July/August 2020

Adirondack Life

Adirondack Life magazine is your source for the best of New York's Adirondack Park.

Adirondack Life1 min read
Adirondack Life
CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Lisa Lincoln CONTROLLER Joni Manning EDITOR-AT-LARGE Elizabeth Folwell EDITOR Annie Stoltie SENIOR EDITORS Lisa Bramen, Niki Kourofsky DESIGNER Mark Mahorsky CONTRIBUTORS Nancie Battaglia, Mark Bowie, Carrie Marie Burr, Joe
Adirondack Life3 min read
A New View
This spring, Joe Connelly, a paramedic with the Johnsburg Rescue Squad, described this uncertain time—the age of COVID—as bringing “the same mix of fear and confusion, sadness and elation as a months-long ambulance ride.” Connelly would know—for deca
Adirondack Life3 min read
Box 410
I just read “Fast Times on the Hudson” (June 2020), by Christopher Shaw. I could not help but think back to my very first descent of the Hudson River in 1983 with Adirondack River Outfitters and guide Gary Staab, one of the rafting company’s owners a
Adirondack Life2 min read
Northern Lights
Pre-hunt breakfasts of condensed split-pea soup slathered on bread. Practical jokes involving wrestling a rubber snake in the Cascade Lakes. A gruff mountain-man exterior with an inside “as soft as a sneaker full of puppy poop.” These are a few of th
Adirondack Life1 min read
Make a Balsam Pillow
FABRIC: Choose cloth that breathes, such as 100-percent cotton. Calico or quilt-weight material works well, allowing the scent to escape but keeping the needles from poking through. PILLOW: The size is up to you. Sew three sides and leave an opening
Adirondack Life6 min read
A Ranger Problem
As the first half of 2020 has shown, New York State Forest Rangers are blessed, and burdened, with a wide-ranging portfolio. In February and early March, rangers managed an influx of winter hikers on popular High Peaks trails, including one March wee
Adirondack Life3 min read
Colorful Character
The Adirondack Park is home to untold species of arachnid, but none is more fascinating and enigmatic than Misumena vatia, the goldenrod crab spider. Though it’s active during the day, it is far from conspicuous. It is, instead, a master of subterfug
Adirondack Life5 min read
Tyll Sass
Tyll Sass’s young years were filled with the magic of the Adirondacks—long hikes, camping and fishing. It was the freedom and space to be a child, to play and explore miles of wilderness. But his start in life was more harrowing. Born in Nazi Germany
Adirondack Life3 min read
Growing up Minerva
In a land of small towns, my hometown is one of the smallest. A map dot so tiny, it’s often left off the map entirely; its presence is as rare as finding my name on a rack of tiny license plates in a Lake George T-shirt store when I was a kid. Growin
Adirondack Life10 min read
Ballad Of The Bark Eater
THE STORY OF ABEL JACOB was told to me over several days in the late winter of 1852 while visiting a man colorfully known as Picker T. T. Dennis, who lived just outside of North Creek. I was sent to Mr. Dennis by the purveyor of a store there in town
Adirondack Life1 min read
Wish You were Here
WHEN MEN DO COME TO THE LAKE they feel at once the distance from the troubling front page of the world’s newspapers. As a man stands by a deserted Adirondack lake on a July day he can feel more than that; everything is as it was last year, the year b
Adirondack Life3 min read
Up And Coming
BABY SNAPPING TURTLES EMERGE FROM SOFT SOIL as summer ends and autumn begins. Having avoided being sniffed out and devoured by raccoons, skunks and foxes while still nestled in their eggs, they are now ready to run a gauntlet of gulls, crows and othe
Adirondack Life8 min read
The Beat goes On. and On and On …
ON an early April afternoon last year, snow clinging to Old Forge’s Bald Mountain and the Fulton Chain still frozen, two men ate lunch at The Tavern, in Eagle Bay. They’d been at the restaurant a few times before. They mentioned that they were new to
Adirondack Life3 min read
Cottage country
VACATIONING AT THESE CUTE COLONIES is a trend stretching back to the 1920s, when visitors began to drive to the Adirondacks. Descendants of the very first cottagers are keeping the tradition alive. Architecture and signage were all about motorist app
Adirondack Life5 min read
Animal Crossing
When Maureen Clark and her husband, Paul Madden, volunteered to have trail cameras installed on their Forestport property for wildlife monitoring, they weren’t sure what to expect. The images later revealed a variety of species—black bear, deer, fox
Adirondack Life6 min read
Nicanor and Ellen
Two early hoteliers in the Adirondack High Peaks region were Nicanor and Ellen Miller, who owned or managed inns in Keene and North Elba during the 1870s and 1880s. The Millers’ establishments—Keene Center House, Cascade House and Adirondack Lodge—ho
Adirondack Life4 min read
Family Legacy
The brilliant blue skies and misty violet High Peaks framed the backdrop of North Elba cemetery in Lake Placid last summer—a lovely and fitting scene for a special memorial. A group had already assembled at the grave site and, for the first time ever
Adirondack Life8 min readDiscrimination & Race Relations
My ADIRONDACK Life
WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME ABOUT MY LIFE AS A BLACK person growing up in the Adirondacks among a predominately white population during the 1950s and ’60s, several persistent images explode in my mind. In one, I was a high-school student in the small iron-ore
Adirondack Life5 min readUnited States
Bootleg Harry
The revelation came in 1977, when I was 16. My grandfather Harry Feinberg, or “Popa Harry” as I called him, offered to take me to lunch at the Adirondack Hotel before I joined my high school’s orientation canoe-camping trip on Long Lake. Though my fa

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