book review

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Don Mellor, the author of Climbing in the Adirondacks, still remembers the letter he received from some Canadians who used the book to try to find a climbing route. They spent the day bushwhacking through the woods and were not happy about it. “Do you sniff glue? Do you work with strong chemicals?” the climbers…

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Ecologist Jerry Jenkins has emerged as one of our most articulate advocates for a rigorous application of science to understanding the Adirondack environment and planning for its future. Now, with his characteristic thoroughness, precision and stylistic panache, Jenkins has teamed up with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Open Space Institute to produce a report…

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As the author of the “Accident Reports” column in Adirondac, I am always amazed at the number of individuals who say that’s the first thing they read in the magazine. And so Peter Bronski’s book At the Mercy of the Mountains should have an immediate audience eager to learn about the tragedies, unsolved mysteries and…

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The Northern Forest Canoe Trail (NFCT), formally incorporated in 2000, winds for 740 miles from Old Forge, in the western Adirondacks, to Fort Kent, Maine, on the Canadian border. Its interconnected waterways and portages trace paddling routes used hundreds of years ago by Native Americans and fur traders in New York, Vermont, southern Quebec, New…

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Bill McKibben, fresh out of Harvard, where he was editor of the Harvard Crimson newspaper, landed a job as a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1982. Early in his career, while grinding out pieces for “The Talk of the Town” section of the magazine, he began to emphasize the “physicalness of the world,”…

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On my mother’s side I trace my Adirondack ancestry back seven generations. That’s hardly a big deal. American toads, red-backed salamanders, garter snakes and their cousin reptiles and amphibians have been breeding, feeding and dying here, with interruptions for ice ages, for untold thousands of generations. They’re the real Adirondack natives. By comparison, bears, moose,…

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The Adirondack landscape of Lueza Thirkield Gelb’s memoir, Schroon Lake, is not the stuff of High Peaks travelogues and dark Romantic vistas. It’s well-groomed and meticulous, a place where homes have names—like Almanole, or The Big Place—and long, curling driveways. Where deviled eggs are cooled on lake ice and sofas swing on the porch. Boathouses,…

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People in Lake Placid knew that their longtime village and town historian, Mary MacKenzie, had written on local history for many years. But hardly anyone knew how prolifically, or how diversely, or what a dogged and accomplished researcher she was. “I don’t think most people had any sense of the real magnitude of the work…

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In her new book of essays, At the End of the Road, Ruth Mary Lamb reflects on her experiences living in a remote valley west of Lake George. In 1990 she and her husband, Sandy, left their busy life in Boston to live in a ramshackle farmhouse they dubbed Journey’s End. Ours was a reverse…

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This past fall, Adirondack lakes and ponds got some much-needed good news. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, eight states and a host of environmental organizations reached a settlement in a suit filed in 1999 against American Electric Power (AEP), an Ohio-based power company with coal-burning plants in five states. To cut back the sulfur and…