Innehållsförteckning för Guide to the Great Outdoors 2022 från Adirondack Life

Scott van Laer, a recently retired Department of Environmental Conservation forest ranger, knows a thing or two about how to safely recreate outdoors. After three decades working to protect the environment while educating, rescuing and recovering folks, first in the Catskills and then in the Adirondacks, he’s an expert and then some. These days he shares his knowledge as director of the Paul Smith’s College Visitor Interpretive Center (www.paulsmithsvic.org). He was gracious enough to chat with Adirondack Life about common questions—and myths—that arise when playing in the great outdoors. Does peeing around your campsite keep wildlife away? If anything it might be the inverse—when animals mark their territory, that’s a boundary, so other predators might urinate adjacent to it. But urinating around your sleeping area is completely unnecessary. People should…

IN 1973, WE VISITED FRIENDS IN LAKE Placid, on our first trip to the Adirondacks. Starting with that visit, which included a hike around Avalanche Lake and up the Colden Trap Dike, the Adirondacks became our favorite place for hiking and camping. That autumn, we returned and climbed Giant Mountain’s Ridge trail, starting from Chapel Pond. From the summit we continued to Rocky Peak Ridge, spent the night at Mary Louise Pond, and descended to the trailhead on Route 9, in New Russia. It was a trip we would repeat more than a dozen times over the next 30 years. Why repeat the same hike so many times? After all, this 5,000-foot uphill climb, from the trailhead to Giant Mountain, takes serious effort. Maybe we kept doing it because it…

While there are many flies that are productive in the Adirondacks, the following were designed by local anglers, with local waters the inspiration for the patterns. You can’t talk about flies for the Adirondacks without mentioning Fran Betters. He was born and raised in Wilmington, and learned fishing and fly-tying from his father, who was a well-respected fly-fisherman and hunter. Fran was immersed in his father’s outdoors lifestyle and his inner circle of legendary angler friends like Ray Bergman and “Red” Wilbur. Fran went on to open his Adirondack Sport Shop, in Wilmington, where he tied flies and built fly rods until his death in 2009. Fran was an innovative fly-tier. He designed flies that were specifically made for the tumbling freestone streams of the Adirondacks—big buoyant flies that could…

ADVENTURE NO. 1 GILL BROOK TRAIL | TOWN OF KEENE THE CLEAR POOLS DOTTING GILL BROOK are popular places to cool off on the way to or from other hot spots in the Adirondack Mountain Reserve—Indian Head, the Colvin Range, Nippletop—but the waterway can be its own destination. The Gill Brook trail follows along its waterfall-rich namesake before intersecting with the cutoff back to the Lake Road, making for a 1.5-mile loop—though there’s about a 2-mile walk from the gate to the start of the route. You can detour to the Gill Brook Flume on a signed spur just before reaching the trailhead. IF YOU GO: The Adirondack Mountain Reserve parking area is located off Route 73. Reservations are required between May 1 and October 31, even for those getting…

When I start to miss my hometown in the Adirondacks, I leave my Brooklyn apartment and start walking south. After a mile and a half, I reach the northern edge of Prospect Park, but I don’t head into the woods. Instead, I enter the Brooklyn Museum, hike up to the fifth floor, and over to the wall of the American Wing devoted to the late-19th-century Aesthetic Movement. Next to a series of four oil paintings by Elizabeth Boott Duveneck is the work I came to see: Winslow Homer’s In the Mountains. He started the painting during a trip to the Adirondacks in 1877; on the same visit, he finished perhaps his best-known Adirondack work, Two Guides, which features the region’s most famous curmudgeon, Old Mountain Phelps. Although Homer often stayed…

