The Town of Shandaken, NY, located approximately 15 miles west of Woodstock in Catskill Park, encompasses the hamlets of Big Indian, Mount Tremper, Phoenicia, Pine Hill, and Chichester. It has served as a wilderness retreat for artists, musicians, chefs, and urban professionals seeking escape or spiritual connection in the mountains for many years.

Since the 1950s, notable French chefs from New York City, such as Jacques Pepin and Pierre Franey, have vacationed and later opened restaurants here. In the 1970s, Big Indian was home to an ashram, while Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were known to visit a sweat lodge in Woodland Valley. Today, the Zen Mountain Monastery, a temple and training center open to the public, is in Mount Tremper. Additionally, the Menla Mountain Retreat and Conference Center, operated by New York City’s Tibet House, can be found in Phoenicia.

Named “rapid water,” most likely for Esopus Creek, the famous trout-fishing destination that flows through the town, Shandaken was established in 1804 from part of the Town of Woodstock. By the end of the century, Shandaken had already developed the tourist industry that would bring Babe Ruth to town in the 1900s and, to this day, remains its most important economic contributor. Currently, between 35% and 40% of all residents are vacation-home owners who live in town only part-time.

Shandaken is covered by 54,000 acres of forest, 70% of which is owned and protected by New York State; it’s also home to Slide Mountain, the highest point in the Catskill Mountains, made famous by the writings of local nature essayist and conservationist John Burroughs.

Other popular destinations in Shandaken include State-owned Belleayre Mountain, a four-season ski resort in the Hamlet of Highmount, and Belleayre Beach in Pine Hill, which offers swimming, boating, kayaking, fishing, and even a climbing wall.

DID YOU KNOW?

Shandaken, and specifically Phoenicia, was featured on national television in the summer of 2000 by Fox Cable, which filmed a segment of its Million Dollar Mysteries series on the lost treasure of Prohibition-era gangster Dutch Schultz regularly visited the town, and for nearly 75 years, treasure hunters have been searching the area for the millions of dollars—whether in cash, gold, or jewels—that Schultz is believed to have buried there. Among these treasure hunters are an ex-bootlegger, a former Grateful Dead scholar, and a pair of undertakers who possess two halves of a treasure map. The Fox show was narrated by Sullivan County historian and Catskills gangster expert John Conway, who told the story of Schultz being assassinated in 1935 in Newark, NJ, shortly after returning from a trip to Phoenicia. It is said that Schultz, dying and delirious on his hospital bed, made numerous cryptic references to the Shandaken hamlet and his loot, which were recorded by a police stenographer. They included: “Wonder who owns these woods…? He’ll never know what’s buried in ‘em.” In 2001, the Fox episode was followed up by a full-length documentary, Digging for Dutch: The Search for the Lost Treasure of Dutch Schultz, directed by Laura Levine, who runs Mystery Spot Antiques in Phoenicia.