The only independent, nonprofit news organization solely dedicated to reporting on the Adirondack Park.
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As the owner of several CD collections of bird songs, I have tried, tediously often, and with negative results, to sharpen my birding-by-ear skills sufficiently to identify the most common birds in my backyard. The scenario unfolds the same way every time: After getting frustrated by spending 40 minutes trying to see an embarrassingly common…
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Wartime letters, written by soldiers on the front, are the essential raw material of military history. While the memoirs of generals and politicians and the reportage of contemporary journalists help us to comprehend the long view and grasp battles and strategy, it’s the first-hand narratives of the men in the fire and fog of conflict…
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Afew years ago, a friend and I made the long carry from Lows Lake to the upper reaches of the Oswegatchie River. Neither of us had hiked the trail before, so we had no idea how long it would take. Humping our dry bags and my big fiberglass canoe through endless blowdown, witchhobble and slash,…
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On the bookcases in my study, I have three shelves of books on the Adirondacks. The bulk of the volumes came from the library of Barney Fowler. Barney was the author of three volumes of the Adirondack Album compilation and a columnist at the Times Union. It was my good fortune that Barney, in all…
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The literature of nature—of being in nature, of contemplating its marvels with an educated and sensitive eye and writing about it with insight and skill— is one of the world’s great genres. Our country’s first great nature writer was William Bartram, who in 1791 described with exquisite detail his peregrinations through the Southeast. Many students…
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Like Mozart in music and Keats in poetry, Bob Marshall packed an astonishing quantity of experience and accomplishment into a short life and has been elevated to near mythic status by generations of followers. We have the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana and a proposal for a 409,000- acre Bob Marshall Great Wilderness (“the Bob”…
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For most of the 20th century, tourists saw fire towers as good destinations for hikes with the kids, while to residents they meant jobs with decent pay for a few months of relatively easy work. Both also saw the towers as an early-warning system against the fires they knew could ravage the forests, as had…
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In 1916, T. Morris Longstreth, a schoolteacher from Kingston and author of a long list of travel books and novels, spent six months exploring the Adirondacks, mostly on foot, accompanied by a friend and a faithful horse carrying their gear. They began at the North Creek train station in June and finished up there the…
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Every once in a great while a book comes along that gives me so much pleasure that when I reach the end I want to start again at the beginning. Such a book is Daniel Way’s All in a Day’s Work: Scenes and Stories from an Adirondack Medical Practice, published jointly in 2004 by Syracuse…
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Let’s say you’re like me, and when you pick up a new book one of the first things you do is to prowl around in the index. Try that with Stephen Sulavik’s new volume Adirondack: Of Indians and Mountains, 1535-1838, co-published this spring by Purple Mountain Press and the Adirondack Museum, and you will stumble…