I was dimly aware that people had climbed Wittenberg from a trailhead or parking area on Moonhaw Road in the tiny hamlet of West Shokan.
The name “Moonhaw” had caught my attention. I pictured moon-glow in a dark forest, and then imagined a donkey braying. “Moon” and “haw” are two familiar-sounding syllables, yet the sense conveyed was of some kind of atavistic lunar exuberance, an experience or feeling that would be completely alien in a modern, urban, high-tech world.
The Internet yielded no clues to the origin or significance of Moonhaw. You would pronounce it, I thought, like this: “moon-HAAAW.”
And so this became the focus for my next Catskills adventure…
