Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2022 i Adirondack Life

If snuggling with your sweetheart by a crackling fireplace after a day of cavorting in the snow sounds like just your cup of cocoa, the Adirondacks can make your Rom-Com daydreams come true. Here are a couple of the park’s most enchanting destinations for a winter trip for two. Friends Lake This private lake in Chestertown goes quiet after ice-in, making it the perfect spot for some alone time with your one and only. And with two intimate lodges on its shores, it has become an all-season favorite for weddings and elopements. Whether you’re planning a proposal, a honeymoon or a “just-because” romantic getaway, The Fern Lodge (46 Fiddlehead Bay Road; 518-494-7238; thefernlodge.com) has a package to fit your needs—with optional special touches like rose petals on the bed, in-room…

At least once every winter, photographer Jamie West McGiver takes time out to explore the Wilminton Wild Forest via Cooper Kiln Pond trail. “It’s breathtakingly beautiful,” she says. “There’s always a ton of snow back there and it’s never been particularly busy.” McGiver makes the six-mile trek point to point, starting from the Gillespie Drive trailhead and staging a car on Bonnieview Road. That way, she says, “you end up descending a lot more than you climb.” And the lean-to overlooking Cooper Kiln Pond is a great spot to stop for lunch.…

Larry Stone has attempted to retire five times. And now, at age 76, the New York Ski Educational Foundation (NYSEF) jumping coach has given up trying to walk away. After decades of working with kids in the Junior Jumping Program, Stone says his latest group of athletes—18 in all—have more talent than he’s ever seen. He’s pretty sure he’s got a handful of future Olympians. So why stop now? “I do a lot of things that involve intensity,” Stone admits. Like singing and picking his Telecaster with his band, The Harbingers, at gigs all over the Adirondacks. Leading a bird-hunting guide business in the woods behind his home in Wilmington. And then there’s ski jumping. When you jump off a hill the size of a 30-story building, “there’s that buzz…

After eradication in the Lower 48, wolves are now thriving in some Rocky Mountain states. The animals had disappeared from the Adirondacks by 1900, due to unrestricted hunting and habitat loss. Could reintroduction or natural recolonization bring Eastern wolves back to the region? Two New York lawmakers want to set the stage for that to happen—or at least not rule it out. Early in 2021, state senator Todd Kaminsky and assemblyman Steve Engle-bright wrote a letter to Basil Seggos, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), asking that wolves remain on the state’s endangered species list to protect future habitat, despite their federal delisting. That tack is unlikely to succeed, as it bumps up against the DEC’s mission. “The protection of habitat without species present is not something that…

In 1778, Alexander Henry “the Elder,” a rich merchant in Montreal, found himself inconvenienced by a non-paying debtor. So, he found a way to pay himself. The man who owed him money was the American land baron William Gilliland, builder of an outsized wood-land empire he was piecing together on the Adirondack flank of Lake Champlain. In 1771, one of Gilliland’s enslaved Black laborers had made a break for Canada. The outraged Gilliland flagged “my man Ireland’s” escape in northern papers, but in Montreal, Ireland would know his freedom for seven years. Then Henry learned Ireland was living in his city. He tracked him down, had him put under arrest. Got a court order that backed his own legal claim on Gilliland’s errant property, and won permission from the Quebec…

Terry Watson is usually much more careful. But when the chance to skitter across frozen Copperas Pond in search of big lake trout presented itself one spring day a few years back, the veteran Adirondack guide couldn’t refuse. In the course of Terry’s 60-plus years fishing the North Country, ice fishing for lake trout has gone from being a much-anticipated winter treat to a legally actionable transgression. Beginning in the 1970s, the state began closing trout season on most of its waters at the end of September and not opening it again until the beginning of April, effectively shutting ice anglers out from the time when lake trout are the friskiest and most delicious. During this particular spring, though, the weather had conspired to give Terry a rare shot. A…

THE SLATERS FOR SOME ADIRONDACKERS, the ultimate in North Country living is being able to ski out the back door. But for Harold Slater, in Jay, it’s about “putting your skates on in the house and heading right out onto your own personal rink.” Harold first experimented with making a skating rink for his kids eight years ago. “Our driveway was a sheet of ice to begin with, so I thought it might work.” He says it turned out to be an easy process, one “you can make as simple or as grand as you want.” Usually around mid-December, when temperatures are in the mid-20s and there are a few inches of snow on the ground, Harold, his wife, Karen, and their boys Harry, Van and Morgan “stomp out” where…