Memory can be an unreliable narrator. I realized this as I started on the trail up Hadley Mountain, where I found, instead of the wild, intimidating landscape I recalled from my last visit, 12 years earlier, somewhere welcoming and benign.
My first impression of this place, in the summer of 2005, was colored by its utter unfamiliarity to me—not just the trail itself, 20 miles from Lake George, but the entire Adirondack Park, whose existence I had only discovered a few months before.
If a landscape could be read like a book, two scenes near the western Adirondack hamlet of Star Lake would seem to belong to very different genres. The first is visible to anyone driving west along Route 3 from Wanakena. On the right, surrounded by a chain-link fence, is a dilapidated complex of industrial buildings, overgrown with weeds. A sign out front declares this the J & L Steel Jobsite and bears the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Emergency Response seal.
Similar tales of woe have played out across the Adirondacks, in towns like Corinth, Tupper Lake and Moriah: industries built on the exploitation of natural resources bring jobs and prosperity, only to leave environmental and economic devastation in their wake when the market shifts or the resources are exhausted.
But across the street, hidden from view on private land, the narrative takes an unexpectedly hopeful turn.
Ask any chef the most essential weapon in their culinary arsenal and they’ll likely mention salt. Though rarely the star ingredient, it has the power to make or break a dish.
When Andrea Lautenschuetz chose Salt of the Earth as the name of her Lake Placid restaurant, which opened last March in a renovated house on Sentinel Avenue, it was partly in tribute to that workhorse of the spice rack. But it was also representative of the Buffalo native’s blue-collar background—her father was an electrician, her mother taught typing—and her conviction that good food shouldn’t be reserved for the elite.
Even if we never raise a rifle or hoe a row to put dinner on the table, most of us who reside within the Blue Line live off the land in one sense or another. According to the last census, some 46,000 Adirondackers—roughly a third of the park’s population—are employed, and a disproportionate number of their jobs are somehow connected to the landscape, whether studying it, protecting its resources, promoting its splendors or providing services to the folks who vacation here.
Driving by Ashes Hotel on Warrensburg’s Hudson Street, I always turned my head to admire the attractive white three-story structure with its green trim, wide second-floor balcony and vintage neon sign. It reminded me of an Old West saloon; I could picture horses tethered to the posts out front. Something about the building called to me—Have I got stories for you.
It’s after 9 p.m. and twilight has turned to darkness, making it hard to discern much other than the lights from homes on the far shore and the erratic, looping flight patterns of insects in the foreground.
Around 9:24, a boat—appearing only as a row of three lights—enters from the left, moving slowly. It is followed shortly after by a much faster boat with a single light, which soon catches up with the slow boat. The lights mingle briefly in a confusing jumble before the slower boat, now with two lights, drifts out of the frame. The other boat bobs in the water. The insects continue their oblivious aerobatics.
For 169 years the Essex County Fair has celebrated the region’s agricultural heritage. But lately attendance for the five-day extravaganza of fried food, livestock exhibitions, carnival rides and demolition derbies in Westport has wobbled. One explanation—“Farming is just dying in Essex County”—was related to Schroon Lake business owner Lisa Marks about a year ago.
“I was astounded that anyone could make that statement,” says Marks. After all, the county’s thriving local food scene was one of the things that had lured her and her husband, Edward, to open Pine Cone Mercantile and North Woods Bread Company here in 2015. “I think [local farming] is more vibrant than ever,” she says.
Passing through the gates of Santa’s Workshop with my two-year-old son on a sticky July day, we are greeted by teens in elf suits wishing guests a Merry Christmas.
“It’s not Christmas,” retorts a blond boy of about nine, an implied “duh” in his tone of voice. One jolly elf’s reply is, “It’s always Christmas at Santa’s Workshop!”
In the spring of 1964 a portal into the future opened in Flushing Meadows, Queens. For two six-month seasons, the World’s Fair enthralled millions of visitors with an optimistic vision of better living through science and technology. The space race was in its early days—the Soviet Union had sent the first man into orbit in 1961, an achievement soon matched by the United States—and exhibits like General Motors’ Futurama II promised equally amazing feats of human ingenuity here on Earth: Underwater hotels! Deserts transformed into fertile fields! Road-building robots that would rip through the jungle with laser beams! The home of tomorrow featured appliances that “automatically emerge from bare walls, floors, ceilings as they are needed by the housewife.” (Apparently, evolving gender roles were beyond the scope of imagination.)
When the North Country housed the nation’s nukes
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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