East St. Regis worth protecting
It’s the first week of May. You can still see snow in the High Peaks. You know skiers are still getting turns in up there. On this day, however, we’ll be making turns on the East Branch of the St. Regis River.
General
All Stories
Cedar River Flow
Last summer I went to the Cedar River Flow with the intention of paddling up the flow and the river to a lean-to just off the Northville-Placid Trail. Though things didn't work out as planned, I experienced one of my most enjoyable days on the water in the Adirondacks.
Eastern Adirondack hikes
It had never felt so good to set my backpack down at the end of a day. For the last few miles, it had been weighing me down more than usual. I leaned the pack against a tree and, blissfully unburdened, stepped across the grassy clearing to join my companions admiring the view—about 20 miles’ worth of Lake George. By Bill Ingersoll
Gleasmans Falls
When photographer Nancy Ford and I read that Gleasmans Falls dropped a frothy 70 feet, we imagined a miniature Niagara tucked in the woods. Instead, we found a series of small, pounding flumes on a quarter-mile stretch of the Independence River. By Linda Murphy
4 favorite hikes
I’ve been hiking in the west-central Adirondacks for years, not only enjoying the woods but also pushing a measuring wheel. I recently rewrote the Adirondack Mountain Club’s guidebook, Adirondack Trails: West-Central Region, which came out late last year. By Norm Landis
Gothics slide climb
This story starts in 1896. That year, on Aug. 20, Newell Martin and a companion, Milford Hathaway, ascended the vast rock cirque on the South Face of Gothics—no ropes, no helmets, no pitons, nothing at all to protect them from a deadly fall. By Phil Brown
Miami River
A river primeval By Mark Bowie Before dawn on an early September day, fellow paddler Rick Rosen and I drifted in a pea-soup fog on Lewey Lake, anticipating a colorful sunrise. A loon wailed nearby, tantalizingly out of sight. We waited. And waited. The mists rose, unveiling a swatch of mountain forest, some blue sky, then resettled, dashing…
T Lake
A songbird’s call pierced the stillness of the hardwood forest. It sounded like “Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!” Bill Ingersoll identified the bird by its call. “That’s the ovenbird,” he said. “Barbara taught me that.”
John Dillon Park
I was not born with a plastic camping spoon in my mouth. Unlike my wife, Debbie, who was raised in rural upstate New York, I was city-born and grew up more familiar with asphalt playgrounds than with green woods. In my neighborhood, we didn’t have swimming holes; we had potholes.
Going the Gilligan mile
Rachel and I recently discovered a great little hike up 1,420-foot Mount Gilligan on the opposite side of Pleasant Valley from Rocky Peak Ridge.