Indholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2024 i Adirondack Life

On the Leonardsville Road this gusty April morning, the wind is inhabited—by pine voices and widow-makers, squirrels and warblers, and the echoes of people I have never known or imagined. As I walk down the road on the center yellow line, I hear them speaking, singing, humming through the woods. They are the spice in fall air, summer’s perfume and wrinkled petals, dry leaves in wind, ideas and obsessions that live on in the forest and beneath the fallen roofs and collapsed ribs of abandoned houses. They are the characters of unwritten stories. They are the keepings of finders. I can’t understand what they’re saying. Maybe it is simply, I am here. Unlike most who come to live in the Adirondacks in the second half of life, I have no…

I discovered the joys of backcountry camping in 1966, just before a boom in high-tech camping gear. My friends and I used what now seems to have been antediluvian equipment, most of it loosely inspired by the gear our fathers and uncles had been issued in the Second World War: ancient canvas packs and bulky sleeping bags, boots from an Army-Navy store. We cooked our meals over wood fires. For shelter, we had waterproof (sort of) squares of canvas that we’d string between trees. No Vibram soles, no portable gas cooking stoves, no mosquito netting, no Gortex. By the early 1970s, I was wearing Vasque boots, carrying a Kelty pack and a Holubar sleeping bag, and using a Svea cookstove. At about that time, I bought the first of several…

Hermit biographer Harvey Dunham (above, far left), author of Adirondack French Louie: Early Life in the North Woods, did his own tramping around the backcountry decades before he chronicled French Louie’s wanderings. This photograph was taken at the beginning of a 1917 ramble from Grassy Point, on the Beaver River, to a base camp at Salmon Lake, where he and his brother Ray and friends Bob Gillespie and Jess Seitz explored the area for two weeks. Gillespie kept a log of the adventure, now part of the collection at the Adirondack Experience, in Blue Mountain Lake. It’s a lighthearted look at a fishing trip that yielded buckets of both trout and rain. After falling asleep asking “the good Lord” to end the watery onslaught, Gillespie wrote, “Prayers were not answered…

Willow hung around for two months. I would have walked past her, oblivious, but back then my daughter was waist-high, her eyes the same level as the rock wall in front of our farmhouse. My daughter was—and still is—a rescuer of worms and woolly bears, and an appreciator of all things slithery and beady-eyed, which is why she was so taken by the spider in a crack in the wall. She named her, and during our daily walks we’d stop and watch Willow hunt in the mouth of a funnel-shaped web, its center a dark hole that led to another world. I loved being with my kids at that dreamy stage, their feet practically floating above the ground as they were wowed by milkweed tufts, cicada shells, river rocks, a…

On a chilly autumn morning, Adam Welz waded through chest-high grass near Westport in the eastern Adirondack foothills, pausing to scan with his binoculars and listen. “That’s a northern flicker, right?” he said. “That does the wok-wok-wok-wok!” Welz lives in South Africa but spent years in New York State. He describes himself as an old-school naturalist who likes to dive into places full of living things. “Smelling them, hearing them, accessing them and then figuring out maybe how they fit into a greater ecosystem,” he said. I first heard about Welz and his book, The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown, from Adirondack naturalist friends. They said his story offered a new take on how human-caused warming is affecting even the world’s most pristine places.…

1 Get Festive Celebrate the harvest or lift a stein to the season at colorful gatherings throughout the park. Below is a sampling—visit the event calendar at adirondacklife.com for more ideas. SEPTEMBER 21: Adirondack Harvest SEPTEMBER 21: Adirondack Harvest Festival, Westport Wagon and pony rides, hikes, petting zoo, farmers’ market and food trucks at the Essex County Fairgrounds. Noon. adirondackharvest.com SEPTEMBER 21–22: Whiteface Oktoberfest, Wilmington A Bavarian bash with music, food and beer, kids’ activities and local crafts. 11 a.m. each day. whiteface.com SEPTEMBER 28: OkTUPPERfest, Tupper Lake Flanders Park hosts hayrides, music, games, food and local brews. Noon. www.tupperlake.com OCTOBER 11–13: Lake George Oktoberfest Canada Street and Shepard Park overflow with music and food, plus a biergarten, keg toss and more. Check for schedule. lakegeorgeoktoberfest.com OCTOBER 12: Thurman Fall…

