Slide Mountain is the highest peak in the Catskill Mountains of the U.S. state of New York. It is located in the town of Shandaken in Ulster County. While the contour line on topographic maps is generally accepted as its height, the exact elevation of the summit has never been officially determined by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and many informal surveys suggest the mountain may actually top above sea level.
While it was not identified as the range's highest peak until the late 19th century, it has played a prominent role in Catskill history. Renowned naturalist John Burroughs wrote memorably of his climbs up Slide, and it helped get the Catskills added to New York's Forest Preserve. Bicknell's thrush was first identified on its summit.
Geography
Like most other Catskill peaks, Slide's summit is gentle and rounded, taking the form of a narrow ridge that rises to a wider bump on its eastern end. From there the mountain slopes down steeply to the col with neighboring Cornell Mountain.
At the western end, a broad slope, part of the Catskill Divide, leads down to the gap between Slide and Hemlock Mountain to the west and Winnisook Lake, the source of Esopus Creek, to the mountain's northwest.
Two more pronounced ridges lead off the mountain, one to the southwest and the col with Wildcat Mountain, the other to the north and Giant Ledge.
Both upper branches of the Neversink River begin on the mountain's slopes.
In addition to the Catskills, Slide is also the highest point of:
Ulster County. the Delaware River watershed. all of New York State outside the Adirondack High Peaks region. a radius of New York City. (Slide is located roughly north/northwest of Manhattan; the southwest flank of Vermont's Killington Peak, about north northeast of the Bronx, is the next closest point of equal elevation.)
It is also the southernmost peak in the Northeast exceeding . The Appalachians do not rise to that level again until West Virginia.
Climate
History
Identification as highest Catskill peak
For a mountain with so many superlatives, Slide actually took a long time to be discovered for what it was.
The mountain received its name locally from a landslide in 1819 on its north face near the summit. The scar can still be seen today, and was partially gouged out again by another slide in 1982.
Slide would not be established as the highest peak in the range until 1886, long after much of the interior Northeast and their mountain ranges had been surveyed and settled. Due to land disputes and schemes that dated back to the colonial period, no complete, impartial survey of the entire Catskill region had been carried out until then.
Seven years earlier, Princeton geology professor Arnold Henry Guyot had been staying at the Catskill Mountain House when he became interested in the surrounding mountains, and management's claim that nearby Kaaterskill High Peak () was the highest in all the Catskills despite growing doubt. His survey, carried out on his own time and at his own expense, established that Slide, located some distance to the southwest, was far and away the highest peak in the range. His findings were vehemently disputed by the hotelkeepers around North-South Lake until others confirmed his results.
There was a movement, once its status had been confirmed, to give Slide a name believed to be more fitting for a highest peak. "Mount Lincoln," after the late U.S. president, was considered for a while. But it ended when Guyot announced that he preferred Slide, as he had followed local custom wherever possible in naming the peaks for his survey.
Legends have grown up over the years in the Catskills over this belated discovery of the range's highest peak. Some tell of a new owner of Hunter Mountain, the range's other 4,000-footer and second-highest peak, swinging a level around to ensure he had bought the highest peak until being stopped by Slide. Another story has John Burroughs, who later became rich and famous writing about his hikes up Slide and other nearby mountains, proving the case atop the mountain by having his friends aim a rifle with a ball in the barrel at all other contending peaks and observing that the ball fell out every time.
Regardless, tourism soon shifted to the new highest peak, and a local woodsman, Jim Dutcher, who knew the mountain well from his days peeling hemlock bark for tanning, built a hotel and did a regular business escorting visitors to the summit up a trail he built in 1880. While it runs over privately owned land and has been abandoned since 1941 save for the final section leading across the summit ridge from the west, it still exists and can be followed.