When I think of fall in the Catskill High Peaks, I can’t help thinking of Washington Irving or of his memorable characters, Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. Actually my mind more quickly conjures the figure of the Headless Horseman, which used to send shivers up my youthful spine every time I saw his image, darkly menacing, against the moonlit sky. My heart, however, abides with Rip Van Winkle. Long an admirer of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, I feel I understand Rip perfectly. The house needs painting, the lawn needs mowing, but it’s a sky-blue, windy day and wouldn’t it be fun to play marbles or fly a kite?

Thomas Locker’s version of Rip Van Winkle, recently reprinted by Fulcrum Press, is one of my favorites. The story opens with young Rip teaching local children how to fly a kite. Here, Locker casts Rip in an appealing light, but no sooner do you turn the page, you run into another, darker side of Rip: the irresponsible husband, finger poised upon his lips, silently pleading with his small daughters to remain quiet—but complicit—in his efforts to avoid the notice of Dame Van Winkle, whom Irving, a bachelor, describes as Rip’s “enraged wife.” I’ve never said this before but maybe Dame Van Winkle, living on a farm “full of weeds and stones,” as she struggles to cook, clean, cloth her family and take care of her three children, has a reason to be enraged. No wonder she would “hunt” her husband down, often to find him at the local inn, gossiping with friends. My favorite characters in this classic story are the gnome-like Dutchmen with their grave faces and their mysterious silence. What I find most fascinating about Locker’s illustrations is the fact that he gets the geography of Irving’s story right since it was surely the natural “amphitheater” behind Kaaterskill Falls that made it possible for Rip to hear the echoes of those odd-looking men playing ninepins. It seems fitting that one of Locker’s final illustrations pays homage to Pine Orchard, site of the famed Catskill Mountain House and the place where Rip fell into his legendary sleep.

Upon opening to the first pages of railroad historian John Ham’s new book, Narrow Gauge Railroads to the Catskill High Peaks, one is again brought to Pine Orchard as Mountain House owner Charles L. Beach sits on a rock ledge high atop the lordly Hudson, gazing appreciatively at his grand Hotel’s five-state view.

By now, everyone knows that the Mountain House rose from a small rustic inn in 1824 to a hotel that could accommodate 400 paying guests and perhaps an equal amount of staff. Building a large hotel on the mountain top of Greene County was not the challenge, though; getting patrons with large trunks of clothing and other belongings to the location was the real problem. Horse-and-carriage seemed to do it at first, but as the hotel’s fame grew, so did its clientele which I could no longer be transported by mere beasts of burden. So begins the story of the building of the Otis Elevating Railway, which, according to Roland Van Zandt, “democratized the institution of the summer vacation.” To Van Zandt, historian and author of the seminal work, The Catskill Mountain House, the consequences of construction of the narrow gauge railroad were “immeasurable” to Greene County’s High Peaks.

John Ham’s new book tells you how the narrow gauge railroads to the Catskill High Peaks were built; Roland Van Zandt’s book is a necessary read for anyone who wants to know what thousands of American vacationers did once they got here.