The only independent, nonprofit news organization solely dedicated to reporting on the Adirondack Park.
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As the author of the “Accident Reports” column in Adirondac, I am always amazed at the number of individuals who say that’s the first thing they read in the magazine. And so Peter Bronski’s book At the Mercy of the Mountains should have an immediate audience eager to learn about the tragedies, unsolved mysteries and…
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The Northern Forest Canoe Trail (NFCT), formally incorporated in 2000, winds for 740 miles from Old Forge, in the western Adirondacks, to Fort Kent, Maine, on the Canadian border. Its interconnected waterways and portages trace paddling routes used hundreds of years ago by Native Americans and fur traders in New York, Vermont, southern Quebec, New…
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Bill McKibben, fresh out of Harvard, where he was editor of the Harvard Crimson newspaper, landed a job as a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1982. Early in his career, while grinding out pieces for “The Talk of the Town” section of the magazine, he began to emphasize the “physicalness of the world,”…
No one knows the Northville-Placid Trail better than Jeffrey and Donna Case. They have hiked it each spring for more than 20 years, so it’s only natural that they would be called on to rewrite the Adirondack Mountain Club’s guidebook for the 132-mile trail.
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On my mother’s side I trace my Adirondack ancestry back seven generations. That’s hardly a big deal. American toads, red-backed salamanders, garter snakes and their cousin reptiles and amphibians have been breeding, feeding and dying here, with interruptions for ice ages, for untold thousands of generations. They’re the real Adirondack natives. By comparison, bears, moose,…
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The Adirondack landscape of Lueza Thirkield Gelb’s memoir, Schroon Lake, is not the stuff of High Peaks travelogues and dark Romantic vistas. It’s well-groomed and meticulous, a place where homes have names—like Almanole, or The Big Place—and long, curling driveways. Where deviled eggs are cooled on lake ice and sofas swing on the porch. Boathouses,…
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People in Lake Placid knew that their longtime village and town historian, Mary MacKenzie, had written on local history for many years. But hardly anyone knew how prolifically, or how diversely, or what a dogged and accomplished researcher she was. “I don’t think most people had any sense of the real magnitude of the work…
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In her new book of essays, At the End of the Road, Ruth Mary Lamb reflects on her experiences living in a remote valley west of Lake George. In 1990 she and her husband, Sandy, left their busy life in Boston to live in a ramshackle farmhouse they dubbed Journey’s End. Ours was a reverse…
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This past fall, Adirondack lakes and ponds got some much-needed good news. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, eight states and a host of environmental organizations reached a settlement in a suit filed in 1999 against American Electric Power (AEP), an Ohio-based power company with coal-burning plants in five states. To cut back the sulfur and…
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Larry Weill has been many things in his life: financial planner, technical writer, trainer, Naval officer. He’s also been a wilderness ranger in the Adirondacks, and that led to another item on his resume—storyteller. Weill shares his experiences from his three years as a ranger in the West Canada Lakes Wilderness Area, in the late…