Spring break, 2023. You set your GPS to avoid the Interstate so you can enjoy the sights along Route 9 in the Adirondacks. There’s incredible scenery. On every side of you is a beautiful peak, and the snow adds a majestic coat to the scene. Even though you have no idea where, exactly, you are, you decide to pull off the highway to try and capture this brilliance with your phone. As you park on the grass alongside the highway, you jokingly tell your passenger that the person inside the nearby farmhouse is saying, “That’s about far enough right there.” The joke acknowledges a feeling that something isn’t right. Nevertheless, you open your door. You get out of the car and stand behind the door, taking a few minutes to…

Brewsplosion Our pints runneth over, as three new brewpubs sprang up around the park this summer. In Warrensburg, the folks at Bandstand Brew Works (3922 Main Street, on Facebook) converted an 1855 barn into an indoor/outdoor tavern that dishes out an eclectic menu and beers crafted by cousins Adam and Darby Langworthy. Up in Saranac Lake, the founders of Lake Placid Pub & Brewery and Big Slide Brewery & Public House, Christopher and Catherine Ericson, introduced RiverTrail Beerworks (79 Woodruff Street, rivertrailbeerworks.com), featuring more than a dozen brews on tap, riverside seating, and a locally sourced menu. And Dawn and Marc Schulz, owners of Auburn’s popular Prison City Brewing, have come home to Lake Placid, where the couple first met and started brewing beer. Prison City ADK’s taproom (2577 Main…

They come like a landslide, the earth trembling beneath their mighty hoofs, and the sound of their coming is like the roar of an avalanche.” The spectacle described by naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes—a bison stampede—had once been a familiar feature of the American landscape. But by 1904, when he wrote these words, wild buffalo, as they are commonly called, were fast being hunted to oblivion. In fact, the magnificent beasts Baynes witnessed were from one of only a handful of herds left on the continent—and not on their traditional home in the Great Plains, but on an enclosed game-hunting preserve in New Hampshire. Still, the experience so moved Baynes that he embarked on a lecture tour to rouse support for rescuing the species from extinction. Attending one of those lectures…

Just before the sun disappeared, a loon floating nearby did the same, diving for dinner along the shore of Lower Saranac Lake. From inside the Sunset Bistro, at Ampersand Bay Resort, in Saranac Lake, the scene seemed staged. But this is the Adirondacks, and this is one of those places where the view and the food are equally sublime. First, the location: in 1858, William James Stillman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louis Agassiz and seven other artists and intellectuals pushed off from this shore, bound for Follensby Pond, where they’d set up their famous Philosophers’ Camp. It is said that the idea of preserving the Adirondack Park was born during this wilderness sojourn. Now, 166 years later, you can sit on the deck of the Sunset Bistro at Ampersand Bay and…

Rolf Schulte grew up in a small village east of Düsseldorf, Germany, in the Sauerland region. He took his first photograph in 1948 at the age of 10 using a simple box camera—a picture of a local blacksmith shoeing a horse. Post-war Germany was a difficult environment, and Rolf dreamed of seeing the world. At 14 he apprenticed as a cook on passenger ships, and so began to fulfill this dream. His father, an interior house painter and hobby artist, gave Rolf a camera when he graduated from his chef apprenticeship, and his photography subjects, which had been limited to his immediate village, expanded infinitely. Rolf’s first job was as a steward on a ship traveling among ports on the North Sea, including England, Scotland and Norway. He worked for…

There’s a cabin colony renaissance happening in the heart of the Adirondacks, where rentals are changing hands and getting modern fixes while retaining much of their original charm. Laying your woodsmoke-scented head to rest in one of these cabins, it’s easy to forget you’re not at your very own family camp. Adirondack Lake Cabins This sweet set of eight year-round cabins was named for its hilltop view of Adirondack Lake in the town of Indian Lake. Two years ago life and business partners Jake Mahoney and Cassie Marion bought the complex to complement their seasonal business, Adventure Sports Rafting Company, which offers whitewater trips through the Hudson River Gorge. For Mahoney, a seventh-generation Indian Laker, cabins run in the family. His great-grandparents owned Burgess Yellow Camps on Indian Lake, which…