The only independent, nonprofit news organization solely dedicated to reporting on the Adirondack Park.
History meets tourism Adirondack historians, including me, have given short shrift to the story of Native Americans in our part of New York. We have all paid too much attention to the generally shared assumption that the Adirondack region was used only seasonally by Indians who thus had no permanently established towns or villages here.…
The giants among us For all the vaunted magnitude of the largest animal that ever lived, and still lives, consider the largest living trees. A few giant coast redwoods skyscrape nearly four hundred feet above their California roots, while the tallest tree of our eastern forests, the white pine, may shoot nearly two hundred feet toward the energy…
Beaver stew, anyone? The Adirondack Cookbook features a smiling young man on the cover, a pipe in his mouth and two big strings of fish in his hands. Of course an Adirondack cookbook should contain recipes for trout, but there are also recipes in this small spiral-bound book for these mountain edibles: wild turkey, eel, squirrel, squab, snapping turtle, bear, duck,…
Local seasonings Yvona Fast’s Garden Gourmet: Fresh & Fabulous Meals from your North Country Garden, CSA or Farmers’ Market compiles recipes from eight years of the author’s North Country Kitchen column which has run in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise since 2005. Like the weekly column, the book focuses on using local North Country produce and ingredients to create food that…
A rock-solid guidebook Standing beneath a strikingly steep, six hundred- foot dolomite tower in the Italian Alps, studying a recently published guidebook, we looked up at the rock, perplexed. The route couldn’t go that way! It just couldn’t! And it didn’t. This was our third, and final, time being misled by this beautifully produced, full-color collection of misinformation purporting to…
Join the 102 club The Adirondacks are a mishmash of municipal and county jurisdictions. Take Saranac Lake: it’s a village that straddles two counties and three towns, none of which is named Saranac Lake. Just to make things more complicated, a town in the Adirondack Park is what’s often called a township in parts of America that appreciate some sense…
A lesson for our times When we fiddle with nature, there can be unforeseen consequences. When we fiddle with nature in big ways, entire civilizations collapse. This was the essence of a densely written book, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, published in 1864 in New York and London. It…
ALTHOUGH I’VE READ several books about loons, a couple of them gloriously illustrated, Journey with the Loon strikes me as the most scientifically informed and appropriately illustrated study of loons I’ve ever experienced. David C. Evers is the executive director, founder, and chief scientist of the Biodiversity Research Institute and has been studying loons since 1987; his wife, Kate M. Taylor, has worked…
As nature lovers, we hoped to take root not just anywhere, but in, or along the edge of, a wild place. We insisted that the spot be governed by restrictions certain to prevent abuse. We had seen the landscape of our youth despoiled by “development”—a curious word often meaning the reduction of a landscape from a habitat shared democratically by thousands of species to a place dominated ruthlessly by one. Watching the pageant of nature play out at our place, a grand show with tens of thousands of actors crowding the stage, it’s clear that appointing ourselves stewards of “our” eighteen acres would be ludicrous. The web of interconnections, an “Internet” if ever there was one, is impossibly complex, so much so that it would be impossible for anyone to comprehend it, let alone manage the system intelligently. All we can do is try to be on our best behavior, live modestly, take care of our needs, and hope for the best outcomes.
Lifelong Tupper Laker Bill Frenette embodied the word “active.” Here are some highlights (you might want to go get a sandwich or something; this may take a while): He was a founder and leader of the ski patrol at the Big Tupper Ski Area, whose trails he helped design. He served as president of the…