Hunter Mountain is in the towns of Hunter and Lexington, just south of the village of Hunter, in Greene County, New York, United States. At approximately in elevation, it is the highest peak in the county and the second-highest peak in the Catskill Mountains.
While the mountain is closely associated with the eponymous ski area built around the Colonel's Chair ridge at the mountain's northwest corner, that takes up only a small portion of the mountain. The actual summit, some distance from the ski area, is graced with a fire lookout tower, the highest in the state and second-highest in the Northeast. The former road to it is open to hikers, horses (and possibly mountain bikers in the future). It is the most popular route to the mountain's summit.
Geography
Hunter takes the shape of a medium-length ridge, rising steeply from Stony Clove Notch in the east, then gently to the summit in the center, and gently back down to the west where the land makes a much less steep drop into Taylor Hollow, the col between it and neighboring Rusk Mountain. As with its eastern neighbor Plateau Mountain, there is a considerable amount of level ground above , the cutoff elevation for inclusion in the Catskill High Peaks.
The relative steepness of the mountain's north slopes facilitated the growth of the ski area, but have made it an otherwise unattractive route up the mountain (only one of the several trails to the summit comes to it from the north). On the south side, slopes are equally steep and challenging to the southeast. However, a ridge splits off at a level area, known as Devil's Acre, midway along the mountain, rising to a ) summit unofficially known as Southwest Hunter Mountain. Beyond that ridge, the slopes again steepen, reflecting the glacial cirque between Southwest Hunter and Hunter that opens up into the Spruceton Valley.
The entire mountain is in the Hudson River watershed, with runoff from the north taking a circuitous route to it via Schoharie Creek and the Mohawk River. On the southeast corner, the route is much more direct, as water follows Stony Clove Creek to Esopus Creek and thence to the Hudson. The cirque on the southwest gives rise to a Schoharie tributary, the West Kill, also fed by Hunter Brook. Regardless of the stream, all of Hunter is part of New York City's watershed, as the Esopus is impounded in Ashokan Reservoir and the Schoharie in the similarly named reservoir downstream.
While Hunter is traversed by the Devil's Path hiking trail and is often considered part of the range of the same name, it is distinct from the Devil's Path topographically due to the fork in the range.
History
Early years
Originally named Greenland Mountain, in the mid-19th century the mountain was renamed. Like the town and the village, Hunter takes its name from John Hunter, a somewhat despised local landlord. It is not known when the mountain was first climbed, or by whom. A popular local legend has it that Hunter, or some other later landowner, went to the summit with a hand level in order to be sure they had indeed purchased the Catskills' highest peak, and were satisfied until an "unknown" peak appeared on the southern horizon — Slide Mountain, the range's true highest peak but not identified as such until 1886 (which makes this legend unlikely to have any basis in fact, as the necessary clearing at the summit for the fire tower was made well afterwards). For a time before Arnold Henry Guyot identified Slide, either Hunter or nearby Black Dome, central peak of the Blackhead Mountains, was thought to be the range's highest, in contrast to the claims of nearby hoteliers for Kaaterskill High Peak.
Hunter, unlike Slide, was located close to settlements and saw considerable exploitation of its forest resources. Retired Colonel William Edwards was so successful harvesting hemlock bark for tanning during the mid-19th century in what is now the ski area that not only was the ridge named the Colonel's Chair in his honor, the village of Hunter was briefly renamed Edwardsville. On the other side of the mountain, the West Virginia-based Fenwick Lumber Company logged Hunter and Southwest Hunter so thoroughly between 1903 and 1917 that it is hard to find virgin forest anywhere in the lands they once owned. Some of the roads and railroads they built on the mountains still serve as trails today, and other remnants of their operations are in the nearby woods.
Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the USFS under Teddy Roosevelt, was named for Hudson River School painter, Sanford Robinson Gifford, after the Pinchot family purchased his famous painting "Hunter Mountain, Twilight."