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MY FIRST MEETING with the nature writer Bernd Heinrich came on a dark, stormy night at the Saranac Lake Free Library. He was reading from a book then in progress, The Snoring Bird, which combines a biography of the author’s entomologist father with Bernd Heinrich’s own life story. Anyone who had the privilege of being…
IT HAS BEEN SAID that we are all residents of the same country called the past. No place values its past more than Saranac Lake, and Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America: Saranac Lake will be warmly welcomed here. Authored by Neil Surprenant, director of the Joan Weill Adirondack Library at Paul Smith’s College, and…
BORN IN MALONE in 1819, William Almon Wheeler spent his early years in relative comfort. That ended precipitously when his father died at the age of thirty-seven, leaving scant resources to his wife and children; William was six months short of his tenth birthday. His determined and indefatigable mother, Eliza, kept her family together, provided…
DANIEL WAY comes by his predilection for photography naturally, or perhaps one should say genetically—he is the great-great-nephew of Seneca Ray Stoddard, pioneering photographer of the post-Civil War Adirondacks. The Glens Falls native’s love of the Adirondacks and all that there is about them may also come down from Stoddard, one of the few to…
GLENN PEARSALL has combed through long shelves of published works about early development efforts north of the Mohawk. The result is a thought-provoking book about selected (on what basis is never clearly explained) episodes in North Country history, covering the years roughly between the end of the American Revolution and 1820. The stories he tells…
SEEING WILD ANIMALS has never been easier. All you have to do these days is flop onto a couch, hit a button, and the glittering pixels of a digital television bring you images of almost any creature you like. You see it eating, sleeping, birthing, mating, dying, the works. Still, let’s get real. Ogling virtual…
CAR CAMPING is an Adirondack tradition with a long history, but not much has been written about it in comparison with the verbiage on canoeing, climbing, hunting, and so on. That gap has been narrowed with the arrival of Good Ol’ Fish Creek, Edward Larkin Jr.’s recollections of fifty-eight consecutive summers of camping at the…
Camera-ready scenery. IF YOU’RE A PHOTOGRAPHER looking for a shooter to emulate, Carl Heilman II is a fine choice. After all, Heilman has been creating iconic Adirondack images for decades, and he knows the hidden (and not-so-hidden) parts of the Adirondack Park as well as anybody. In his new book, Photographing the Adirondacks: Where to…
A photo app for autumn. You never know just how good leaf-peeping season will be. That’s OK—you can always get a dose of spectacular color in Chris Tennant and Adam Baker’s new e-book, Photographing the Adirondacks: Fall in the High Peaks Region. The 104-page PDF is available as a $7 download from www.adkbook.com. Unlike Carl…
Great Guide to a Great Camp. JUST NORTH of Newcomb sits one of the Adirondack Park’s cultural treasures: Camp Santanoni. Designed by architect Robert H. Robertson in 1892 for Albany banker Robert Pruyn, Camp Santanoni manifests all the marvelous eclecticism and attention to detail that make the Adirondack Great Camp one of our region’s chief…