Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2026 i Adirondack Life

When I was a senior in high school, I was president of the school’s art club, which meant it was up to me to plan our yearly trip. At this small rural school, our graduating classes were about 80 to 100 kids. Most of the families were either farmers or worked in the local salt mine, and I don’t remember any of my friends ever traveling even as far as the Adirondacks. I pitched the trip to the art teacher—hiking, camping, sketching in the woods—and he got it approved by the administration. Most kids in the area were comfortable in the woods, hunting, fishing, camping. But the dozen or so kids in the art club were not. They were the art nerds of our high school—their parents, like mine, transplants…

ON A SATURDAY IN KEESEVILLE the skies above the Ausable Brewing Company are freshly scrubbed after a midday shower. The air is a cocktail of summer and fall, the sun low on the horizon. The line at the outdoor beer counter is a dozen bodies long and, at the Northern Feast food truck, a cluster of people study a chalk-board menu. Beneath the brewery’s timber-frame pavilion, patrons lean on tables littered with pint glasses, dogs strain at their leashes and a local band works through a set of ’90s rock anthems. There’s always a celebratory family-reunion vibe at the brewery. Strangers fold into circles with new friends. Mismatched chairs and tables are arranged to make room for late arrivals. Dylan Badger keeps the beer line moving, chatting with customers over his…

Jean Hennessy has several old casket handles. After the construction of the 96-year-old Conklingville Dam that formed the Sacandaga Reservoir, all sorts of artifacts emerged. Hennessy is the Town of Day historian, keeper of archives and the schoolroom-sized museum at Day Center, in the southern Adirondacks. Her parents had a camp along the reservoir—renamed Great Sacandaga Lake in the 1960s—and she spent every summer here, from “the day school ended until the day before it started.” Hennessy moved to Day three years ago as a year-rounder, living by her family camp perched high above the water. But on a rainy late-fall morning, the lake-bottom is exposed, drawn far below its warm-weather depths, when summer residents and vacationers come to swim, boat and play. Now is when the past is revealed,…

Microplastics: those teensy bits shed from synthetic clothing, food containers and water bottles that have been linked to cancer and other health problems. They’re everywhere, even at the tippy top of the Hudson River, on the southwest slope of New York’s highest mountain. In 2023, researchers who took measurements along the length of the Hudson were surprised to find higher than expected levels of microplastics in Mount Marcy’s Lake Tear of the Clouds. A research expedition spearheaded by the nonprofit Adirondack Hamlets to Huts returned last summer, reporting a significant uptick in the lake water’s average particles per milliliter, from 9.45 to 16.54. But a nearby trailless waterbody, Moss Pond, showed only 0.73 particles per milliliter—suggesting that hikers to Lake Tear of the Clouds may be leaving more than footprints.…

Iinsisted that we leave our Brooklyn home at 8:30 p.m. one Friday last winter so that we could wake up in the Adirondacks. On the final mile of the drive, with the moon lighting up the road’s snowbanks, we realized it was our fifth winter having a place up here—and it’s been a most wonderful adventure. Ten months into the pandemic, in fall 2020, I’d driven to Keene for a three-day solo bicycle trip. Recovering at the Holiday Inn in Saranac Lake after a hilly day, it came to me. We were wrong to think the Hudson Valley or Catskills should be our boundary for finding a house with easy access to nature. I had always perceived the Adirondacks as being only about the distant High Peaks. Ten minutes later,…

It was never an easy gig, peddling. Never the goal, the thing to go for. The idea, always, was to outdistance it, put the peddling life behind you, find your future not on the muddy road but in a gleaming, well-lit store. That’s how you aimed to be remembered—as the hard-striving owner of the upmarket emporium your regulars relied on for good value and a little style. And the Adirondacks needed stores. Retail was slow to muscle into the late-settled wilderness. Peddlers, prospective shopkeepers to a man, discerned an opportunity. From the towns and cities flanking the region’s green perimeter, they loaded up their backpacks or horse-drawn wagons and set out. How many Jewish peddlers threaded in and out of the North Country in the second half of the 19th…

For more than a century, Charlie’s Inn in Lake Clear has occupied real estate simultaneously at the center of the universe and the middle of nowhere. Charlie’s opened as the Junction House hotel in 1891, an interruption in the howling wilderness where lonely railroad lines that came to be owned by the New York Central and the Delaware & Hudson—the Athens and Sparta of early Adirondack railroading—grudgingly touched. The original station at Lake Clear Junction was soon replaced by the one that still stands today, just a short walk from Charlie’s, where it served not just as a junction of steel rails, but of classes, lifestyles and personalities. Charlie’s architecture said it all, a cornice of civilization hung on a plain shoebox of frontierism, a spot from which travelers had…

ON A BLUSTERY FALL AFTERNOON, after a series of wind delays, Mimi Wacholder leans out from a watch stand on the ski jumps in Lake Placid. She looks on as her son Tate Frantz launches himself into space, his body angled sharply forward over his skis. Frantz is a boyish-looking 20-year-old who grew up here in the village. Over the last year, he has emerged as the most successful American male ski-jumper ever to compete on the World Cup circuit. “It’s pretty astounding,” Wacholder says. “He’s kind of come onto the scene as a young gun.” The expectation is that Frantz will build on his current momentum through this winter’s World Cup competitions, capping it with a spot on the U.S. ski-jumping team that will travel to the Milan Cortina…

Adorning the front of Mark Fridén’s house in Star Lake are a Ukrainian flag, Tibetan Buddhist Lung Ta prayer banners, a North Country barn quilt and a sign he made from pieces of old license plates, bearing the name of his house: “Ainahau,” Hawaiian for “cool place.” The cosmopolitan display echoes Fridén’s eclectic life. If he had a formal résumé, it would need an index with enough entries to make you think he must be multiple people: Ice Dancer, Rodeo Rider, Winter Olympics TV Broadcast Consultant, Historian, Civil Servant, Genealogist, Collector, and more, much more. Sitting with him in his living room, I ask him to tell me his life story. Two hours later, we’re not even close to done. Although he was born in Gary, Indiana, Fridén considers himself…

March 1971, during one of Caroga Lake’s infamous late-winter snowstorms, the Caroga Lake Evangelical Chapel, built in 1929, began to buckle. Trish and Jack DeWeese and their two young sons, who owned a home on East Caroga Lake, watched the snow pile up as the storm unleashed its power. Jack and the boys shoveled off their roof and the boys happily leaped into six feet of snow below. On Sunday, March 28, residents of Caroga Lake who lived near the chapel began to hear a disturbing sound as the roof started to crack. Someone was hired to remove the layers of ice and snow, but his weight created an even more dangerous threat, so the effort was abandoned. The blizzard continued into the evening hours, and the DeWeese family ventured…