A note on the name: this is not the “Thendara Lodge” that appears among the Long Trail’s own backcountry shelters. This Thendara sits roughly 150 miles south of Vermont, on the shore of Lake Tiorati in Harriman State Park, New York. For most of the twentieth century it was the clubhouse of the Green Mountain Club’s New York Section — the section’s answer to Vermont’s mountain shelters, adapted to a very different landscape of lake swimming, birdwatching, and commuter-friendly weekend outings. Today the property continues in active use, but as the clubhouse of an independent organization, the Thendara Mountain Club.
A Camp Taken Over, 1922
The New York Section’s own account of Thendara’s origins, preserved in a Long Trail News retrospective written on the occasion of the camp’s 28th anniversary, describes a straightforward acquisition rather than a ground-up construction project:
“The New York Section maintained a camp for many years on Lake Tiorati in Bear Mountain-Harriman Section of the Palisades Interstate Park. The deal to take over Thendara was closed in the fall of 1922 and the camp opened with Bill and Beth Barclay as chairmen of the committee.”
— Long Trail News, February 1950
Thendara Mountain Club’s own present-day history states that “the club opened in 1916” — several years before the Green Mountain Club’s involvement — while a separate account of the property describes the main lodge building itself, with its fieldstone hearth, as dating to 1920. Taken together, the evidence points to a camp that existed under earlier auspices before the New York Section acquired it in 1922; a surviving photograph in the shelter database, captioned “Camp Thendara, 1923,” shows the camp already established the year after the Section’s takeover, and a New York Section summer bulletin from 1926 likewise depicts Thendara Lodge in active use. No source found reconciles the exact relationship between the 1916 opening date, the 1920 construction of the lodge building, and the Section’s 1922 acquisition — only that all three predate any Green Mountain Club shelter database record placing the property’s “start year” at 1929, a date this history cannot otherwise explain.
Financing a Camp by Raising Dues
The New York Section paid for Thendara in a way distinctively suited to a section built around dues-paying urban and suburban members rather than volunteer trail crews. The camp was supported by raising Section dues by a dollar a year, with the explicit understanding that the increase was temporary and the money would flow back to the general treasury once the camp no longer needed the subsidy:
“The camp was supported by raising the section dues by one dollar a year, with the understanding that the money would be returned to the treasury when it was no longer needed. This was done in 1928 when for a time the camp was self-supporting.”
— Long Trail News, February 1950
By the early 1930s, Thendara was only one piece of a New York Section operation substantial enough to warrant its own legal structure. A February 1933 dispatch to the main club described a section running roughly sixty miles of trail in New York — about double its assigned mileage on the Long Trail itself — while simultaneously expanding its lakeside camp:
“Thendara Lodge had been enlarged… They operate about 60 miles of trail in New York, about double the mileage of their Vermont trail… They intend to incorporate the Section, so as to relieve the general Club of any legal liability in connection with it.”
— Long Trail News, February 1933, p. 3
Life at Camp: Community Cooking and the Test of Manhood
Community cooking was instituted at Thendara in 1927, turning the camp’s kitchen into a shared operation rather than a collection of individual campfires — a detail the 1950 retrospective singled out among the camp’s defining features. Winter use came with its own initiation rite, water having to be hauled uphill from the pump house by hand:
“In winter, water had to be carried by pail from the pump house, a test of manhood being to carry two pails, 700 feet uphill without stopping or sliding in the snow.”
— Long Trail News, February 1950
That same account traced the camp’s steady physical growth across its first twenty-eight years: the enlargement of the main cabin, installation of a motorized pump and electric lights, a canned-gas modern stove to replace whatever had come before, an incinerator built by club members, a canoe fleet that grew from two boats to six plus an aluminum rowboat, new bathing facilities, and trails cut out to nearby points of interest such as the old Hogencamp Mine. The same piece captured what the camp had become to the wider Section by mid-century:
“Today Thendara is a part of the club life of every active member whether he chooses to skate, ski, swim, canoe, sail, attend the Bird census or just loaf.”
— Long Trail News, February 1950
Open Houses, Hobby Shows, and House-Cleaning Weekends
Thendara’s social calendar, as recorded in the Long Trail News’s “Section News” columns across the 1960s, reads like a portrait of a very different kind of GMC chapter than Vermont’s trail-focused sections — one built as much around fellowship and city-adjacent leisure as around hiking. A 1963 dispatch advertised museum trips to the Newark Museum’s Tibetan Gallery and a “Spanish-Moroccan Museum in a sunken meadow” alongside the camp’s more conventional draws:
“At Thendara you won’t have to swim all the time! You can, but you could also go boating and you could help count birds… Did you ever Housclean with all your friends? Yes, and all in the same house, too? You have a whale of a good time thrown in with a little work. Don’t make any other plans when there’s a chance to Houseclean at Thendara.”
