The Magazine of the Mountains since 1969
Nearly everyone can name a place or two or, if they’re lucky, three, that for them is like no other. Those are the places that generate the emotional resonance and mystery and power of a recurrent dream—the kind of dream that psychiatrists like to analyze, in which every detail down to the smallest reveals the dreamer’s secret inner life.
For 33 years Noah John Rondeau, the best-known Adirondack hermit of the 20th century, lived in a crude cluster of huts and shanties along the Cold River northeast of Long Lake.
Bids at 30, now 30, would you go for 40, I hear 40!” Numbers were rattled off in a mesmerizing chant. The crowd listened, huddled in an unheated warehouse beneath a domed wooden roof. “Now 40, would you give me 50? Now 50, would you go to 60? Come on folks, chance of a lifetime. Trunk’s never been opened, key lost, might be treasure in this here trunk, 60, 60?”
Everyone can—and generally does—have their own idea of Adirondack style, making it a knotty concept to nail down. The form has branched into ever-evolving offshoots, but there’s a common origin, a beau ideal that was conceived in the heady days of robber-baron excess. If you close your eyes, you can probably conjure it—satiny wood, coarse bark, tangled sticks, river-smoothed stones. And some very dead animals.
Thomas Delaronde Tiohkwanóiron and his family were the last to leave Moss Lake in 1977. In the early hours of the morning on May 13, 1974, a convoy of Native Americans from the Kahnawake and Akwesasne Mohawk reservations in Quebec crossed the border and made their way...
There are lives so well lived, and Julian Reiss lived such a life, that the most basic question is the most difficult to answer: where to begin?
Once upon a time, there was a larger-than-life man named Charles R. Wood—better known to all as Charley—who dedicated his life to fun. He strode onto the North Country’s mid-century scene with little more than a smile and a hammer, but managed to build an entertainment empire from scratch.
I went searching for the ghosts of Hope Falls while unboxing some old books last year in my Maryland basement, particularly the tale of Edward Earl, hanged in 1881 for stabbing his spouse through the heart.
On a rainy night in May 1945, at age 48, Quintal died unexpectedly on the northern shore of the Upper Hudson River, near the cross that marks his passing. He may have been one of the last Adirondack lumber-camp blacksmiths.
“Adirondackers are made of sterner stuff,” my mother would say as we passed Glens Falls, heading up to visit family. “They just keep going, no matter what the mountains throw at them.”
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