Last year on a February afternoon, Danny Filippidis left Whiteface Mountain’s Mid-Station Lodge, clicked into his red Volkls and skied away. According to the Canadian Press, he’d told his friends, a group of fellow Toronto firefighters on their annual Adirondack ski trip, that he wanted to fetch his phone at the bottom of the mountain. And then he disappeared.
Martha Rebentisch fell sick with the same disease that killed her mother. She dropped out of high school and left home in New York City to fight for her life at sanatoriums, where clean country air was the only hope for survival from tuberculosis, rampant at that time.
Ask an Adirondacker about their take on our region’s signature style and you’ll hear all sorts of things: Tree stumps and twigs. Plaids and earth tones. Rough-hewn accents and stuffed animal heads. But Marion Jeffers’s approach is a little different.
Scholars say composer Samuel Barber wrote Adagio for Strings in Austria. But watch a sunrise from Lake George’s shoreline—waves lapping, light breaking through the dawn mist—and you can imagine how Barber’s heart-stirring masterpiece that crescendos and crashes might have been inspired by this place.
As of early April 2012, Peter Fish, of Keene, had hiked 5,344-foot Mount Marcy 763 times. The 76-year-old retired forest ranger, who’s still a High Peaks fixture after working there from 1975 to 1998, chats about how to appreciate this place; why he sports a kilt; and where he’s planned his terrestrial exit strategy—not on what he calls “the Big M.”
A seaplane dropped Melanie Sawyer onto a spit of land along northern Saskatchewan’s Reindeer Lake. Sawyer’s challenge, like that of nine other competitors deposited across the Arctic, was to survive the longest. Alone.
Pâté chinois served in a cast-iron skillet. Chicken, stewed vegetables and gravy over biscuits. Crusty bread. If you’re craving this French-Canadian comfort food, you’ve got to check out The Woodshed on Park, in Tupper Lake.
“Every day Uma would slowly move around the property,” says Joanne. So she’d strap on snowshoes and follow the moose at a safe distance. “You could hear the sound of her big teeth chewing balsam and birch branches. She was just so sweet and her mane was so pretty and I would just stare at her and think, I can’t believe I’m looking at a moose.”
In July the Vidals opened the doors to what they call NewVida Preserve—an appropriate name for the 2,000-acre spread—with trails for hiking, biking and skiing; a lodge with 14 guest suites, a bistro, bar, game room and dining room; wellness center with gym, yoga studio and soon an indoor pool; and community business space.
Every fall for more than 30 years, the Adirondack Experience, in Blue Mountain Lake, has hosted the best in classic and contemporary rustic art. Meet some of the showstoppers featured at this year’s Rustic Furniture Fair.
Think serial killer, and Berkowitz, Bundy or Dahmer come to mind. However, in the 1890s, following Jack the Ripper’s London killing spree, Mudgett, by then sitting in a cell at Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison, was the notorious monster.
“My life changed when I bought it,” says Roger Jakubowski. The “it” he’s referring to is Camp Topridge, on Upper St. Regis Lake near Paul Smiths.
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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