Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2025 i Adirondack Life

When Long Lake supervisor Clay Arsenault announced the Whitney estate’s mega-gift in March, he called it “one of the most significant events in the town’s history.” He wasn’t boasting. Proceeds from the sale of the nearby Whitney Park, listed for $125 million, will go entirely to the former logging town, with no restrictions on how the money can be used. “I was, for one of the few times in my life, speechless,” Arsenault said, describing the moment when he heard the news. “I didn’t know what to say. Then it went into jolly, happy celebration. Then we thought, Let’s get straight to business.” The 36,487-acre tract includes more than a hundred miles of undeveloped waterfront land with dozens of lakes and ponds, much of it bordering pristine Adirondack wilderness. On…

IN THE EARLY SPRING of 1903 there were no signs of trouble, no indications of the drought and fires that would ravage the Adirondacks. That March, Lake Champlain was at its highest level in memory. Two months later the water would drop 33 inches. A few fires early in 1903 were quickly extinguished. Still, the April rains did not come, and dry winds raked the region. Fires sprang up from Lake Placid and Elizabethtown to Long Lake, Old Forge, Cranberry Lake, Tupper Lake and the St. Regis Lakes. Fires were common near railroad lines in the wake of trains. By the end of April, burns had broken out along the tracks of the New York Central, the Chateaugay, the New York & Ottawa, and the Saranac & Lake Placid Railroads.…

YOU MAY NOT KNOW HIS NAME, but you know his work. Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, also known by the playful nicknames “Cash,” “Kash,” or “Kash Koolidge,” is the artist who painted pictures of dogs playing poker and engaging in other human activities. Historically, art critics have scoffed at Coolidge’s “dog” paintings as kitsch while a large popular audience regards them as quintessential Americana—a fixture of barber shops, dens and barrooms. In 2015, Poker Game (1894, seen at left), the first of his 18 anthropomorphic dog paintings, sold for $658,000 at a Sotheby’s auction. Not bad for a guy with little formal training as a painter. Coolidge was born in 1844, in Antwerp, New York, but spent significant stretches of his life in and around the Adirondacks. His parents were part of a…

In the Adirondack wilds of 1853, a remarkable drama played out in northern Franklin County, rocking the sparsely populated region and becoming one of the area’s biggest crime stories of the 1800s. It began in the unlikeliest of locations—at Sunday church services in the schoolhouse at Thomasville, otherwise known as Dickinson Center, about 15 miles southwest of Malone. When the session ended, folks dawdled and visited in the customary fashion. Among the attendees that day was 21-year-old James Madison Bickford, who mingled with friends in the school entryway before stepping outside. At that moment, two strangers were passing by on horseback, with each man leading a string of three other horses. Bickford took notice, and any warm, residual glow from community prayer was extinguished, replaced by a plan he admittedly…

Monday, March 24th, I set out on foot to the post office. My route leads past the entrance to Saranac Lake High School, on Olive Street near the traffic light at Lapan Highway. As I approached the intersection, a large blunt object hurtled noiselessly through the trees beyond, pursued by about a dozen crows in full alarm. You don’t see that every day, I noted to myself as I turned the corner and headed downtown. I am a bird watcher by marriage; Mary, my wife, comes from a murder of birders, a family that will drop everything to chase practically anything on the wing. I recognize owls generally by profile and even a couple by name—Woodsy comes to mind. Their skill maneuvering at high speeds through tightly-woven woods has always…

When I travel around the Adirondacks, I sometimes squint my eyes, trying to imagine how the landscape looked before it was settled: Wild, tangled woods. Unencumbered rivers. But looking out at Lake Champlain from Essex’s ferry dock, I go back 13,000 years, when the freshwater lake as we know it was an inland sea. Whales swam here. Across the lake, in Charlotte, the skeleton of a beluga was discovered. Today’s 120-mile-long Lake Champlain is bordered by two countries and two states. And from Valcour Island, off the coast of Plattsburgh, all the way south near Lake George, it’s part of the Adirondack Park. Last year, in an Adirondack Life article about Adirondack lakes, we included Champlain. Later, a reader sent us a note that said, “I have never heard of…

THIS SUMMER MARKS the 125th year that a fleet of Idem sloops will slice Upper St. Regis Lake’s waters, their antique hulls balancing precariously as their crews navigate a racecourse established back when McKinley was president. Eleven of a dozen boats, first designed in 1897 by Clinton Crane for the St. Regis Yacht Club, are still privately owned and maintained on one of the park’s most exclusive lakes. (The 12th is on display at the Adirondack Experience, in Blue Mountain Lake.) On race days spectators paddle the water’s edge to watch the action, but also to admire the historic Great Camps that hug the shoreline. Among them are Camp Katia, with its circular, cobblestone boathouse; the Vanderbilts’ Pine Tree Point pagoda; Camp Top Ridge, originally Marjorie Merriweather Post’s over-the-top rustic…

RECENTLY, ON A TRIP to Glens Falls, I drove to the Warren County Airport to visit a place that sticks in my memory. I discovered a chain-link fence that barred me from driving to the grassy field that, in the 1960s, had been the epicenter of the New York State Conservation Department’s air operations in response to high wildfire danger. Back then, airport security was more relaxed, and our trucks and personnel moved freely in and out to provide the services needed by the pilots and their aircraft. As I stood there, my mind scrolled back to those times and to the people I met when I was a newly hired forest ranger. The danger of wildfire had been made frighteningly clear on April 26, 1962. On that day sparks…

