Adirondack Explorer

I don’t need to heap up superlatives for the views from Hurricane Mountain. Breathtaking, spectacular, magnificent, etc. You’ve heard them all before. And you’ve seen the photos. Hell, you’ve probably been there. With the views, of course, come crowd

Historic buildings and sites can and do have a place in the Adirondack Forest Preserve. Sites like John Brown’s Farm, the forts at Crown Point, Great Camp Santanoni, Camp Intermission on Lake Colby where the state has an environmental education camp,

The first time I saw an evening grosbeak I experienced a neck-snapping déjà vu as I visualized a brilliantly yellow 1956 Ford Thunderbird with a black convertible top that a neighbor used to park immediately outside my bedroom window. When I opened m

Chad Dawson wanted more deliberation. The wilderness expert who taught resource management classes at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry resigned from the Adirondack Park Agency board in December. He anno

State Route 28 will take you to North Creek and, if you’re not careful, right by it. When driving northwest from the Northway, slow down after the Ski Bowl and look for the right onto 28N. At the four corners, turn left onto Main Street. Slow down ev

The recent spread of non-native forest pests in the Adirondacks brings new urgency to New York State’s firewood transport regulations. Designed to keep campers and others from moving tree killers to new woods, the regulations restrict hauling of untr

Somewhere high over Lake Ontario last February the weather gods were cackling with wild abandon. They had cooked up a little lake-effect snow, which is effectively a storm system without the system, a blizzard-in-a-bottle created by frigid winds free

Hiking through the pitch-black forest, I noticed the dirt trail had disappeared and leaves covered the forest floor beneath me. Had I lost the trail? I raised my headlamp and lit up the trees around me. I was only a few feet off the path, so I got ba

In the five years before the iron mine closed for good in 1930, miners hauled 400,000 tons of the world’s finest ore out of Barton Hill. When they left to mine in other Adirondack mountains nearby, Barton Hill’s gutted innards went quiet, got dark an

They’ve talked about bigfoot and quicksand, John Brown and the moon landing, national parks and national trails. In wide-ranging discussions punctuated with raucous laughter and frequent profanity, the Foot Stuff Podcast crew delves deep into wildern

Ahead of the 1980 Winter Olympics, local officials decided they had to fight one of the very things drawing people to Lake Placid from around the world—the snow. To ease the commute through the Adirondacks, they kept roadways clear by dumping unprece

Jerry Delaney Sr. thought his skidder was blowing apart. The heavy-duty transporter for felled trees was shaking. The noise was so loud that he shut it off and jumped. Then he saw it, a military jet screaming overhead, level with the treetops. Delane

In regard to your article about dams on the Saranac River (November/December): The protection/conservation population constantly encourages the use of renewable energy sources. Yet you as a group constantly gripe about solar or wind farms—and heaven

It snowed hard and the wind blew strong and cold in Lake Placid on the afternoon of Jan. 22, 2004. Looking down the icy bobsled run atop Mount Van Hoevenberg, world-class skeleton racer Courtney Yamada clutched her 75-pound sled, a piece of metal on

Love brought Diane Fish to the Adirondacks. Although she was raised nearby in Bennington, Vermont, and Williamstown, Massachusetts, she didn’t know about the Adirondacks until she started dating her future husband, Peter, who spent summers in the par

The Adirondack Park contains the most significant tracts of wildland in the eastern United States, including more than a million acres of public forest preserve classified as wilderness, which is defined as follows by the Adirondack Park State Land M

The Masten House has been sold and will be a private residence, according to an attorney for the buyer. The Newcomb mansion, previously owned by the State University of New York’s Environmental Science and Forestry College Foundation, was sold at the

Adirondack lake advocates want stronger state protections against aquatic invaders after boats carrying damaging species delivered some close calls in 2020. Some even question whether New York’s regulators are doing enough to enforce laws already on

If there’s a tree in the Adirondacks I love more than any other, it’s Tsuga canadensis, known to most of us as eastern hemlock, or simply hemlock. Hemlocks are grand—perhaps the biggest trees in the region by volume—and stand in our woods like shaggy

In mid-September, Katie Rhodes and Bethany Garretson were coming down off Panther Mountain. The sun had just risen and there was a blanket of clouds hanging over the High Peaks. “You could just see those grand mountains poking out from them,” Rhodes