It’s a soggy March afternoon. The sky spits rain and the roads are slushy, lined in dirty snowdrifts. But inside Jim and Parmelee Tolkans’ Lake Placid living room—more an atrium, with its floor-to-ceiling windows and potted trees—it’s cozy and bright. Panza the Corgi...
“I love Algonquin,” says Reverend Philip Allen. “I’d like to do that again. It’s all business and the views are great, and it’s the first mountain I ever did. I did go up barefoot at that time. That was 1958.”
Ever since Adirondackers began keeping track, they’ve recorded hamlet-swallowing blizzards that socked folks behind snowdrift-jammed doors, downpours that ravaged river valleys, and hurricanes with jet-speed winds that uprooted chunks of forest.
Sometimes big adventurers come in small packages.
Fifty-five years ago Tad and Linda Sturgis’s Adirondack Store was featured in the winter issue of Adirondack Life. By then, the couple’s emporium had been thriving for more than a decade.
She rushed from her campsite at Marcy Dam to Lake Colden after being summoned in the deep of a September night. A man splitting wood for his party’s campfire had sliced his ankle to the bone with an ax.
On a September afternoon at Westport’s Essex County Fairgrounds, a farmers’ market on steroids is underway. People stroll booth to booth and table to table along a loop of growers and bakers and makers.
When I travel around the Adirondacks, I sometimes squint my eyes, trying to imagine how the landscape looked before it was settled: Wild, tangled woods. Unencumbered rivers.
July in Jay—a hamlet that cradles the East Branch of the Ausable River—is postcard perfect. Families splash in the rapids below the covered bridge. On weekends, musicians perform by the gazebo on the village green. Every Fourth of July there’s a lively parade, followed by field games, then fireworks. And the past few years another summer event has added an artistic flair to this Rockwellian scene: the Jay Invitational of Clay.
A mother accompanied her child to the school bus with a rifle slung over her shoulder. Guns were loaded and propped near doors and windows. People slept with hammers and baseball bats. They locked their houses, camps, cars and trucks—some for the first time ever. Armed officers lined roadways, searched passing vehicles, and swept forests and fields while the chop of helicopters drowned out the sounds of Adirondack springtime.
The best years of my life have, so far, passed in a crease of the Ausable River Valley. The love of my life, our children, our friends, our trials and triumphs—it’s all happened here. Recently, after the kids were tucked in and the dog walked, my husband and I sat on our front porch, the river roaring after days of rain, the creeping night swallowing the Jay Range in the distance.
Last spring, after months of deep freeze, the East Branch of the Ausable River still choked with ice, a neighbor caught a bobcat on his backyard trail cam. In the grainy footage, the creature saunters forward again and again on a seven-second loop, like those clips you see on the news that track the last movements of a missing person—or a criminal.
Lost hikers, splintered bones and wildfires—a forest ranger reflects on more than two decades of coming to the rescue. Plus the oldest tavern in the Adirondacks, a trip through James Bond’s Lake George, and new energy in Schroon Lake.
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