The Magazine of the Mountains since 1969
By the time Tropical Storm Irene moved on, the Ausable River’s rage had washed away portions of Au Sable Forks, Jay, Upper Jay, Keene and other hamlets. Roads and homes, businesses and roadside attractions, including the actual Land of Makebelieve, a former theme park in Upper Jay, were swamped. A total of $25 million in damages sat on the ledgers of hamlets whose combined annual budgets were a mere $4 million.
Boreal chickadee photograph by Jeff Nadler Want to go birding in the park? Let guide Joan Collins show you the way Know Before You Go: Learn the birds around your home first. A feeder is a great way to attract them. Most species are habitat specific, so...
The best years of my life have, so far, passed in a crease of the Ausable River Valley. The love of my life, our children, our friends, our trials and triumphs—it’s all happened here. Recently, after the kids were tucked in and the dog walked, my husband and I sat on our front porch, the river roaring after days of rain, the creeping night swallowing the Jay Range in the distance.
It is easy to imagine that spring in the Adirondacks is a concert. The trills of toads and background refrains of frogs and the choral fervor of coyotes. The staccatos and crescendos of waterfowl and the tremulous songs of meadow and forest birds. A white-throated sparrow whistling “Taps” at dusk while I sit in a rocking chair on the porch of my Long Lake cabin.
Light has remarkable, changeable qualities in the Adirondacks. In winter it can be pink, floating warmth over a chill landscape, or blue, tinting a blank canvas of snow to mirror an austere sky. In summer, light has depth and heft to it, a physical intensity that bears down like gravity or hauls a scene right into the viewer’s eyes and brain.
From a distance, I thought I could see some of the family on the screened-in porch already tucking into blueberry pancakes, bacon and fruit salad. I pushed the screen door and was half a step in when I realized the shape I saw from a distance wasn’t my father but a bear up on its hind legs eating the family breakfast right off the picnic table.
Five-year-old Ivan Cook considers the question, looking from goat to goat. After some thought, he rattles off the names of several of the herd, while all around him, the goats dance, sniff his small hands, and nudge him for attention.
Last summer, when Gerry Delaney spoke at a public forum about the future of the Adirondack Park, the conservative councilman from the town of Saranac laid out a vision that’s become a startling new normal. He acknowledged deep policy divides while insisting that all the park’s factions embrace neighborliness and civility.
To the question often posed by evangelical preachers “do you know where you’ll spend eternity?” an increasing number of Adirondackers have an answer: in a pine forest by a wetland meadow in Essex.
A seaplane dropped Melanie Sawyer onto a spit of land along northern Saskatchewan’s Reindeer Lake. Sawyer’s challenge, like that of nine other competitors deposited across the Arctic, was to survive the longest. Alone.
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