Mt. Cathalia Ski Center
Ellenville, New Yorkc. 1960-1978
Shop Mt. Cathalia Ski Center tees, long sleeve tees, hoodies and crewnecks. Joseph Tso's hotel above Ellenville drew families from Manhattan's Chinatown when many resorts in the region turned away Chinese American guests. Most of the 15 trails on its 1977 map were named for the night sky, from Milky Way and Big Dipper to Comet's Tail and Polaris. Scroll down past the styles for the full Mt. Cathalia history. Down Home Apparel is an American small business remembering the best places and teams of yesteryear, and every shirt is printed to order in the USA.
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Mt. Cathalia Ski Center History
Mt. Cathalia Ski Center near Ellenville, New York, sat on the mountain just above the village, about two miles south of town off Route 52 in the Town of Wawarsing, at the foot of the Shawangunk Ridge. In the late 1800s the mountain was called Mt. Meenagha, and the Terwilliger family ran one of the town's first summer resorts there. In the mid-1950s Joseph Tso took over the hotel. He had come to the United States from northern China in the 1940s to help train Nationalist Chinese pilots, stayed after the war, and became an Army veteran and an attorney. He called the place Cathalia, a name the Open Space Institute says was meant as a little bit of China.
The Cathalia began as a summer hotel of the Catskills kind, with swimming, tennis, dancing and stage shows, but it also served Chinese food and advertised in New York's Chinese-language weeklies. Families from Manhattan's Chinatown made the trip in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when many resorts in the region turned away Chinese American guests. The Open Space Institute describes it as the only Chinese American owned and operated ski resort and hotel in the country.
Skiing came around 1960 or 1961; the sources differ. The hotel burned in 1963 and Tso rebuilt. By 1970 the ski guides listed a double chairlift, a T-bar and a rope tow, a summit near 1,750 feet and about 500 to 525 feet of vertical on a northwest-facing slope, with snowmaking. Later listings added more T-bars and night skiing, and the base lodge had the hotel attached. The 1977 trail map shows 15 trails, most of them named for the night sky: Milky Way, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Comet's Tail and Polaris, along with Sun Tanner and Captains Courageous. City skiers could reserve lift tickets through Ticketron.
Tso sold the resort in the 1970s, and it ran on and off under later owners. Its last ski season appears to have ended in March 1978. The buildings are gone and the old runs have grown into meadows ringed by chestnut oak and pine. In August 2026 the Open Space Institute bought the 440-acre property to add it to Minnewaska State Park Preserve.