Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2025 från Adirondack Life

I'VE BEEN A SKI PATROLLER AT GORE MOUNTAIN, in North Creek, for more than 20 years, and in that time I’ve seen a lot of change, more trails, more lifts and more skiers, so much so that Gore now ranks as one of the biggest in the East and is a blast to ski. But no matter how much more Gore I get, it will never be as fun as my first year there, when I was a Stooge who couldn’t ski, and Bean Dip gave me a job on top of the world. In the spring of 2001, I escaped New York City for a small town in the Adirondacks. I’d been a paramedic for 12 years in the city, and I wanted to get as far from those streets…

A decade after America’s triumph in World War I, a grateful public was still casting about for ways to honor its heroic Doughboys for making the world safe for democracy. Statuary of Brodie-helmeted infantrymen could be found in parks from sea to shining sea, obelisks and arches rose to the skies and names were etched upon tablets of stone. The Adirondack Park did not escape the monumental fervor, even though the idea behind the Forest Preserve was to protect the woods from any manmade intrusions. What was the park if not an ode to untrammeled tranquility, and what was war if not the antithesis of such an ideal? Yet the war gave currency to an idea that had been kicking around for some while. In the decades bookending the turn…

It’s still dark when my bedroom door creaks open. My father tiptoes in and sets the cat down beside me on the bed. I check the clock: 5:15. Last night we agreed on five; my father is being kind. Anyway, we both know that if light breaks and we aren’t up there, the morning will be wasted, and we might as well have slept in. Today we’re skiing up Whiteface Mountain, which looms over my hometown of Lake Placid. We’ve hosted the Olympics twice, in 1932 and again in 1980, that famous year when the U.S. beat the Russians on the hockey rink. We’re too small to ever host the Games a third time, but that doesn’t stop tourists from flocking to see the old venues—the three ice rinks under…

Martha Rebentisch fell sick with the same disease that killed her mother. She dropped out of high school and left home in New York City to fight for her life at sanatoriums, where clean country air was the only hope for survival from tuberculosis, rampant at that time. According to the Center for Disease Control, in the late 19th century and well into the 20th, one out of every seven people living in the U.S. and Europe succumbed to the bacterial disease. The odds were awful. In 1927 Martha came to Saranac Lake for treatment at the Trudeau Sanatorium, where she underwent a handful of procedures, including a thoracoplasty—removal of ribs from the chest wall to collapse the lung, the goal being to rest the organ and inactivate the disease.…

“… the feeling that goes through me when I think of you is a bit as I feel when the sun shines on me,” wrote Georgia O’Keeffe in a 1932 letter to her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, on her way to visit him at his family’s Lake George estate. From 1918 to 1934 the couple spent part of every year living and working at the lake. “Somehow it doesn’t seem fair for two people to have all that we have in our lives of beauty and love,” wrote Faith Weston, of her time in the High Peaks with her husband, Harold, one of the foremost Adirondack painters of the 20th century.…

As an entryway piece it’s stunning: a massive, rotating millstone dangling from the ceiling, made of foam but looking as if its weight could stop Wile E. Coyote in his tracks. The sculpture, A Stone Alone, greets visitors to The Mill, a former grain mill that’s been transformed into an arts center with galleries, a performance space and a speakeasy that slings craft cocktails and small plates. The sculpture is an immediate reminder of the building’s history—it originally opened in 1952 as the Champlain Valley Seed Cooperative—but there’s a dissonance in the symbolism of the solitary millstone, a tool uncoupled from the partner that gave it purpose. It strikes an unexpected note in a space dedicated to community engagement. But dissonance might be the point. The unexpected can offer an…

Look Up Showings of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, were more common at lower latitudes in 2024 due to the sun being at the solar maximum of its 11-year solar cycle, when the sun’s magnetic poles flip and the star blazes with solar flares and coronal mass eruptions (CME), sending stronger streams of solar wind toward Earth. That activity is expected to continue in frequency into 2025. There is no specific month, season, or time of night to look for auroras; they occur based on the timing, varying speeds, intensity, and angles of CMEs hitting Earth. To track the activity, photographer Jeff Nadler uses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aurora forecast (https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast), the SpaceWeather website (www.spaceweatherlive.com/en) and associated apps. He’s also an administrator of the Facebook group Aurora…

If you check the index of any Harry Houdini biography, you will find an entry for Lake Placid. In the late winter of 1921, Houdini shot the cold-weather scenes for The Man from Beyond in and around the community. Houdini spent March and early April in Lake Placid before production shifted to Niagara Falls, the site of the film’s climactic scene. Between Lake Placid and Niagara Falls, filming lasted 18 weeks, an extraordinarily expensive shoot for its day. At the time of The Man from Beyond’s April 1922 release, posters promoting the film depicted the cliffhanger scene at Niagara Falls, never referring to the significant portions of the film shot in the Adirondacks. At the time he filmed The Man from Beyond, Houdini was one of the world’s most famous…

SPECTACULAR, MAGNIFICENT, incomparable Lake George. … As President Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to his daughter dated May 31, 1791: “Lake George is without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw; formed by a contour of mountains into a basin … finely interspersed with islands, its water limpid as crystal, and the mountain sides covered with rich groves … down to the water-edge: here and there precipices of rock to checker the scene and save it from monotony.” My latest Lake George photography book features the beautiful lake and scenic mountains, bubbling streams and waterfalls, and quaint hamlets and byways within the Lake George basin. In the 15 years I’ve explored the region since my first book, I’ve been able to cover even more ground, since new land…