— Long Trail News, May 1963, p. 4
A 1969 dispatch describes an annual Open House tradition each October, free of camp fees for the day, built around a Hobby and Crafts show:
“Open House at Thendara is the first weekend in October. All GMC members are invited. There will be hiking. The main feature is a Hobby and Crafts show on Sunday. You will see some rare and beautiful hobbies. You can also be instructed in some of the crafts. There are no camp fees on Sunday and coffee and donuts will be served.”
— Marie Morris, quoted in Long Trail News, August 1969, p. 9
Golden Anniversary and Continued Growth
The New York Section marked its fiftieth anniversary at Camp Thendara on October 1, 1972, with a substantial turnout that testified to the camp’s continuing pull on the Section’s membership:
“On October 1, 1972, on a beautiful sunny day, the NY Section celebrated its 50th Anniversary at Camp Thendara. A great turnout of 134 members and guests gathered.”
— Long Trail News, November 1972
The camp kept expanding in the decades that followed. In 1987, the Section attempted to source new siding for one of Thendara’s buildings from wood cut and milled within Harriman State Park itself, near Tiorati Circle — a plan that fell through only because the park couldn’t find enough suitable trees for shingle-making, forcing the park to purchase the siding elsewhere. Nearly a decade later, a 1996 Long Trail News section report credited volunteers Manny Sanudo and Frank Soricelli with leading a project that expanded the camp’s overnight capacity with the addition of what the Section, with evident fondness, called “the ‘dug-out’ (much more elegant than it sounds).” As late as the spring of 1998, the Long Trail News was still describing the property in terms that made its GMC affiliation explicit, praising Harriman Park’s autumn colors as seen from “GMC Camp Thendara.”
From GMC Camp to Independent Club
No source located in the Green Mountain Club’s own archive documents precisely when or why the New York Section’s relationship with Thendara changed from a GMC-affiliated section camp to a fully independent organization. What the record does show is that the transition happened sometime after 1998 — the last archival GMC reference found still calling it “GMC Camp Thendara” — and was complete well before 2016, by which point outside press coverage described Thendara Mountain Club as a standalone entity with no GMC affiliation mentioned at all. A 2020 tribute to a longtime club volunteer, published by a separate regional hiking organization, captured the transition in a single retrospective phrase, describing him as having been active “in the then Green Mountain Club (now Thendara Mountain Club) on Lake Tiorati since 1974” — treating the rename as settled fact by the time of writing, without dating it further.
The club’s own present-day account confirms the broad arc while leaving the details for members to fill in: “The club opened in 1916 — then part of the Green Mountain Club but now an independent organization.” Whatever the precise mechanics of the split, the property and its membership carried forward largely intact: the same lakeside site, the same tradition of a caretaker-run clubhouse, and by some accounts many of the same families who had been coming to Thendara for generations under the GMC banner.
Thendara Today
The Thendara Mountain Club now operates as an independent membership organization of roughly 250 to 300 members, still centered on the same historic camp on the south side of Lake Tiorati. The clubhouse retains the rustic character the New York Section built up over decades: a great room built around a fieldstone hearth, six bedrooms, a large kitchen, indoor washrooms with hot and cold water, and — in keeping with a tradition stretching back to the camp’s earliest days — an outhouse. A screened bunkhouse, tent sites, docks, and a fleet of club kayaks and canoes round out the property. Access still carries something of the old volunteer-caretaker ethos: casual visitors can join for a fee, but obtaining gate keys requires passing three caretaker tests, covering furnace and fire safety, boat safety, and trail maintenance. One member, describing the club’s continued appeal in a 2016 profile, offered a verdict that would not have been out of place in a 1963 Long Trail News dispatch about Thendara’s charms: “the outhouse scenario weeds out the more high-maintenance types.”
Sources
- Long Trail News, February 1933, p. 3.
- Long Trail News, May 1963, p. 4.
- Long Trail News, August 1969, p. 9.
- Long Trail News, November 1972.
- Long Trail News, August 1987, p. 5.
- Long Trail News, Fall 1996, p. 17.
- Long Trail News, February 1950 (28th-anniversary retrospective).
- Long Trail News, Spring 1998, p. 19.
- Thendara Mountain Club, “About Us” (thendaramountainclub.com).
- “Get Your Cabin in the Woods,” The Highlands Current (highlandscurrent.org, 2016).
- “Cabin Fever,” My Suburban Escapes (mysuburbanescapes.com, 2021).
- The Trail Marker, June–July 2020 issue (noany.org) — memorial reference to “the then Green Mountain Club (now Thendara Mountain Club) on Lake Tiorati.”
- This history concerns Thendara Lodge on Lake Tiorati in Harriman State Park, New York (Green Mountain Club shelter ID 238), the former clubhouse of the GMC’s New York Section. It should not be confused with the differently-named shelter of the same name on the Long Trail itself in Vermont; no sources describing that separate Vermont shelter are used here.