WHEN BILL TANSEY MOVED with his family to Keene Valley a dozen years ago, it wasn’t long before Rusty Hall showed up at his doorstep. Hall, the longtime fire chief with a salt-and-pepper mustache and no-nonsense manner, was—and is—on a perpetual quest to recruit volunteers. “He knocked on my door and said, ‘Hey, do you want to join, and I said, ‘Sure.’” But the obligation was a bit more than Tansey, the assistant county attorney for Essex County, bargained for. First there was the training. He had to attend three sessions a week for three months, both in a classroom and in the field, where he learned to climb ladders and shoot hoses. “It was a huge commitment,” he recalled. Then came the calls. Structure fires aren’t common, but the…

STEAMBOATS, once a mainstay on central Adirondack lakes, haven’t completely disappeared from these shores. Each August, about a dozen enthusiasts from around the Northeast—part of a tight-knit steamboating community—gather for a week-long “camp” on Raquette Lake, bringing along their launches. They bunk at St. William’s on Long Point and tool around the lake in an assortment of boats, some built from scratch and some brought back to life. Kelly Anderson, 63, captains Vividus, an open launch he purchased in 2014 and rehabbed using a converted turn-of-the-century steam-car engine and a new wood-fired boiler. He’s been coming to Raquette Lake since the first steamboat meetup, in 2002, and has no plans to stop. He says it’s the perfect spot for steamboating, thanks to the cooler weather—“running a steamboat on a 90-degree day…

Inside the Frenchman’s Bakery, in Keene Valley, the air is warm and fragrant with baking bread. It’s 5 a.m. and Mathieu Fialon, the eponymous Frenchman, is in the kitchen heaping flour into a stainless steel bowl on a digital scale. Filtered water is added next. “The slightest difference in proportions changes everything,” he says, holding up his fingers to show a shape the size of a sugar cube. Baking is precise, but recipes almost don’t matter. It’s about juggling proportions and adapting to environmental conditions—temperature, humidity and feel. Mathieu grew up in Bordeaux, France, a city often described as a “little Paris”—elegant and old-fashioned and, in his words, a bit stuck-up. “It has this aristocracy of wine,” he says. “And my parents were not part of that culture.” Childhood weekends…

My daughter is 19 now, but her eyes still light up when we talk about our family’s trip to Speculator back when she was small. “That town was so fun,” she says. And why not? We visited on a July 4th weekend, camped at the Moffitt Beach state campground, watched fireworks at the town beach, got a sugar high at Donuts & More, and she even bounced down a giant, inflatable slide at the park. We also discovered a hermit’s hideout—Kunjamuk Cave, rumored to have been overnight accommodations for French Louie—and popped over to nearby Wells to hike the Pine Orchard trail. That may have been the weekend’s only hiccup. I’d mis-remembered the length of the trail (five miles round trip) and there was a full-scale revolt halfway through, with…

AS MORE WILDFIRES have scorched much of the western United States and Canada in recent years, smoke from those fires has also clouded the air down-wind in the Northeast. For some local residents of a certain age, the acrid haze reminds us of the Bad Old Days of acid rain and smog. It also makes us wonder what the future might hold in terms of fires here in the heavily forested Adirondacks. Everyone knows that hotter, drier conditions can amplify fire risk, and both science and common sense make it clear that we’re headed for a warmer future. Sophisticated climate models that focus on the North Country disagree on how much wetter or drier it will become here, but they all agree that the more heat-trapping carbon dioxide we release…

BACK WHEN JOHN “HOSS” HOSLEY was running Hoss’s Country Corner, in Long Lake, he’d say, “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” Today, if you ask his kids, three of whom are at the helm of the Hoss’s empire—store, ice-cream stand, campground and a handful of buildings leased to area businesses—they’d say the same. Inside Hoss’s Country Corner, Jules Hosley-Pierce, the oldest of the Hosley siblings, strides through the sprawling store, pointing out its various sections: bears, loons, moose, balsam, books, boats, maps, mugs, T-shirts, ball caps, candles, Christ mas, camping, fishing, hunting, blankets, bags, jewelry, socks, slippers, even “the zoo,” a room packed with stuffed animals. But you won’t find white bears. “No polar bears in the Adirondacks,” says Jules. Or a Sasquatch section. “Where would I put…

Edwin “Poodles” Hanneford has been called the greatest trick horseback rider of the 20th century—and possibly of all time. Born into a multigenerational English circus family and a performer from the age of five, he spoofed his superb equestrian ability by becoming a riding clown. In a red wig, clown makeup and a baggy suit, Hanneford was the first person to master a back somersault from one running horse to another following behind, and became a Guinness World Record–holder with his 26 consecutive jumps on and off a fast-moving horse. He was also, for some 37 years, a resident of Kattskill Bay, on the eastern shore of Lake George. Poodles and his bareback-riding siblings, Elizabeth “Lizzie” and George—born in 1891, 1893 and 1895—along with their widowed mother, the ringmaster for…

I had been hiking the Northville-Placid Trail (NPT) for five hours, heading “SoBo”—southbound in NPT parlance—aiming to meet up with friends hiking NoBo. They were on a multi-day excursion; I was braving an overnight, in and out. I started from Wakely Dam. Getting to Cedar Lakes would be about 10 miles, so I expected some woodland walking and water views and maybe some humans. One of those, named Collin, appeared about seven miles in. He had seen my people the day before. Perfect. The plan to meet near Cedar Lakes was happening. Hopefully they would make it to lean-to #1, where I’d set up camp. My one-night stand appeared shortly after six p.m. It was empty, a prize for an overnighter. I dropped my pack and planned a quick run…