Innehållsförteckning för 2021 At Home in the Adirondacks från Adirondack Life

I’ve known Alison Haas for almost 30 years—first as a fast, fawn-legged 13-year-old who joined my varsity relay team when I was a high-school senior. And decades later in the Adirondacks when she was hired at the Lake Placid Olympic Museum. We’d grown up on the shelf of the St. Lawrence River Valley, but we both settled in the mountains. Today Alison’s leading the museum, but the wild surroundings of her Wilmington home have triggered her creative side, something that seems to happen to people when they give themselves to this landscape. Ferns, cinquefoil, cow vetch, daisies, Queen Anne’s lace—in the beginning Alison loved their shapes and how their colors morphed according to season, so she’d pick some during her walks along her property, later pressing them in the pages…

Emmett and Ethan Smith are on a mission to change the way you think about the electricity that powers your house—to think about it as a local good, like something you buy at the farmers’ market, something rooted in Adirondack history, and something that can save the planet. “You’re actually making this conscientious decision about who is putting that energy into the grid on your behalf,” says Ethan. Your lights and washing machine and laptop could be powered by a multinational conglomerate or a local firm, using coal or nuclear or natural gas or solar or wind. It’s your choice. The Smiths and their business, Northern Power & Light, want you to choose a little hydropower dam on a little Adirondack river. When Emmett was nine and Ethan was 14,…

In 2017 I announced a bid for the US House of Representatives. A few months before the campaign launched, I listed my five-bedroom/five-bath house in downtown Keene. The timing was not ideal, and the market was unrecognizable from today, but the decision was sound. Even with the privilege of living in Keene, I couldn’t stand the sound of waking up to traffic and I swore I’d never clean another toilet. Now I use an outhouse six months each year. I made a good profit off the sale. But I had no regular source of income for the past year, as I’d been running for office. Despite great credit, having raised half a million dollars in six months for my campaign, and the money from the sale of the house in…

In 2013, Franklin-Essex-Hamilton Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) decided that, when it comes to career goals, Building Trades students should start small—tiny, even. Since then juniors and seniors at the Adirondack Educational Center, in Saranac Lake, have built and auctioned off seven tiny homes of various styles, while adding carpentry, electrical, HVAC and plumbing to their résumés. The students design the structures from top to bottom, coming up with creative ways to make each small-scale living space unique. “We try to do something different every year,” says Clarence Brockway, who teaches the program. This year’s project was a 280-square-foot, barn-style beauty (shown above) with an open loft and fold-out deck. It sold at auction for $30,100—a little higher than normal, helping to offset the higher cost of building materials…

Farmer Lissa Goldstein likes her produce to be pretty—red radishes free of any trace of the soil that cradled them; gently dimpled blueberries; kohlrabi the color of an Adirondack twilight. The vegetables should be wholesome and look the part. She’s a perfectionist that way. Goldstein, 36, and her staff of four at Wild Work Farm grow three-dozen crops in the fertile soil of the Ausable River floodplain in Keene Valley. The setting is as picture perfect as the produce Wild Work sells at the Keene farmers’ market, local restaurants and through a farm share. A bend in the river hugs cultivated acres. Weathered red barns and a white farmhouse stand as testament to more than 100 years of Goldstein’s family making a living from the property. Mountains rise steeply on…

Passing through a forest it’s easy to focus on the familiar, the exceptional. Is that deafening teacher, teacher call an ovenbird hiding in a brambly thicket? Did a red eft just slither between a tangle of twigs and a mud puddle? There’s dazzling diversity to the flora and fauna we can see and hear in the Adirondacks. But so much of our landscape—or any ecosystem—is invisible, high in the canopy or beneath the surface. There are individuals, of course, but each is part of a complex community. Susan Hopkins, a retired postal clerk with four decades of deep involvement in fungi of all kinds, explains, “What we’re seeing here does not work as a single organism, it’s about the common good. A forest is all about interdependency. Birds depend on…

