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.
History
Malfunction Junction in the Adirondacks
Photograph by Johnathan Esper Malfunction Junction, Dysfunction Junction, Spaghetti Junction, Crazy Corners—or, often for first-timers, What the Hell. Those are a few of the epithets for the intersection of Routes 9 and 73, in New Russia, a head-scratching...
About Orra
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.
Manhunt Revisited: 10 Years After the Dannemora Escape
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.
Renaissance Man
I remember the gloss of a fresh coat of varnish on a newly built boat. I remember the coziness of the shop from the woodstove in the dead of winter. But even without it, my dad’s energy filled the area. He was calm and focused, with a passion for his craft. For years...
Raiding Party
Fort Ticonderoga hosts a three-day reenactment of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga on the 250th anniversary of the raid.
Gone: Missing on Whiteface
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.
Make Traditional North Country Hand-Warmers: Buff Mittens
Coming from different places and never mass produced, the homemade hand-warmers have been known by names such as shag or shagged mittens, fringe, buff or latch-hook mittens—all references to the yarn that forms a thick pile on the surface of the knit fabric.
The Healing Woods
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.
Summer of Garrow
Robert Garrow was on the run. The 37-year-old who grew up in the Adirondacks hunting, fishing and trapping had left a trail of terror in the wilderness. Hundreds of police officers, guided by forest rangers and tracking dogs, swarmed the Hamilton County woods trying to find him.

















