The Gowns for Greenbacks crew atop Wittenberg Mountain, the third peak in their 35-peak quest. From left to right: Melissa Bean, Tom Rolland, Heather Rolland, Danny Davis, Judy Mann, Suzanne Provenzano and Edward Moran.
The Catskill Mountains, those shadowy blue-green humps that undulate mysteriously across New York State’s pie-shaped lower extremity, have always had a transformational effect on human psychology and behavior. Stories abound of people wandering into the mountains and emerging years later, changed beyond recognition, their outlooks softened and feminized, their facial features calmed and beatific, like they’ve been on an extended acid trip. The Rip Van Winkle legend carries more than a kernel of truth. Spending time in these hills has turned accountants into poets, engineers into painters, suicidal neurotics into moonstruck spiritualists, Wall Street sociopaths into vegetable-eating philanthropists … and recreational weekend hikers into rope-muscled, ball-gown-wearing superheroes.
Indeed, this sort of psychotropic neural re-mapping surely has something to do with the unusual breed of adventurer who obsessively tramps across the dreamy, deceptively treacherous Catskills landscape. After a walk up one of these ancient brooding hills, the formerly casual hiker leaves his or her casualness behind, becoming increasingly wrapped up in a physical and emotional quest to conquer all 35 peaks above 3,500 feet in height. And that’s only the beginning. When that feat is in the bag, the 35-peak quest must be undertaken again and again, in increasingly difficult and inventive ways: In the dead of winter. All 35 each month for a year … 420 mountains in all. Really, really fast. All 35 in a single through-hike. Walking backwards. Walking barefoot. Walking naked. Walking in full-length formal evening wear …
To deal with this, a complex organized subculture has arisen over the years — calling itself the “3500 Club” — through which mountain mania is rewarded with a sew-on patch for each increasingly improbable accomplishment. Heather Rolland, a club member and avid hiker when she’s not wrangling her dogs or working for the county as a psychotherapist in Ellenville, told me all about it, explaining the rigors a would-be 35’er must endure. “Even people who are real hardcore hikers run into trouble in the Catskills, because so many of our 35 that you have to hike to get your patch are un-trailed. There’s no trails; it’s just wilderness. You need to use a map and compass — a goofy sort of geocaching-meets-mountaineering experience — to find a can. There’s actually, I kid you not, a can nailed to a tree on the top of the mountain. You’ve got to find the can — it’s a treasure hunt — and inside the can there’s a notebook and a pencil. You have to sign in. At the end, when you’ve done all these un-trailed peaks, your sign-ins are actually accounted for. It’s all volunteers who do all this, but there’s a guy — the Can Man — who goes around hiking all these peaks, looking at all the notebooks and checking up on everybody.”
In a word: obsession. Codified and made socially acceptable, but obsession nonetheless. Which is why Heather described herself as “insane” in claiming responsibility for the recent sightings of ball-gown-clad expeditions tramping exotically through the remote wilderness, ostensibly for the purpose of raising money for the 3500 Club and trail maintenance, but really as a desperate attempt to keep their obsession alive. The organization she created, Gowns for Greenbacks, serves as a conduit for funds pledged to the ball-gown-wearing participants, dauntless debutantes who solicit their own cash sponsorships. The group is currently a few iterations into the difficult but fashionable 35-hike quest, pushing the envelope as to what is possible for a human being to do in a dress.
“We have knives. We have duct tape. There’s no honor involved,” said Heather, whom I met, photographed and interviewed with her initial entourage at the Slide Mountain trailhead as they embarked on their “maiden” trek about a month ago. “The effort is not to keep the dresses intact, necessarily. Just to try and keep them on our bodies.”
She, her friend Melissa Bean and her winter 3500 patch-holding husband Tom — he not technically in a ball gown but prettily turned out nonetheless in Heather’s ankle-length “hippy-dippy” Indian skirt and one of his more girly-looking shirts — were the only participants who knew each other well, although from the group’s instant camaraderie you wouldn’t know it. “Looking forward to my first hike in drag,” said Tom gamely.
"Sports mode" ball gown hiking is a technique in progress.
