Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2024 i Adirondack Life

There is no better salve for post-traumatic stress, A. J. Beaudoin believes, than the call of the loon and the morning mist rising from an Adirondack pond. But it’s more than just that. Beaudoin wants to build a model in the Adirondacks, inspiring veterans to launch outdoor-oriented businesses in their own hometowns, where they, in turn, can bring the joy of the woods and waters to other veterans, students, Scouts and anyone who needs a breath of fresh air. There are many moving parts. But so far they have come together better than he ever imagined. Certainly better than when he himself returned from Afghanistan in 2008—after an air drop of Howitzer shells burst open and ripped up his knee—when he tuned out the world with only video games for…

In the mid-1940s, a draftsman named Hans Winbauer, his wife, Fran, and a few of his fellow World War II veterans from Fort Drum’s 10th Mountain Division started thinking about opening a ski area. They reviewed snowfall patterns, sun direction and topographic maps and found that Pine Mountain, in the Three Sisters Mountain Range outside of Warrensburg, was a great spot. After a summer of work, Hickory Hill opened in 1946 with one trail and later expanded over the next couple of decades, as Winbauer and his friends continued to clear the land and build more lifts. Almost immediately Hickory became a popular winter resort. Not only did locals love the mountain, but capital-area businesses like General Electric and Schenectady International even offered discounted tickets to their stockholders. Local ski…

This juvenile Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) was photographed in captivity, the most likely way to glimpse one of these elusive cats, considered extirpated in our region. But after a lynx sighting in August in Vermont’s southern Green Mountains, there’s hope the animals could make a comeback. The Vermont lynx, according to that state’s fish and wildlife experts, might have been “dispersing,” or clearing miles and miles in search of food and territory. Cats that are reported in occasional sightings in the Adirondacks—when they’re actually lynx and not similar-looking bobcats—are probably doing the same. There’s no evidence of a Lynx canadensis breeding population in New York State. Between 1989 and 1992 SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), with the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), released more than 80 lynx…

Benny disappeared every few minutes, camouflaged by the brown leaves carpeting the forest floor. Unlike Star, who cannonballed through the trees, we couldn’t hear Benny coming—his stumpy legs and “fairy feet,” as one of my friends called them, practically floated above the duff. This was my first time hiking with a miniature Dachshund and a Frenchie pug—one shaped like a cocktail weenie, the other like a baby potato. Twenty-some years ago, my companions in the woods were usually Lab mixes. These days, not so much. What’s changed? Is there a true “Adirondack” dog? When it comes to domestic canines, says Wendy Tibbitts, executive director of the Elizabethtown-based North Country Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the most ubiquitous one she sees in these parts is the pitbull mix.…

It is a fact that Tahawus no longer exists as part of the Adirondack landscape. What once was the most remote of communities with no town beyond it has moved into an even more extreme dimension, accessible only through memoir and museum study. All signage and advertisements to the contrary, Tahawus was never a “deserted village,” and it is expressly different from the villages of Adirondac, McIntyre and the Upper Works. The Tahawus titanium-mining process in the 20th century had no practical use for an impressively restored 19th-century blast furnace. In 1963, National Lead moved most of its buildings to Winebrook Hills in Newcomb, and later, they buried the remaining ones (including the K–3 Tahawus School, the “Twenty Families” Apartment B, and eventually the YMCA) under tons of overburden from…

“THE PLACE IS MAGICAL during the holidays,” says the Whiteface Lodge’s executive chef Greg Sherman. Festive garlands and twinkling lights dangle from peeled-log beams; miniature mountain villages depict wintry scenes; and shiny wrapped packages ring Christmas trees and are stacked on fireplace mantels. But it’s during the Lake Placid resort’s annual tree lighting, when a three-story evergreen in the lodge’s Kanu restaurant’s Great Camp–style dining room is illuminated, that Santa Claus makes an appearance, a brass quintet plays Christmas classics and Chef Sherman serves trays of cookies—Chris Kringle balls, candy-cane cookies, thumbprints and sugar-cookie cut-outs, all made from his mom’s holiday recipes. Sherman also prepares a “chocuterie” board, an assortment of sweet treats for kids to embellish their hot cocoa; for the adults there’s hard mulled cider. Outside, visitors can…

EVER GIVE IN TO A “GREAT DEAL” for clothes online and, when you open the package, you’re hit with a face full of eau de chemical? It’s the price of fast fashion—throwaway pieces that sacrifice quality, workers’ rights and the environment for rock-bottom price tags. Dan Kelleher, an Albany native, noticed that smell when he worked summer jobs at Cape Cod surfing shops, and he realized that the products he stocked didn’t always back up the sustainability philosophy of surfing culture. It was a lesson that stuck with him. In 2011, when he accepted a job at the Adirondack Park Agency and fell in love with the local landscape—and its hiking, paddling and skiing—he decided that he could do something different here. But slow fashion takes its time. It wasn’t until…

Comeback Kid Meet Linnaea, a 2021 hatchling from Paradox Lake. She had a tough first summer—that July she was spotted struggling in a tangle of fishing line. But Nina Schoch and other staff and volunteers with the Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation, based in Saranac Lake, were called in to save the day. They netted Linnaea, removed the loops of line around her head and mouth, treated her injuries, and measured and banded her. She recovered, and that autumn she set out for the ocean, where juvenile loons spend their first few years. If they survive, loons will return to the waters of their birth once they’ve matured into breeding adults. Only about half make it back home, but Linnaea beat the odds again—this July loon naturalist Ellie George spotted…

Herkimer County was once a wood-fueled powerhouse: New York designated the Moose and Beaver Rivers “public highways” for the lumber trade in the 1850s. Choice spruce milled in Thendara graced Steinway pianos and top-of-the-line violins, making the community “practically the piano sounding board center of the country,” according to David Beetle, author of Up Old Forge Way. Lesser timber became window frames, door sashes, even French heels for Endicott-Johnson shoes. Later, pulpwood was king. Beetle wrote that, between 1938 and 1948, C. J. Strife’s teams felled 45,000 cords of softwood, “enough to stretch a pile of logs four feet high and four feet wide between Utica and Eighth Lake.”…

THE ADIRONDACKS. Twenty years ago, I fell deeply in love with this place. It began with a single moment—a glimmer of sunlight dancing on the blue-green waters of a glacial pond on a summer day. Chapel Pond, framed by towering purple cliffs and the endless green of evergreens, birch and maple trees struck me like a revelation. The effect it had on me was profound. When I returned home, that scene lingered in my mind like a cherished memory I could not let go. My thoughts swirled with ways to convey what I had experienced and felt. I searched for the language to describe this intense connection, one I had only felt once before, visiting my uncle’s farm in rural Jamaica. Could one truly be in love with a place?…

Fall is a favorite time of year, with temps dropping and colors exploding. The bugs and the crowds are gone, and a simple hike like Cascade Mountain feels like a real alpine climb. But before the last leaf has dropped, the trails up high will have glazed over, making it near impossible to stay upright wearing your summer footwear. A lot of folks will try to fight this reality by grabbing desperately onto little trees on the side of the trail, but this practice is rather inelegant (as well as tedious, scary, dangerous and very bad for the trail). Right from that first October freeze and all the way through spring’s melt, you’ll want some pointy things on your feet and in your hands. Conditions vary, however, from iced-over boulders…