It is snowing, the flakes descending in endless, languorous swirls. Seemingly from nowhere, the snowplows emerge—yellow lights flashing and blades grinding. It is winter in the Adirondacks.
Nature and Environment
Dog Had a Run-in with a Skunk? Try This.
Even if you don’t see a striped skunk waddle by, you can certainly smell it.
It’s Peregrine Falcon Nesting Season. Here’s What’s Happening on Adirondack Cliffs
To be sure, there is perhaps no better place to see peregrines strut their stuff than in the Adirondacks.
Preserving Our Night Skies
On the evening of January 2nd, Lake Placid attorney Amy Quinn took her dogs for a walk in her quiet neighborhood behind the village’s old railroad tracks. A lover of the night sky, she assumed her dog walk would offer up the heavens as she’d known them during her 19 years living in the region. Instead, she was surprised by the opposite. An intense ball of artificial light was emanating from the center of town. “Oh my God,” Quinn remembers thinking at the time, “this is glowing.”
“When Smelt Are Running, It’s a Signal of Spring.”
“I tell my kids,” says Tom Conrad, “that when smelt are running, it’s a signal of spring, when everything wakes up after winter.” And those kids were in for a show last March, when Conrad and his partner, photographer Carrie Marie Burr, brought them to a brook near their home in Huletts Landing, on Lake George. That day, says Conrad, the coltsfoot was blooming—a sign for smelt spawning time, according to local lore—and the kids witnessed a narrow Lake George tributary thick with dark, torpedo-shaped fish. The boys learned not to disturb the brook’s sandy beds where the fishes’ eggs had been laid, and that up to four weeks later the young would hatch and drift back into the lake. It was a teachable moment. Living in the Adirondacks means that “nature is a huge part of our daily life,” says Conrad.
Could Wolves Repopulate the Adirondacks?
After eradication in the Lower 48, wolves are now thriving in some Rocky Mountain states. The animals had disappeared from the Adirondacks by 1900, due to unrestricted hunting and habitat loss. Could reintroduction or natural recolonization bring Eastern wolves back to the region?
Ice-fishing’s a Way of Life for this Veteran Adirondack Guide
Terry Watson is usually much more careful. But when the chance to skitter across frozen Copperas Pond in search of big lake trout presented itself one spring day a few years back, the veteran Adirondack guide couldn’t refuse. In the course of Terry’s 60-plus years fishing the North Country, ice fishing for lake trout has gone from being a much-anticipated winter treat to a legally actionable transgression.
Shopping for the Apocalypse
For the last week I’ve been in the Adirondacks, not visiting my new land. My land is just a couple miles up a hill from the cottage I’ve been renting for the past two summers. I’ve run up that hill again and again to the roundabout near my land on my morning jog.
Small Wonders
The Adirondacks, with its varied forests and numerous lakes and streams, is an ideal habitat for the only hummingbird species that breeds in eastern North America, the ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris).
Fungus Among Us
Passing through a forest it’s easy to focus on the familiar, the exceptional. Is that deafening teacher, teacher call an ovenbird hiding in a brambly thicket? Did a red eft just slither between a tangle of twigs and a mud puddle? There’s dazzling diversity to the flora and fauna we can see and hear in the Adirondacks.
Birds of Summer
I awoke in near-darkness to chirping, peeping and tweeting—the “dawn chorus.” I sat up in my sleeping bag where I was camping along the shores of Horseshoe Lake to better hear and identify the avian songsters.
Power to the People
Emmett and Ethan Smith are on a mission to change the way you think about the electricity that powers your house—to think about it as a local good, like something you buy at the farmers’ market, something rooted in Adirondack history, and something that can save the planet.
On Sale Now
October 2026
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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