Yosemite, New York

Mohonk Mountain House on its mountaintop lake. The new spa wing is at far left, mostly behind trees.

(Jim Smith Photography)

Imagine a place 90 minutes from New York City with such wild crags and cliffs and mountaintops and sweeping valley views that the Vice President of the United States in 1870 compared it to Yosemite—and it looks the same today. Imagine in the heart of that landscape a grand and tranquil mountain resort hotel completed in 1902—and barely changed today.

The Vice President was Schuyler Colfax, before he was disgraced in the Credit Mobilier scandal during the Grant administration. The hotel is Mohonk Mountain House, in the Shawangunk Mountains above New Paltz, New York. Colfax visited the summer when two identical twin brothers, Albert and Alfred Smiley, bought three hundred acres around cliff-rung Lake Mohonk and set about turning the little tavern and inn at the head of the lake into the big, genteel hotel that survives surrounded by 8,700 acres of protected land to this day.

By 1902 the Smileys had completed one of the grand mountain-house hotels of the era, almost the last anywhere that still stands, with more than 250 rooms in a string of playful buildings, some wood, some stone, with huge parlors, 238 balconies, and 138 fireplaces, plus carriage roads and trails around the lake and up to the mountaintop and 125 summerhouses (gazebos) providing restful stops at hundreds of dramatic viewpoints and outlooks. Then time pretty much stopped.

It stopped so completely that the hotel is still run by members of the Smiley family, the fourth generation, and it stopped so completely that in keeping with the original Smiley twins’ stern Quaker ideals, no alcohol whatever was served at Mohonk Mountain House until the late 1960s.

Which raises the basic dilemma of historical travel. We all want to travel back, to enjoy a taste of a life of simple comforts and pleasures, of old-fashioned country living, of slow-paced relaxation, of burnished wood furnishings and wide open countryside and true dark and quiet at night. But the last thing we want is to have to actually inhabit the world of a century or more ago, with its poor heating and nonexistent cooling, and its gaslight, and—don’t even think about the plumbing. We want what we imagine to be the best of that world but all the comforts of today too.

Mohonk has just addressed this conflict with its biggest change, or rather discreet addition, in, well, ever. A hotel that only 20 years ago still rented rooms with shared baths has built a top-of-the line spa with every amenity from “energy balancing” massages and an “Herbal Rejuvenation Ritual” to Qi Gong classes, and indoor swimming pool with and underwater sound system, and a hot year-round outdoor mineral pool. The spa opened last summer. Also, two years ago the hotel put air conditioners in every room (quieter and less intrusive central air conditioning will follow); a year ago it even, for the very first time, installed a bar on the property. You can actually buy a drink from a bartender at Lake Mohonk for the first time since Albert Smiley shut down the original tavern in 1869.

Is this possibly the best of both worlds? Can you still enjoy a timeless escape from all that is modern and urban—and at the same time indulge in the finest modern comforts? My wife and I arrived on a chilly afternoon in May just as a spring rain was ending. You drive down two miles of private roads through the hotel’s own woods, past signs reading “Slowly and Quietly Please” (speed limit 20), before passing beneath several acres of hillside lawns and formal gardens that mark the final approach to the hotel, which looms up at the end of your approach something like Manderley in the old movie Rebecca. Valets took our car and our luggage, and we checked into our fifth-floor room overlooking the cliff-sided lake.

The room was done immaculately in simple but elegant Victorian style, with a working fireplace and a load of wood by it, spare but ample antique furniture, no radio or TV (but wireless Internet access), and a gleaming claw-foot tub in the bathroom. We felt at home in the best way. We stepped out onto our private balcony and saw boaters on the lake and the children fishing on the dock and hikers setting out for Sky Top, the private mountaintop.

Seeing that view, we had to get outside ourselves. We went out through the big Lake Lounge, which was once the hotel’s lobby and has two big fireplaces and sofas and chairs and long wood tables and a porch around it overlooking the gardens and lake. Afternoon tea was being served in the Lake Lounge, as it is every day. We set out for Sky Top, a twenty-minute amble made longer by our constant detours to visit summerhouses on boulders overlooking the lake and alongside the cliff beneath the summit. At Sky Top, capped by a castle-like Smiley Memorial stone tower dedicated in 1923, we looked south across the broad valley below known as the Trapps; north and west past Eagle Cliff on the other side of the lake to the distant peaks of the Catskills; and east across the Hudson to the hills at the edge of Connecticut. The Mohonk property itself feels immense, in a cozy way, having been divided in 1963 into 2,200 acres of hotel property (buildings, lake, gardens, mountaintop, surrounding woods—the Yosemite Valley core of the place) and a surrounding 6,500 acres of Mohonk Preserve, abutted by thousands of acres more of state park and other protected lands (the whole Yosemite). We felt a very long way from our home in New York City.

On our way back down, almost back at the hotel, we passed another recent addition, a large open skating rink roofed over in timber and stone, completed in 2001, tucked away in the woods and designed with a serene rustic majesty that made it fit perfectly with the rest of the place. Our hike winding up, we agreed that our next stop must be the bar. It is in what must be almost the only room in all of Mohonk Mountain House with no windows and no view of anything. But we were assured that it is going to be made over by the same architects who did the skating rink and the spa, and they, our first visit to the spa confirmed, are an ideal choice for any addition to Mohonk.

The spa is in a new connected building at the far end of the Mountain House—far from the main lobby areas and dining rooms and extensive formal gardens and lakeside, that is. It was made largely with local materials, including 600 tons of the stone that was excavated to make room for it, local timber, and local cedar shingles. Stepping into it from the adjacent part of the Mountain House, which was completed in 1879, you feel as if you’re in the spiffy, new cousin of the old place, done up with gleaming pine floors and stained-ash wainscoting. It couldn’t be much handsomer or more comfortable.

I’m not one for spa treatments, but my wife signed up for the “Mohonk Red” pedicure. It lasted almost an hour and involved among other things exfoliation with Mohonk ground quartz and sea salt; a hot paraffin dip for the feet; a heated neck appliqué enjoyed as the paraffin soaked in; a foot massage in red mud cream; and tea and fruit taken by a roaring fire in a solarium as the toenail polish dried. It made my wife very happy.

I talked to Nina Smiley, one of the present generation running the place, about the changes at the hotel. “Mother nature seems to be changing course on us,” she said. She explained that they had built the ice-skating rink partly because the lake wasn’t freezing as dependably in winter as it used to (Mohonk first stayed open through the winter in 1933), and cross-country skiing hadn’t been having as long a season either. That was also one reason for building the spa—to enliven days when the outdoors doesn’t beckon. But weather or not, any serious resort in this day and age must have to have a spa and a liquor license and air conditioning.

Mohonk has folded all those things in without in the least disturbing the tranquil pleasures the place has always offered. “We’re very careful about every little change,” Nina Smiley said. “We talked about building a spa for five years before even deciding to do it. We wanted to keep the best of all our old-world charm while having the best of modern amenities, too. No matter what, we want guests to be able to come back after 20 years away and breathe a sigh of relief that nothing has been lost.” They can.

For more information, visit www.mohonk.com or call 845-255-1000.

—Frederick E. Allen is the editor of AmericanHeritage.com