Highmount

Highmount Ski Center stood on the north side of Belleayre Mountain, in the Catskill hamlet of Highmount. Its founders were Maurice and Francis Davenport, their wives Gertie and Blanche, and their friend Lincoln Christensen, who had skied pastures, wood roads and golf courses since 1939. Sources differ on when they got the 110 acres: 1939 for NYSkiBlog, the spring of 1946 in a town history from 1976. By the 1946–47 winter they had five narrow trails, three rope tows and a lodge, but no snow fell until late January 1947, when the area finally opened.^1,2

It grew to about a dozen runs on a northeast-facing slope with some 1,050 feet of vertical. A 1978 trail map shows two T-bars, two Pomas and rope tows; Skikabbalah says that before it closed it had a double chairlift, two T-bars, two Pomas and a pony lift. The lifts last ran in 1992 by one account, or 1993 by NYSkiBlog's.^2,3,4,5

Plans to fold the slopes into neighboring Belleayre were floated in 1994, and in 2015 the state approved a Belleayre expansion that included the 78-acre former ski center. Skiers have long reached its dormant, overgrowing runs from Belleayre's trails.^3,4,6

TodayThe old runs sit idle and overgrown next to Belleayre, and skiers still reach them from Belleayre's trails. (2015)³