Hudson Valley’s Gunks roiled by noise, environmental disputes

It may take a smarter-than-average bear to settle land and environmental disputes revolving around a glamping club and a Yogi Bear-themed campground in the Hudson Valley.

Local residents are complaining that Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park Camp in Gardiner, near Shawangunk Ridge, affectionately known as “the Gunks,” is too noisy and fails to comply with local permits, the Times-Union reported. Neighbors also say an exclusive glamping resort violates town codes and that it’s too close to the environmentally sensitive Palmaghatt Stream.

“Imagine that your next-door neighbor’s nine-year-old son is having a birthday party and they’ve rented a waterslide, and they have a pool, and they have a jumpy house, and they have music,” Janine Brutvan, whose home is near Jellystone, told the outlet. “What you hear that afternoon is what we hear 10 hours every day, seven days a week.”

Camilla Bradley’s high-end Awosting Club, also in Gardiner’s section of the Gunks, has been in violation of the village’s permit codes for more than a year – even after the former building inspector gave the club 30 days in April to come up with a site plan and application for a campground. It wasn’t clear whether those had been submitted, the publication said.

The land occupied by Awosting has been in Bradley’s family for more than 50 years and her father, John Atwater Bradley, once owned more than 2,000 acres in the Gunks. In 2002, he proposed a development plan for his land that would include more than 300 luxury homes and a golf course. The town rejected the proposal, and a movement dubbed “Save the Ridge” eventually protected the land, which is now owned by the state and forms part of the Minnewaska State Park Preserve, where a 163-acre wildfire was about 40 percent contained by the end of the week.

“If we want to secure the Shawangunk Ridge for the recreation and enjoyment of future generations, we have to continue to take steps to protect it now,” John Hayes, president of Friends of the Shawangunks, told the publication.

Another property dispute roiling the small upstate town involves a landowner on the ridge who wants to build a home. Friends of Shawangunk are challenging a building permit issued by the town for the project.

While the disputes aren’t directly related to the changing face of the bucolic area, they come as small towns across upstate New York deal with the fallout from a pandemic that supercharged a once-sleepy real estate market. A deputy mayor in New Paltz recently lamented that she couldn’t find a rental for $1,200. Activists are hoping to expand rent control north from the city.

The Ranch Malibu, a wellness resort beloved by celebrities, recently said it would open a new location in the Hudson Valley, taking over an historic estate originally built for J.P. Morgan’s daughter.

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