The Magazine of the Mountains since 1969
Sweet, sour, hot, salty, crunchy, with chiles or garlic, cucumbers or green tomatoes or even strawberries, the universe of Adirondack pickles is ever expanding. Just a few years ago someone craving Kosher spears or bread-and-butter chips or giardiniera had to search a big grocery store and be content with whatever a major distributor supplied, made from a mishmash of ingredients coming from a thousand miles away.
Boom. I bolt out of sleep into thick dark. What was that? I burrow into the warmth of two wool blankets and a comforter. What was that sound? Did a tree fall on our cabin? What else could it be? Maybe the corner of our tiny bedroom has broken off in the cold and is lying in a splintered heap in three feet of February snow. After a childhood in Buffalo, New York, I should be used to snow. But here it’s been snowing for three days. On the first day, snow settled like a fluffy down coverlet on our roof. On the second day, snow coiled on tree branches like fat lazy snakes. By the third day, I felt completely cut off from the outer world.
In a rehabbed Agway building tucked on a hill above Route 3—the main artery carrying travelers southwest to Saranac Lake or northeast to Plattsburgh—Hal Moore takes a phone call from a customer on the hunt for a 10-foot sheet of plywood with birch veneer. It’s an unusual size, but Moore has it. That’s the bread and butter of Adirondack Hardwoods, those not-your-run-of-the-mill pieces that aren’t stocked at big-box stores. “If you can buy it at Lowe’s, I can’t compete with that price range,” Moore says.
Tupper Lake Junction’s Wheel Inn had a reputation—dive bar, strip joint, a place where patrons went at it hammer and tongs on many nights. For the past 10 years master craftsman Dan King has owned the former hotel and watering hole. As a blacksmith, he’s at it with real hammer and tongs, forging decorative and functional pieces in iron and bronze. Just inside the door on Main Street, past the mailbox embellished with twining vines, there’s a thistle-design fire screen reminiscent of William Morris patterns, and in the backyard studio graceful bronze leaves are spread across a table.
An old painted board from a torn-down house. A fragment of chipped glass. A piece of cast-off and rusted galvanized roofing. A hubcap. All things that might be found at your local dump, but in the eyes and hands of potter Brooke Noble and her partner, self-described “jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none” Justin Thurston—artists in their late 30s who live in the town of Bloomingdale—these are materials. For art, for crafts and, above all, for incorporating in the construction of their quirky, colorful work-in-progress home. They are like the artistic version of American Pickers, seeing deals and must-acquire items wherever they go.
A riot of ferns mobs a clearing circled by maple saplings, thick oaks and solid beech trees. Danny Kaifetz, a trim 66-year-old Keese-ville resident, leads me into the forest. There’s no path. We step from one patch of copper pine needles to the next, lit by the odd ray of June sun.
Level ground slopes up to granite benches, bridged by a ramp of two dozen blackened logs. That’s the only legacy of construction Kaifetz completed here more than a decade ago. Underfoot, moss cushions stubborn rock. Undisturbed white pines tower a hundred feet overhead. Atop the rocky knoll, a solid flank of cedar shingles interrupts the columns of trees. As we approach, a 32-by-22-foot log cabin emerges. Two cedar rails—made from a single tree split down the middle—bracket the front porch. Twig work spells out “Ridgetop” on a sign that hangs from the timber-frame truss. As Kaifetz heads for the southern wall, he pulls a pocketknife from his jeans, flips open the three-inch blade and pokes between shoulder-high logs.
Below Sentinel Mountain’s jagged profile on Keene’s northern border, where Limekiln Road meets Alstead Hill Road, there’s a farmhouse painted the color of freshly churned butter. The surrounding acreage has transformed from homestead to dairy farm, and then a center for horseback tours and cross-country skiing. But one use has been constant for 150 years. This has always been a traveler’s rest.
On Main Street in Schroon Lake, across from the bank and several storefronts down from a shop that sells both night crawlers and pet rabbits, you’ll find Pine Cone Mercantile, a boutique that is sophisticated, rustic and unlike anyplace else. A rainbow of indestructible Adirondack chairs made of recycled plastic line the outside of the store. This is the only plastic you’ll find at Pine Cone Mercantile, as its proprietor, Lisa Marks, is passionate about showcasing handcrafted, high-quality design items that use natural materials to evoke the wild beauty of the Adirondacks.
“Own a legit, Honest-to-God, Adirondack-Style Girl Scout Camp” read an August 4, 2011, headline in the online housing magazine Curbed. “Here’s something different,” the accompanying text went, “a full-fledged Girl Scout camp offered up as a prime piece of real estate meat.… Camp Eagle Island boasts a stone-and-timber main house—with 10 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, nine fireplaces, and 47,153 square feet.… The 31-acre property sits on scenic Upper Saranac Lake in upstate New York.… The Girl Scouts operated the camp from 1938 until 2009, when they were forced to shutter it; there’s currently a group of former Scouts trying to raise enough money to save it. Doing so, no doubt, will earn them all a mighty huge badge. As for the sum they need: $3.75M.”
The Wildlife Issue! A peek inside the secret lives of Adirondack moose by Jeff Nadler, wildlife portraits by Pamela Underhill Karaz, an opossum search party led by best-selling author Kristin Kimball, plus loons, turtles, turkeys, chipmunks, coyotes and more.
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