My TOBIE trail adventure last summer was perfectly planned—in my head, at least. With a pledge to make my 2021 Adirondack vacation compensate for the one I missed in 2020 due to the pandemic, I knew exactly how I’d tackle the 16-mile trail connecting the communities of Thendara, Old Forge, Big Moose, Inlet and Eagle Bay (TOBIE). The strategy: I would walk or bike a different short segment of the trail each day throughout the week of my annual family reunion. And I’d check it out at a speed slower than the usual car rides on which I’d first noticed TOBIE’s brown trail signs, as I whipped along Route 28 for ice cream, donuts and other critical camp survival supplies. Traversing TOBIE would be an excuse to sneak off with…

Last spring, six paddlers representing three Haudenosaunee nations—two Mohawks from Akwesasne, two Oneidas and two Onondagas—began a journey along the Northern Forest Canoe Trail (NFCT). Hickory Edwards, a member of the Onondaga Nation and one of the Northeast’s best-known and most-experienced indigenous paddlers, led the group, beginning in Old Forge. Over the next couple of weeks they paddled on to Swanton, Vermont, following the 740-mile NFCT that runs from Old Forge to Fort Kent, Maine. Hickory Edwards told me that it was an “awesome” adventure. “I never really canoed through the Adirondacks before,” he said. “We’re used to more just being on the water, but this time we were portaging.” The Iroquois paddlers’ route has been explored by many others, but what made their trip special was that it continued…

When I told my 16-year-old daughter I was going on a seven-or-so-mile round-trip hike alone last September, she acted like I was marching to my doom. Her vote of no-confidence was, I thought, laughable. Sure, I don’t generally hike alone. And, yes, I’ve always been more at home in a library than on a trail, but I’m not completely clueless in the wilderness. I can start a fire and pitch a tent. I sign in at every trailhead and follow the tenets of Leave No Trace. I tote along plenty of food and water and layers of practical clothing. And I know my limits, sticking with easy-to-moderate, well-marked treks. My destination for this trip was no exception; the route to Pine Lake, in the Essex Chain Lakes Complex, follows a…

BY THE TIME I REACHED THE FIRST CLIMB of the Over Easy Mountain Bike Route, the whole canopy bowed with the weight of the rain. My single-track ribbon had become a river full of frogs. This is not an exaggeration. My back tire was leaving a wake. Turns out frogs stand their ground. Their eyes glowed in the light of my head lamp as I pedaled toward and then around them. Lesson 1: Be the frog, unbothered and unwavering. The Over Easy Mountain Bike Route was dreamt up by Keegan and Shane Kramer, two bicycle-loving locals. It connects Bark Eater Trails Alliance trail systems in three separate communities—Lake Placid, Wilmington and Elizabethtown—and is miserable by design. It’s about 93 miles, give or take (depending on wrong turns) and gains 11,500…

BEGINNING IN EARLY SPRING 2020, I started hiking the trails at Massawepie, a Scout camp 12 miles west of Tupper Lake. In my younger years I was a camper and on staff at the camp, and I’ve been a volunteer there ever since. In the early stages of the coronavirus lockdown, I’d go there every week, often with my girlfriend, Beth; sometimes my sister Sherry, also Massawepie staff alumni, would join us. It was a welcome escape from the overwhelming aspects of life during that time. On these hikes I photographed the landscape, noticing through the lens of my camera how the seasons transitioned. One of my jobs at Massawepie had been overseeing the trail department, hiking every route again and again. But on my more recent visits, I found…

Peaks and Ponds is a collaborative work written by Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) staff members in honor of ADK’s centennial, 1922 to 2022. The organization was founded by a group of people who recognized the need to protect and preserve the Great North Woods of the Adirondacks. This guidebook introduces lesser-known trails and locales in the Adirondacks in order to encourage exploration throughout the seemingly boundless park. The treks were selected to provide a wilderness experience for all hikers, whether new or seasoned. The book is also a call to action. While adventuring on these trails, the authors picked up and carried out trash, dismantled inappropriate fire rings, dug plentiful catholes and did their utmost to minimize their own unavoidable impacts on the landscape. To protect this place and preserve…