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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…

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BILL MCKIBBEN has been trying to warn us about the apocalyptic threat of climate change for two decades, ever since The End of Nature in 1990. As a writer, activist, and citizen of our beleaguered planet, he has done the best that one smart and caring man can do to get us to pay attention…

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FOR AT LEAST TWO DECADES, we’ve known that the global climate is warming, that efforts to stop this trend are grossly inadequate, and that the future is uncertain at best, catastrophic at worst. We know that we need to kick the fossil-fuel addiction. We also know that even if we did this today and released…

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JAMES KRAUS owes a lot to his father. He got interested in the outdoors when his father took him fishing and in photography when he received a box camera. He went on to teach forest recreation at Paul Smith’s College for thirty years and often incorporated photos into his lectures. Now retired, Kraus recently collected…

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If you’re a golfer, you may have heard of Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, a popular compilation of golf tips related in an amusing, plainspoken style. Kirk Deeter, an editor-at-large for Field & Stream, is a golfer who benefited from Penick’s advice. So he and Charlie Meyers, the late outdoors editor for the Denver Post,…

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WHY DO WE FIND FISH so appealing? After all, humans are hardly the piscivores ospreys and otters are. Yet fish and fishing have preoccupied the minds of men, women, and children as far back as history and archeology can plumb. The literature on fish and fishing grows more vast and diverse by the year. “A…

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PROBABLY THE MOST interesting fact in No Place I’d Rather Be: Wit and Wisdom from Adirondack Lean-to Journals is buried in the back under Forest Preserve camping regulations. First among the state’s five rules for the backcountry log structures is this: “Must be shared by groups up to the capacity (eight persons) of the shelter.”…

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IN 1946, THE ADIRONDACK HERMIT Noah John Rondeau wrote entries in his annual journal in a complicated code. Fifty years later, a recent college graduate, David Greene, deciphered the symbols. Rondeau was fond of nicknames, and some of the journal entries didn’t make any sense until Richard Smith, an old friend of Rondeau’s, helped interpret…

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ACADEMIC HISTORIANS (like me) who devote their careers to regional studies would be lost without the work of diligent amateurs. Here in the Adirondacks, for example, nearly all historical work begins with a grateful nod to Alfred Lee Donaldson’s two-volume A History of the Adirondacks, first published in 1921, reprinted in 1977 with an introduction…