The only independent, nonprofit news organization solely dedicated to reporting on the Adirondack Park.
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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…
Inspiring stories of female winter 46ers who defy extreme conditions to conquer the High Peaks, experiencing unexpected transformations.
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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…
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A stretcher and a bobsled repose in Lyon Mountain’s former train station, which is slowly undergoing restoration for a museum. Both were made from ore wrested from the ground beneath. Together they symbolize how the people of this mining town worked and played on the edge. The bobsled, dubbed “Iron Shoes,” would have carried its…
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Wandering Home is Bill McKibben’s 10th book, and a most companionable and schmoozy read it is. The story tracks a 16-day summer hike from the summit of Vermont’s Mount Abraham, with its westward-reaching view of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains beyond, to his home of 20 years in Johnsburg in the southeastern Adirondacks. In…
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Old pictures fascinate us. They jumpstart memories among our elders and prompt younger viewers to wonder, “What was it like back then?” Pictures tell stories, and if we peer between the pixels, those of us who were not there can deduce something of what it was like “back then”— what people did for work and…