“I kind of egged her on,” said Melissa, a fellow hiking zealot who works for the New York/New Jersey Trail Conference. Like Heather, hikers Judy Mann, another veteran 35’er, and Suzanne “I’m working on my peaks” Provenzano, looked resplendent and ready to hit the ballroom floor, as did Danny Davis, a geologist with the New York City DEP whom I failed to initially identify as a member of the opposite gender. “I’m not a 35’er, but I will be at the end of this. I have about 12 to go,” he said, a steely telltale glint in his eyes. Edward Moran, not yet ready to surrender his psyche to the mountains’ feminine mystique, was getting into character in top hat and tails to escort the stunning sextet up Slide Mountain, along with a pack of feisty, snarling dogs.
I found myself feeling a tad concerned for them. “This hike today is really going to be about seeing how it’s done,” said Heather breezily, as if she’d not a care in the world. “Because some of the other hikes we’ve got are trail-less peaks, which literally means that we’re going to be smashing through brush and crawling under … you know, some of the conifers are tough to get through; it’s very, very thick. There are vicious stinging nettles to make you lose your mind. I’ll send you a picture of my friend Snickers; it looks like her legs went through a Cuisinart. It’s not for the faint of heart. They’re not tall mountains, but they’re tough, and full of surprises.”
But Heather remained undaunted. “People have been walking up and down the mountains in dresses for years. In the 1800s women wore dresses all the time, for everything.” Then, perhaps having second thoughts: “But those were not fancy dresses. They didn’t have sequins.”
I took pictures and some bad video, and watched the group, all business now, quickly disappear up the mountain and into the forest over a rock scramble. I then turned around and headed over to Overlook with my 6-year-old son, where we and my pal Paul Joffe hiked up a significantly less imposing trail to the old hotel and fire tower, not a ball gown in sight. This act led serendipitously to a significant cul-de-sac in the story, as I literally stumbled into a quest to determine the true history, if any, of long-dress hiking in the Catskills. My curiosity was sparked during a conversation with Rich Griffin, a semi-retired font of information who volunteers part-time with his wife Cathy, occasionally staffing the tiny Overlook Fire Tower museum. The couple is familiar with Catskills-induced obsession: “Both my wife and I are members of the 3500 Club, so we know what you’re talking about,” he said before launching into a long, intriguing and disarmingly obsessive dissertation, full of wonderful digressions I may or may not include further along in this increasingly ungainly piece.
Griffin cited a book he’d been reading about the Catskill Mountain House. “There is a painting in the book, ‘Under the Falls,’ by Winslow Homer, of Kaaterskill Falls in 1872. It’s a double falls, and under the second one there’s sort of a semicircular overhang that you can walk under … it’s actually kind of dangerous … but this picture shows two women in long dresses. They both have hiking sticks, and in the background it looks like there’s a man helping a woman up. It got me thinking about the ladies who are hiking presently in the ball gowns.”
I told him they weren’t just ladies.
“Ah,” said Griffin. “Anyway, they were constantly building footpaths and carriage roads and railroads, all sorts of things, up here in the late 1800s.” He read a passage from the tome: “‘Expansion and improvement of the trails and footpaths continued without abatement through the Gilded Age.’ It says that in 1882, for instance, ‘their variety seems endless, and new pathways are opening on every side.’ So I imagine there were plenty of women in long dresses hiking between all the hotels.”
After lavishing upon me an oral history of trails, roads, railways and competing mountaintop hotels, all of them now sadly gone and three-quarters forgotten, Griffin got to the point I was searching for. “People had a lot of interesting ways back then. But it all came down to what I felt was a feeling of becoming more green and getting away from the cities. They talk about the cooling air. They talk about how it’s more healthy. They thought it was more beneficial to be up high, that the air was much better for you to breathe in. When you think about the 1800s, they were probably heating with coal and had a lot of coal-fired factories. I’m not an expert, but … It seemed like this would be a way to come back to nature, that whole romantic idea of nature being the expression of divinity. And then that whole Hudson River School of painting …”
Exactly. Back on Slide Mountain, a band of modern-day expressionists were painting the Catskills with a traveling bit of performance art, playing to an audience of birds, insects, forest critters and an occasional stunned human being. A couple of non-participating friends, Tom and Alexis, joined them on the first leg, after which human interaction slowed considerably. Laughter was usually the initial reaction — one overly tickled Boy Scout leader apparently nearly peed herself — but a significant number of the hikers they encountered, especially some of the younger ones, averted their eyes and pretended the apparition wasn’t happening.
