Most Adirondack maple syrup comes from venerable operations—the same trees tapped for generations, the old family sugar shack a traditional springtime hub. But Kirk and Kristy Bassarab, of Keene, are newcomers to the sweet life. They’ve quickly expanded from a handful of backyard trees to a 10-acre, 600-tap tube system that fuels their new business, Black Rooster Maple.
Forty-three years ago Buddy Atkinson, a 20-year-old from western Massachusetts, called home to say he’d arrived safely in the Adirondacks. He parked his dad’s aging Lincoln Continental at the Adirondak Loj, signed the Van Hoevenberg trailhead register, and then he was gone.
Last night a friend called to tell my husband and me that, earlier that day, a mutual friend had died of a heart attack. We’d heard the ambulance siren—strange and troubling when you live in a place like Jay, with some 1,000 permanent residents. You can’t help wonder who that ambulance is steering toward.
A bug crawled in my ear during a High Peaks family camping trip last summer. I had been asleep an hour, snug in my sleeping bag, my husband and I on either side of our kids. I awoke screaming as whatever it was—tunneling to escape an inhospitable burrow—shredded my eardrum.
Jodie Frederick’s birthday cake had been baked and decorated, ready on a platter in her new refrigerator. Frederick’s family had planned a party that also celebrated the success of her recent hip replacement.
But there wouldn’t be any kind of celebration. That day—August 28, 2011—Tropical Storm Irene dumped seven inches of rain on the northern Adirondacks, saturating the High Peaks and pummeling the river valley settlements below. With floodwaters gauged at 18.5 feet, about seven feet above the riverbank, it was one of the worst natural disasters to hit the region since the freshet of 1856 swept away mills, homes, livestock and human lives.
Eastern timber rattlesnake photograph by Johnathan Esper Adirondack snake encounters Photographer Johnathan Esper has traveled the world. In recent years he’s stayed months at a time in Iceland, where he teaches visitors how and where to shoot the stunning...
A state-of-the-art independent music label sets up shop in Saranac Lake IF YOU COULD STAND on Jeff Oehler and Sue Bibeau’s glassed-in Saranac Lake porch and crank back time about eighty years, when this All-America City was synonymous with sickness, you’d find...
Illustration by Corey Pandolph Is social media ruining the Adirondack wilderness experience? Last summer, ultramarathon runner Scott Jurek stood atop Mount Katahdin, in Maine, after completing the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail in record time. Someone in the...
Home remedies through the ages Rub a bite-size chunk of salt pork on your wart, bury the meat beneath a stone and the wart will disappear. When Bill Sorrell was a kid, that’s how you did away with the pesky growths. And it worked, says the 80-year-old Au Sable Forks...
illustration by Mark Wilson Mount Matumbla, a couple of miles outside of Tupper Lake, is the highest peak in St. Lawrence County. It’s only half the size of Mount Marcy, but its name implies exoticism and grandiosity. Same goes for Mount Arab, the second highest peak...
Want to know the most extraordinary place to stay in the Adirondacks? It’s got nothing to do with thread counts or executive chefs or spa treatments. It’s got everything to do with mind-blowing scenery and accessibility to some of the finest hiking in the park, the...
Guide Orson “Old Mountain” Phelps cut the original path up Mount Marcy and was the first to ascend and name a handful of High Peaks. He carried mail in Keene Valley, hung out with Mark Twain, turned urbanites onto the Adirondacks, even had a mountain named after him....
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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