MOHONK MOUNTAIN HOUSE
1000 Mountain Rest Road
New Paltz, NY 12561
1- 800-772-6646
www.mohonk.com
 Overall Impression
Mohonk Mountain House is a 90-minutes auto trip from our East Side Manhattan apartment. The resort is six miles west of the New York State Thruway near New Paltz, New York and is readily accessible by auto, train, bus, or air. |
There we were in Valhalla aka Mohonk Mountain House with its majestic turn-of-the-century ambience, eager to take in the formidable lakeside scenery, thanks to the munificence of my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, coincident to Alice’s and my 50th Anniversary. And yes, they generously booked us in perhaps the room of all rooms in the resort, with a spellbinding 360 ° view of a magnificent 26,000-acre natural area in the Shawangunk Mountains, comprised of the resort property, private preserves, and a state park preserve. Tucked away near the top of the Shawangunk Ridge is Lake Mohonk, a half-mile long, 60-foot deep, freshwater lake where a sprawling Victorian castle stands guard. This is one of the last great 19th-century mountain resorts. It has 266 guest rooms, three dining rooms, 138 working fireplaces, 238 balconies, a new Spa, a fitness center, and indoor heated swimming pool. The grounds contain golf, tennis, stables, gardens, a greenhouse, "summerhouses" (rustic gazebos), a museum, and an observation point known as Sky Top Tower. Mohonk has been family-owned since 1869 when Albert Smiley made his original purchase of 280 acres and a 10-room inn. More than a century later, in 1986, Mohonk Mountain House was named a National Historic Landmark.
Mohonk Mountain House is an unspoiled resort. The walking trails are off-limits to motor vehicles, and signs on the entrance road read "Slowly and Quietly Please."
Accommodations (Our “Tower Room”) -
Accommodations (Conventional Room )
How Suite it is!
We spent two luxurious nights in a gloriously ample Tower Room that if partitioned, would, in square footage, be tantamount to a suite. Since it is a single entity, the resort uses “room” rather than “suite” in its nomenclature which I regard as a misnomer, since two or three rooms in which we poked our heads were distressingly small. Prior to our visit, our son spent one night in such a room that was inversely proportionate to the rate.
American Plan Dining
| Buffet Breakfast, Buffet Lunch, Outdoor Cookout (Granary), |
| Casual Buffet Dinner |
|
Traditional Dinner (West Dining Room-Jacket Required)
It is definitely a plus that Mohonk Mountain House’s room rates include three meals daily, afternoon tea and cookies. The hot and cold buffet meals are wholesome and serviceable, and for breakfast, my yoke-less omelet was served up with élan by an obliging egg-maker who mixed in the mushrooms, tomatoes and onions at hand and obligingly interrupted his stirring and flipping to gather a couple of slices of lox from the kitchen and toss it into the white omelet olio. Alice was pleased with her pancakes and French Toast at successive breakfasts. In the afternoon of Day One, we sat in the same dining room for an appetizing buffet lunch. For the next day’s lunch we headed to the Granary overlooking the lake for a delightful outdoor barbecue repast, complete with chicken, ribs and hot dogs (cholesterol count be damned) and corn so tasty, we eschewed salt and butter. Homemade pie a la mode topped it off beautifully and reminded me that I haven’t had so much culinary fun since a sit-down community barbecue in Amish Country in Lancaster, PA. The Granary is open every day (weather permitting) during late June, July, and August and weekends from early May until late October. As for our one experience with Mohonk’s “Traditional” four-course sit-down dinner for which jackets are de rigueur (a dictum I applaud) it was a benign attempt at haute cuisine, beginning with soup that needed re-heating, a duck entrée that was overcooked, sorbet impacted with chards of ice, and an earnest young waiter from Cracow whose English was infinitely better than my Polish. But what we had here was, a failure to communicate on my part.
The Lake
For those of you who are into serious hiking, I have it on the authority of a number of adventurous friends that Mohonk’s nature trails which thread their way through the woodlands and rock formations that jut into the lake, are fascinating and well-marked, with graduated levels of difficulty. You can go it alone with a Mohonk trail map or go in a group led by a guide or naturalist.
For seniors like us, it was a “trip” simply to tread vigorously counter-clockwise a mile or so around Mohonk’s pristine glacial-formed lake, filling our lungs with unadulterated mountain air. Much as I love canoeing, getting in an out of one today is akin to manipulating myself out of my diminutive apartment bathtub. Row-boating is boring, so we ventured forth in an unfussy leg-powered paddleboat. Boats are available from mid-April through October. Lake Mohonk, we are informed, is generously stocked by the resort with brown and rainbow trout, so bring along your rod and reel.
The Indoor Pool
|
View of the sheltered indoor heated pool and spa from our room. |
The Gardens
It’s a toss-up as to which is Mohonk’s more storied asset, its lake or its gardens. Call my wife and me “accidental tourists,” because we had not planned on being led through the resort’s Romantic English Country Gardens by the authoritative and winning Pieter Heijnen. It happened strictly by chance. And the happy result was that we spent an absorbing and delightful hour-and-a-half tour with a few other fortunate souls. As you have surely surmised from his name, Mr. Heijnen is a native of The Netherlands, specifically the village of Oosternijkerk, where he was raised in a thatched cottage on a “big farm” that dated back to 1783. His love of flora and fauna began at the age of 7, when his father, a successful seed producer, encouraged him to plant a garden in his sandbox, using the colorful seed packets pierced with sticks to identify the disparate varieties. Despite his encyclopedic grasp of the pedigree of every plant and flower on the premises, Heijnen disputes the premise that he is a horticulturist. He is a practicing professional sculptor and art historian. It is his contention that Mohonk founder Albert K. Smiley's original design for the gardens when he purchased the land in 1869, was influenced in great part by Andrew Jackson Downing, who in the early 1800s wrote the bible of horticulture: Click: A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. To this day, Heijnen studiously follows the principals and precepts of Downing’s dissertation. His tour offered glimpses of the past, allowing us to enjoy masses of flowering annuals, perennials, and tropical plants, set against magnificent vistas and views. You will find beautiful gardens throughout the Mountain House grounds, including ornamental grasses, herb collections, peonies, rock gardens, container gardens, and a butterfly garden. The Mohonk Greenhouse contains an almost unlimited assortment of orchids, begonias, and fushchias. During the winter months the Greenhouse is used to grow seedlings and potted plants for use in the gardens and the Mountain House. Do be sure to join Pieter Heijnen for a 1½ hour garden tour the Saturday of your stay at 9:45 a.m. |