The recent wave of interest in growing native plants to provide food and habitat for wildlife, from foraging birds to pollinating insects, is exciting. It has created an industry demand for attractive, garden-worthy plants that aren’t just aesthetically pleasing to us, they support critical ecology in turn. Yet with all due consideration for pollinators and wildlife, there is one animal we must also consider differently as we garden in much of North America. That is the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). The following is a selection of plants from the 75 annuals and biennials, perennials, ferns, grasses, sedges and shrubs listed in our Deer-Resistant Native Plants for the Northeast, that deer seldom browse. It is prudent to remember that common names are not reliable for identification and purchasing purposes, as they…

FOR THE LAST WEEK I’VE BEEN IN THE ADIRONDACKS, not visiting my new land. My land is just a couple miles up a hill from the cottage I’ve been renting for the past two summers. I’ve run up that hill again and again to the roundabout near my land on my morning jog. I circle the sign with the name of the road that now appears on my tax bill but never head down the road to my actual address. There are many things I could do on my land. I’ve brought four grape plants up from New York City that I took the time to cut from their mother vine and root during the spring, with the purpose of planting them on my land and taking the first steps…

Having spent many happy days on the shores of Tupper Lake, we wanted to make it our second home. We didn’t have a big budget, but both of us are architects, so we had lots of creativity and a desire to keep our hands busy. We wanted a modern Adirondack aesthetic, and we wanted it to be simple and beautiful. The end result was an eight-foot-by-24-foot tiny house with a nice kitchen with apartment-sized appliances and a big couch for watching TV or taking naps. We used cork flooring, red cedar siding, clear maple built-ins and fresh colors to keep it warm and fun. The summer of 2014 we settled into a private campground. Our boys—at that time nine and 11—and our golden retriever puppy, Vesta, filled the house. At…

You care about the Adirondacks and do your part to be a good steward along the trail, on the water and in all the wild places in between. But what about your private property? Whether you own land the size of a beach blanket or have a sprawling estate, there are plenty of ways to use your land for good. Love It Show your land some TLC by eliminating the use of harmful chemicals. Pesticides may kill pesky bugs and weeds, but they can also poison non-targeted plants and animals. Pesticides have been connected to the collapse of bee populations and fertilizers can trickle into streams and lakes, harming fish and invertebrates. Sodium chloride can be toxic, too. Adirondack winters bring ice, which can lead to treacherous sidewalks and driveways.…

Taking the LEED FOR MIKE AND MARCI PHINNEY, the lake house they built in Hague isn’t just their dream home, it’s a showcase of the kind of green architecture their Saratoga Springs firm, Phinney Design Group, specializes in. The structure, a hybrid of Japanese and Adirondack influences, was built on the same footprint as the “time capsule of the ’70s” raised ranch that was there when they bought it in 2012. They salvaged what they could, reusing most of the old siding as wainscoting and donating plumbing fixtures, sliding doors and whatever else still had useful life in it. With that fresh slate, they installed geothermal heating and cooling, used state-of-the-art insulation and opted for materials, including lumber and stone, sourced from within 100 miles. “We happen to live in…

When I was in my 20s and early 30s, I spent most winters living in Belize. I appreciated the respect and care Belizeans gave their aging family members. It was inspiring, and influenced my decision to build a tiny house on 120 acres of wildlife refuge in Jay, where my mother and stepfather reside. I am a minimalist, so simplifying my and my teenage son Bladen’s lifestyle was appealing. I was also motivated by eliminating a rent or mortgage payment, and having hiking and ski trails right out my door. I began my research by exploring yurts, but under New York State building codes they’re considered tents and not allowed as permanent homes. Next I looked at tiny houses on trailers, but learned that they’re considered mobile homes and can…

Farmer Dillon Klepetar scratched his head through a wool cap, holding an oversized wrench in his other hand. He’d been retrofitting the farm’s tractor to run on diesel produced from pig and beef fat, making it the only one of its kind for miles. Although the ability to generate biodiesel from soybean and canola feedstocks is well established, fuel refined from animal fat is still relatively rare. Thirty-five-year-old Klepetar owns Farmstead Catering at Echo Farm, in Whallonsburg, which caters weddings and other special events from the output of its 170 acres. The pastoral landscape is a juxtaposition of old and new. A milking barn made of hand-hewn beams sits on an aging stone foundation adjacent to plastic greenhouses equipped with modern irrigation. A small staff of young adults busy themselves…