Meanwhile, Heather and company were connecting with the same basic insight as Rich Griffin had, in real time. “There’s a long history of losing yourself in the Catskills,” said Heather. “My grandparents in the 1920s were Jews escaping the hot summers in Brooklyn who came up to Ellenville, hanging in the Borscht Belt. You’re getting out of the city to get away from cholera and typhoid and tuberculosis. You’ve got to come up to the Catskills and take the air, take the water. We’re honoring their memory and building awareness … not to mention raising a little money.”
They were also building on their instant camaraderie, forming what Heather called a “trauma bond.” “Between all of the things that are happening today … I have written about hydraulic fracturing and the marriage equality bill — it’s not gay marriage; I take offense to that. Are you having lunch or are you having straight lunch? With everything else going on, it seems a little bit goofy and absurd to be running around in the woods in a ball gown. But truly, all of us who are out there, we forget that we’re wearing ball gowns and we’re talking about real issues. This was a bunch of strangers who went up that mountain … but we talked while we hiked, and got to know each other. … Seriously, although many of the gang had hiked with at least one other participant before, the synergy of this particular group was perhaps the most magical part of the day. … We were talking about drilling. We were asking Danny, who was the scientist on board: ‘Tell us about fracturing, what does it really mean? What’s going to happen? What’s the impact on the Catskills if that Belleayre Spa nightmare happens?’ All of the issues were totally present. We all live here, we all love the Cats. We’re all trying to figure out how to make our lives make sense here.”
The dresses fared almost as well as their wearers. With less help from knives and duct tape than Heather had expected, they made it more or less intact through the first round, which was actually a three-peak hike (Slide, Wittenberg and Cornell). “We looked all right; we looked like we were doing pretty well,” said Heather. “My dress had a slit in the back; that tripled in size by the end of the hike. Susanne’s dress had this tulle material to make it stand out real pouf-y; that shredded and turned into a bow in her hair by late in the day. We were calling her a Disney princess; she looked like something on top of a cake.” She said Danny, the DEP geologist, was “a hoot. He was fully convertible; he had a ‘sports mode’ all organized.”
The group took notes during the post-hike dinner, and is working on dress performance improvements. Meanwhile, Heather scored a minor coup in locating a cache of used ball gowns to lend out to prospective participants who don’t own one (not everyone does, you know). “Tomorrow I’m running up to Albany to pick up 40 used prom dresses. If people say ‘I don’t know what to wear,’ I have an answer for them. Another member of the 3500 Club put the word out at a high school. They’ve been doing a clothes closet for years, and the closet teacher wanted to clean out and get rid of the stuff, and this is her donation.”
As of this writing, varying permutations of the Gowns for Greenbacks crew have completed two additional hikes: Balsam Lake on July 3 and Indian Head/Twin on July 9. The rest of the tentative and subject-to-change July schedule is thus: Today, Saturday July 16, they’re heading up Plateau and Sugarloaf; Saturday July 23, Rocky and Lone; and Sunday July 31, Panther.
Heather writes engagingly of the group’s exploits at her blog, Gowns 4 Greenbacks, and there’s additional information on the site as well.
A nugget from Heather’s report on the thrilling July 9 hike, which started in Platte Clove, one of my favorite places in the world: “We met the hiking legend Ted Ripley Duggan and he might have said the single funniest thing to us all day. He suggested that if we could catch the attention of the right journalist and get out story out there, that we might get a mention in The New York Times. ‘After all,’ he lowered his voice a touch, catching our eye, ‘what you are doing is sufficiently eccentric.’ We howled with delight at that gorgeous Britishism: sufficiently eccentric. That’s us!”
That’s you, Heather. Keep up the good work, and hope the right journalist comes along soon …
This article originally appeared on July 16 in the Hudson Valley Chronic, a print (and web) newspaper prone to erupting sporadically on newsstands around the Hudson Valley region. Thanks to publisher Steve Hopkins for the story and photos.
