President Grover Cleveland stood on the second-floor veranda of Henry and Kate Graves’s mansion in Au Sable Forks and likely told the crowd, waving hand-sized American flags on the lawn below, that company towns like theirs were the pride of the nation.
I n some circles the term “peak-bagger” is disparaged, the belief being that checking summits off a list in record time distracts from appreciating the natural world. But there are folks out there, like Erik Schlimmer, whose brains are wired to systematically experience the great outdoors while still marveling at every detail.
“I’m a methodical person,” says the 45-year-old, who calls Rensselaer, near Albany, home when he’s not in the Adirondacks. “It’s just my personality. Lists of mountains or named features or long-distance trails give me direction and a goal, so when I draw up a list of peaks, I have a focused mission.”
Schlimmer has checked a lot of challenges off his list, among them Pennsylvania’s 132-mile Baker Trail, New Hampshire’s 162-mile Cohos Trail, Vermont’s 273-mile Long Trail, the 357-mile Long Path from New Jersey to New York, the 1,000-mile Florida Trail, Lake Tahoe’s 165-mile Rim Trail, the Catskill Park’s 320-mile trail system, the 235-mile Trans Adirondack Route, twice, and the 133-mile Northville-Placid Trail four times.
Three-year-old Michael Hart II loves mud puddles, the Power Rangers and playing soccer—things most kids his age embrace. But Michael’s also undergone two heart surgeries, has low muscle tone, severe astigmatism in both eyes, hearing loss in both ears and, because of his frustration at not being able to communicate, throws fits so epic, nothing—nothing—soothes him, says his mom, Jessica Smith.
Where the pavement ends, the West begins—that’s what Painted Pony is,” says the rodeo’s co-owner Shana Graham. She’s not kidding. From woodsy Route 9N that twists west from Lake George village, you pass roadside motels and cabin colonies, mom-and-pop restaurants and kitschy campground signs. But turn onto Howe Road in Lake Luzerne, bump along until you reach Painted Pony, and you might as well be in Texas or Montana: Everywhere you look are people in Western attire, including volunteers from the local Lions Club who greet visitors with down-home hospitality, tipping their cowboy hats, showing them where to park their pickups or Priuses.
Country music spills from the entryway of the Longhorn Saloon, a roadhouse with a bar the length of a bowling alley. Outside is a buffet with deep pans of barbecue, baked beans and creamy coleslaw. There’s a mechanical bull and a gift shop stocked with lassos, hats and other souvenirs. The crowd—clusters of teenagers, families with their babies, older couples who hang toward the back—moseys to the grandstand, ready for the theme park–like entertainment they expect from this corner of the Adirondacks. (Magic Forest, Water Slide World and Six Flags’ Great Escape are just down the road.) With fried dough, nachos, snow cones, cups of beer and soda bottles in hand, they take their seats on the wooden-plank bleachers and then, like that, the rodeo kicks off. Shana Graham gallops around the arena on a chestnut quarter horse, the gigantic American flag she carries billowing in her wake. Rodeo contestants, also on horseback, join Graham for “the Grand Entry.” The massive horses, the wise-cracking announcers with Southern accents (despite one who says he’s from Glens Falls), a rodeo clown and the “Star-Spangled Banner” belted out by Graham’s 11-year-old daughter, Gabby—it’s something else.
Still, Shana later says, “This is no showdeo.”
Yesterday I hit a turkey in McCollums. I slowed my car as a half-dozen of them jogged across the highway. They passed, I accelerated, then, too late, a straggler appeared from a roadside curtain of pines, sprinting to catch up. I feel awful about it.
In the last year, I’ve circumnavigated the Adirondack Park, crisscrossed it, zipped from east to west, north to south and back again. And again. Between the classes I teach at a college beyond the Blue Line, my research for a regional guidebook, assignments for this magazine, and family fun, I’ve been on the road a lot, a lamentable load on my carbon footprint, but a bonus in exploring the place I’ve spent almost 20 years covering for Adirondack Life. The magazine’s readers and contributors share plenty about their hamlet happenings, but armchair editing just gives you a screenshot. Roadside observation at least gets you deeper, filling the frames.
Last week John Davis heard that four dead coyotes had been found along a road a mile or so outside of Essex. They’d been shot.
Killing coyotes isn’t illegal. According to the Department of Environmental Conservation, each year 33,000 New Yorkers hunt and trap them. A license is required and there’s a designated hunting season, unless the animal is considered to be a “problem.” The dead, dumped animals were a reminder to Davis, a conservationist who has dedicated his life’s work to protecting wildlife and their migratory corridors, that there’s still much to be done.
Late last fall I was sick in bed, so feverish my skin hurt. It wasn’t influenza, my doctor had assured me, but another respiratory virus that, with time, would run its course. I have two young kids; for several days my husband assumed all childcare responsibilities, which included some kind of daily adventure. During my sickest, I heard my phone ping. I reached for it on the bedside table and studied the photograph my husband had texted me: my kids in smiles and with walking sticks and driftwood trophies they must have found along the Ausable River. I recognized the swampy meadow and the mountain silhouette—they were downriver from the Jay covered bridge, likely following herd paths marched flat by local deer.
I felt a wave of worry.
Ticks.
A dying patient once confessed to hospice chaplain R. W. Williams, “You know, I’ve never done this before.” In the quarter-decade that Williams has been making house calls across the southern Adirondacks, traveling 1,000 times a year from his home in Northville to sit with those seeking comfort, he’d never suggest to anyone that he has the answers. What he does tell them is, “You’re never alone. If you have a phone, call me—midnight, two a.m. … anytime.” Same goes for what he says to callers on the other end of the Fulton County suicide hotline he’s answered for 38 years.
Half my life ago I spent summer weekends at a family camp on Lake Ozonia, with perch-catching extravaganzas, epic campfires and other multi-generational traditions. After that, while renting a place along Lake Placid’s Main Street, tourism—crowds, gift shops and parking tickets—dominated my surroundings. Next stop was a solitary farmhouse near Black Brook, not a neighbor in sight but Whiteface looming in my windows. From there I landed in Jay, a river-valley hamlet where the sun always seems to shine.
The woodchucks disappear. It happens gradually, the family of “Woodys,” as my kids call them, no longer sunning themselves on the boulders that ring our backyard. It’s not until a week of unconsciously scanning the lawn from our stairwell window that we realize they’re gone—and we know they are. By early fall they’re blobs the size of obese housecats, ready for suspended sleep.
What if a million acres of Adirondack forestland caught fire? That’s about the size of Franklin County and more square miles than three Lake Champlains. Consider the devastation to our landscape and its wild inhabitants, the ashes blanketing our little Adirondack settlements, the thick smoke clogging the sky, settling in a mustard haze as far away as Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia.
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba—China’s version of Amazon.com—is one of the richest people in China, worth an estimated $29 billion. In 2015 he purchased a 28,100-acre chunk of the northwestern Adirondacks.
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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