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Shandelee Stories
Mark Pressburger had the holiday week-end all planned. He would leave his Englewood home Wednesday afternoon and join his wife, Priscilla, up at the Catskill resort, the Concord Hotel, and together would observe the high holy week of Rosh Hashanah. Instead of fighting afternoon traffic escaping the city's workday, he would pilot his plane, a twin-engine Piper Aztec, from Teterboro Airport to the local airport at Sullivan County where he would meet his wife.

The experienced pilot took off from the New Jersey airport that afternoon, September 19th, 1990. Though overcast skies blanketed the area, no threat of inclement weather was in the immediate forecast, allowing Pressburger to pilot his plane using visual flight control. But weather conditions can be radically different in higher terrain, as the pilot soon discovered as he climbed over the higher, more rugged landscape of the southern Catskills. Entering Sullivan County airspace, he encountered a much lower cloud ceiling. Forced to fly in the whiteness of thick fog and the relentless drizzle, he switched from visual flight to the plane's instruments for finding his destination. On the approach, he was to find the airport's beacon light, that once locked in, would guide him on his approach toward the runway. For whatever reason, he failed in his first attempt finding this marker and circled overhead to make another pass to link up with the airport.

The Catskill Mountains are bounded to the east by escarpments, where the more rugged peaks have geologically resisted eons of erosion to form a wall of forested hills, most notable being the steep hillside that rim the Husdson Valley. On the western side of the Catskills, not as dramatic as to the east, is a less pronounced, west-facing, elevated ridge that goes from the Tennanah Lake section to Walnut Mountain, just outside of Liberty, including Shandelee. The change in elevation from the ridge's height to the lower, rolling countryside is spread over a wide belt, and though not as obvious, the ridge's height looms up to 1,000 feet above the narrow valleys to the west and, more importantly, the airport thirteen miles away. Though it is not known, perhaps Pressburger's instruments were not calibrated for the changes in elevation and if flight charts were in the cockpit, he probably was preoccupied, blindly maneuvering the plane now floundering in the clouds.

The plane, an older Piper model and being over thirty years old, roared over the residents and homes, just above the tree tops as it passed over Shandelee in the thick fog. Making a swing towards the south to find the airport's beacon, it clipped a tree-top along the northern shoreline of Sand Pond, ripping off the nose-wheel from the fuselage, spewing articles from the cockpit along the shore and into the lake. The engines continued to power the aircraft out over the lake, now losing what little altitude it had, until the plane slammed into the surface of the lake, a quarter mile from its initial impact, ripping the engines off of the wings. Pressburger was ejected from the plane upon impact, both pilot and plane sinking to the lake's murky depths below.

Fred
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Shandelee Stories
Since the introduction of bass to Sand Pond, sportsmen have sought this prize fish, known for its gamey fight once upon the hook. Known favorite haunts under the lake's surface for these finned creatures are secretly kept by anglers, who go to great lengths to hide their location's whereabouts. Bass fishermen have continually relied on various techniques, equipment and knowledge of the fish's habits to seek the upper hand in landing the trophy. Recently added to the bass master's arsenal is a "fish-finder', a portable, hand-held device that is able, through the use of sonar, to scan the under-surface waters and locate individual or schools of fish. The secrets of the lake's depths are now visualized on the small screen, the mysterious hiding places revealed to the bass master floating above in search of bass treasures from the deep.

A couple of bass fishermen were out on the lake as the early morning's mist rose from its surface when recovery operations for the Pressburger plane resumed the morning of September 20th. Rescuers discontinued the search the previous evening as darkness set in but now returned with divers from three local fire departments and the office of the Sullivan County Sheriff. Overhead, a State Police helicopter circled the lake, following the plume of oil and gasoline on the water's surface, in hopes of seeing the submerged aircraft from the air, but without any luck. Divers probed the murky bottom, each movement riling up silt and diminishing what was already limited visibility. By chance, just before noon, after three hours of underwater searching, they stumbled upon Pressburger's body, half buried into the silt, in 38 feet of water. The plane's location, though, was still a mystery.

Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board were in hopes of locating the wreckage by honing in on the plane's emergency transmitter but were unsuccessful in this attempt. Finally, a bass master's hand-held "fish-finder" was put to use, and the hidden mystery along the lake's bottom, half concealed in mud, was uncovered as the wreckage, broken into three pieces, was finally located, only about twenty feet away from where the unfortunate pilot was found. Throughout the history of Sand Pond, its waters have swallowed up horses, sleighs, trucks, one-arm bandits and the occasional swimmer, but now the biggest "trophy" of all, during the lake's grandest fishing expedition, has been found. Now, as with bass, the challenge was "reeling" the aircraft in.

Down the Ages