Commentary

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FOLLOWING UP on his successful “Peak Finder for the Northern Adirondacks,” Thatcher Hogan has produced a Peak Finder for four of the High Peaks plus Mount Jo. The High Peaks are Algonquin Peak, Mount Colden, Phelps Mountain, and Wright Peak. The first Peak Finder covered two other High Peaks, Cascade and Whiteface, plus eight smaller…

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Most books on climate begin with the last couple of centuries—the Industrial Revolution and the onset of massive emissions of carbon dioxide—and then move to what remains of the twenty-first century. In Deep Future, Curt Stager looks at millennia, thousands of millennia, back toward the very origins of life and forward for over a hundred…

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In 1987, David Goodman got a dream job for a ski bum trying to survive as a freelance writer: the Appalachian Mountain Club hired him to write a guidebook for backcountry skiing in New England. The following year the club published Classic Backcountry Skiing: A Guide to the Best Ski Tours in New England. Unlike…

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SEVERAL YEARS AGO, we asked Bill McKibben to ski the entire Jackrabbit Trail in a single day and write about it. Saranac Lake to Keene. That’s twenty-four miles, but that wasn’t enough for McKibben. When he turned his story in, I learned he started instead at Paul Smith’s, where there is an orphan piece of…

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KRISTIN KIMBALL’S The Dirty Life is the story of an urban, highly educated woman and how she moved to the Adirondacks and learned to be a farmer. Instead of worrying about commuting and her 401K, now she thinks about the weather and whether the hogs are warm enough. This profound shift in priorities puts her…

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DURING THE DEPRESSION, how did a single mom with two kids support herself in a rural Adirondack community? From the distance of over seventy years, Gloria Stubing Rist recalls her mother as an entrepreneur who built a shack of salvaged lumber and created the Top of the Hill dance hall. “Mim” planned to sell coffee,…

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TOO OFTEN we think about the history of the Adirondacks without considering its context. We know something about the dramatic events of the 1880s and 1890s—including the establishment of the Forest Preserve and Adirondack Park and the constitutional protection of the Forest Preserve— and we recall the equally important creation of the Adirondack Park Agency…

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For me, there are two best bike rides, the one that I do whenever I can and the one that I will do when I finally have enough time. Charles Hansen lays out both of those rides and twenty- three more in 25 Bicycle Tours in the Lake Champlain Region. The ride I do whenever…

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CARLHEILMAN II takes the kind of iconic Adirondack photographs that make you want to quit your day job, blow lots of money on lenses, and head into the hills to capture some of those epic vistas yourself. The great thing about landscape photography is that everybody who wishes can shoot the same landscape. So everybody,…

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The Nature Conservancy recently published Climate Change in the Champlain Basin,which reviews weather records and other data and looks ahead to what’s in store for this century. Written by scientist Curt Stager and journalist Mary Thill, the study says the basin in recent years has seen higher temperatures, more rainfall, and later and less-frequent freeze-ups…