festivals, packed with Catskills-style small-town spirit.
ATHENS
Athens is eager to welcome all good souls to this weekend’s Athens Street Festival. Over 150 vendors will be offering their best, from barbecue, gyros, kettle corn and other street yummies to specialty items and crafts of all sorts. Three stages will be vibrating with rock, country, Motown, and jazz -- even an accordion and a barbershop quartet, not to mention magic and ventriloquism. They’ll have carnival rides and a gleaming array of classic and antique autos.
Above: A scene from the Hudson Valley Chalk Festival in 2012, the event's first year.
Artists who work in chalk on public ground are pouring their hearts into big bold creations that get washed away nearly as soon as they’re done, sharing the process with whoever happens along. It’s a performance and an experience -- the art of art, you might say -- and a whole lot of fun, especially when the town throws a party around you with live music and comes out to enjoy and kibitz.
Join in at the second annual Hudson Valley Chalk Festival. You can chat up the pro street painters as they layer detail on detail, sometimes creating 3-D magic that opens a whole other dimension, sometimes incorporating local sights or events or audience suggestions. Or you can grab some chalk yourself and give it a try, with plenty of pro tips provided to get you started right. Sixteen visiting artists will be joining a bunch of local artists and inspired participants to turn a charming pedestrian mall into a gigantic outdoor installation.
The young Toshi Seeger -- filmmaker, activist, arts advocate, cofounder of the Clearwater organization, and wife of legendary folksinger Pete Seeger. Toshi died Wednesday at the age of 91 at the couple's home in Beacon. Last year, Pete told Persimmon Tree magazine that Toshi was the one who taught him how to sail: "She was the one who steered the boat; she had the chart, she kept off the rocks." Photo by Gene Deitch.
Today's NewsShed is a twofer: News from both Thursday and Friday. We got a little consumed yesterday with putting out an investigative story on the embattled owner of three Delaware County junkyards, who's in hot water with both the DEC and his mortgage lender.
Above: VW Parts, William Hrazanek's junkyard that has sat on the bank of the Bushkill for over 20 years. Photo by Julia Reischel, taken on July 9, 2013.
In a rare show of force, a phalanx of state Department of Environmental Conservation officers raided three auto junkyards in Fleischmanns and Arkville on Tuesday to execute a search warrant.
But junkyard owner William Hrazanek may have bigger problems than the DEC. Legal and financial troubles could force Hrazanek to close his two Fleischmanns junkyards, which have angered village residents -- and probably leached pollutants into New York City's water supply -- for years.
Hrazanek, who stopped paying taxes and mortgage payments on the properties years ago, is betting on a $1.2 million windfall from a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood buyout program to bail him out of his current financial predicament.
Four young barn swallows peep out at photographer Frieda Suess, who shared this shot recently in the Watershed Post's Flickr group pool. By mid-August, these talented young aerialists will be getting ready to make their first big migration south to the Caribbean or Central or South America.
Watch out for potential flash flooding, Eastern Catskills. (You knew that already, right?)
This is almost a century too late to be breaking news, but we've found a wonderful ornithology paper from 1922 cataloguing the birds of Frost Valley, by Mary Wood Daley. Bird people of the Catskills, we'd love to know if the species on and around Slide Mountain have changed over the last 91 years.
Above: "West Branch's Finest" in Delhi, NY by Ian Conkling. Submitted to the 2013 Catskills Great Outdoor Experience Photo Contest.
Boating in the Catskills: Where to go
Water is everywhere in the Catskill mountains, even their name: The 'kill' in 'Catskills' is a Dutch word for 'creek.' There's plenty of open water to go around for kayakers, canoers, sailors and rowers -- especially now that several of New York City's vast reservoirs have been opened to recreational boating, a recent development in the past few years.
Another aspect of Catskills great outdoors that's improving: Our bald eagle population. If you spend time on our rivers and creeks, you're likely to have a close encounter with one of these fish-eating eagles, who have been brought back from the verge of extirpation over the past few decades and are now a common sight near Catskills waterways.
A poolside chair at Grossinger's succumbs to the elements. Photo from Marisa Scheinfeld's "Leftover Borscht," a photography project documenting the slow surrender of Sullivan County's former Borscht Belt resorts to nature and decay.
The photos in the slideshow above were taken last week at Fourth of July celebrations in the Catskills, and shared with us in the Watershed Post's Flickr group pool. Frieda Suess got some terrific shots from the Margaretville Firemen's Carnival, and John of Catskills Photography has a stunning view of the fireworks at the Monticello Raceway.
If you got some good fireworks photos last week and would like to share them here, feel free to add them to our Flickr group pool, or you can email them to us at [email protected]. Make sure to let us know where they were taken, and the name of the photographer so we can credit them properly. Thanks!
