On any given weekend, if you’re deep in the Catskills and hear a distant howl, it might just be Tater, a seven-year-old mountain cur who’s spent the past five years climbing mountains across the Northeast with his owners, married couple Redmond Haskins and Gina Morrow.
Haskins, 39, and Morrow, 36, live in Saugerties, where their lives revolve around hiking and Tater. Together, the trio have tallied 118 hikes this year—607 miles and more than 142,000 feet of elevation across 81 summits, lookouts, and peaks. Since 2020, Tater has hiked more than 2,500 miles over 500 different hikes. “He’s flying,” Haskins said. “I call it four-wheel drive because he’s dragging me up and down the mountain.”
Tater was found emaciated on the side of a Tennessee road in 2019, and rescued by the Union County Humane Society and later adopted by Haskins, who at the time was living in New York City. “We did a DNA test and he came back as a purebred mountain cur—a treeing dog from the South,” Haskins said. “He still has this junkyard-dog snarl and big howl, but he’s the sweetest, most loyal little guy.”
When the pandemic hit, Haskins rented a car and began escaping the city before dawn to hike in Harriman State Park and the Catskills. “It quickly became an obsession,” he said. “We’d wake up at 4:30 in the morning, drive up, hike a couple peaks, and then drive back down.”
The pair later moved upstate full-time, and now, Tater sets the pace. “He knows when we’re at the top,” Haskins said. “He does the summit howl—sits, looks, takes it in.”
Morrow, a long distance runner ,started dating Haskins in 2021. “I hadn’t done much hiking,” she said. “Tater gets so excited when we drive to the trailhead—he starts barking the second we park.”
She said he’s also the gentlest of trail companions. “If I fall a little behind, he always waits and checks in on me,” Morrow said. “He’ll look back, make sure I’m close enough, bark once, then run ahead to catch Red again. It’s really sweet.”
The couple’s rule for the season is simple: no repeating the same trail to the same summit twice in a year. That approach, Haskins said, has pushed them to explore lesser-known corners of the Catskills—especially around the Catskill Mountain House area. “We’ve gotten really into hiking lost places and forgotten trails—hidden gems from the golden age of the Catskills, spots that inspired the Hudson River School painters,” he said.
Along the way, Tater has encountered just about everything the mountains can offer—bears, moose, rattlesnakes, porcupines, bobcats, and fishers. “He’s seen it all,” Haskins said.
Morrow, who works for a structural engineering firm, says hiking has become the couple’s anchor. “It really brought the three of us together,” she said. “It’s a way to get to know the landscape—and to admire it, season after season.”
Next year, Haskins hopes to climb 150,000 feet of elevation in honor of the Legal Aid Society’s 150th anniversary—an organization he’s represented for years through his media relations consultancy.
For now, though, the record stands—118 hikes, 606.3 miles, 142,259 feet of climbing—and one little dog with boundless energy, waiting for the next summit.
“There’s a John Burroughs quote I love,” Haskins said. “‘If you want to find something different, take the trail you took yesterday.’ That’s kind of how we live — there’s always something new to find.”
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.