The only independent, nonprofit news organization solely dedicated to reporting on the Adirondack Park.
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They were first. At the dawn of the 20th century, before the Adirondack Mountain Club, before the Adirondack Council, before the Adirondack Nature Conservancy, the only organization dedicated to safeguarding these mountains was the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks. The association’s leaders were watchdogs who rose to the occasion at a critical time…
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Making a living in the Adirondacks has never been easy. Long winters, rough terrain and biting insects keep out or keep poor most who would make the Park their home. Too often, those who stick around do so by taking too much from the land—extracting non-renewable resources or renewable ones at non-renewable rates. My friend…
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Buried in the middle of this long recipe collection, there’s a two-page spread devoted to Nettle Meadow Farms, a goat dairy on the Thurman- Johnsburg line. It’s a small place, just a few dozen goats, and owners Ronald Hebert and Laurie Goodhart do all the work themselves— milking, cheesemaking, packaging, delivery. The chevre is unbelievably…
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“One woman’s wild summer” was from the March/April 2003 edition By Neal Burdick One day early in the summer of 1942, Bill Touhey, on duty in the Salmon Lake Mountain fire tower in Whitney Park west of Long Lake, took a phone call from the observer on Mount Electra, not far away in Nehasane Park.…
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There is not much humor in Half the Way Home. In its 236 pages, not one anecdote directly involving the author elicits laughter. Whereas Lewis Spence describes a loving if fundamentally Victorian relationship between a boy and his grandfather, Half the Way Home is a search for understanding of a father-son relationship where love was…
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Sooner or later, we all come home—if not literally, then spiritually, emotionally or psychologically to a place that had a role in shaping us. One day, without realizing it, we are there. And we confront the forces that made us what we have become. We complete a circle. The Adirondacks are an arc of that…
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Not every classic stands the test of time—not when the public’s tastes keep changing. For nearly a decade, cross-country enthusiasts have relied on Tony Goodwin’s Classic Adirondack Ski Tours for advice on where to ski in the Adirondack Park. The book is a minor classic in itself, with its spare descriptions of the author’s favorite…
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It was a Saturday in November 1994 that I met Victoria Rinehart to take her and a group of her nursing students on a walking tour of the cure cottages of Saranac Lake. As we tramped the streets, I told her what I could about Saranac Lake’s history as America’s pioneer health resort for the…
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Barbara McMartin is an Ivy League-educated mathematician. I recall her mentioning once that she began hiking the Adirondacks systematically and obsessively as relief from preparing for doctoral orals at Columbia. I raise this not so much to assert how smart she is as to suggest that it is in her nature to seek a closed…
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How can one man do so much in just 97 years? Clarence Petty is of one of the most interesting and important people ever to carry a canoe, bushwhack through the backcountry, or dedicate his life to protecting the Adirondack wilderness. And he has lived through a period of high drama in Adirondack affairs. As…