How do you delete vertices?

Hmmm, I want to remove some trees from the NE and other glue screens (Like in COTN), I have 3ds Max, how do I delete vertices. I nkow I can shrink everything else, but that will make the gamme really laggy, because the polys are still there, they are just hidden. Please help!

im working on a script to allow you to delet verts w/o messing up the models anims, wait about a week for ti to be done