If you’ve ever driven into the Adirondacks on Route 10, you’ve passed, a few miles inside the Blue Line, the Nick Stoner Municipal Golf Course, with its dramatic statue celebrating Stoner as a heroic frontiersman.
February 2017
From Ore to Orchids
If a landscape could be read like a book, two scenes near the western Adirondack hamlet of Star Lake would seem to belong to very different genres. The first is visible to anyone driving west along Route 3 from Wanakena. On the right, surrounded by a chain-link fence, is a dilapidated complex of industrial buildings, overgrown with weeds. A sign out front declares this the J & L Steel Jobsite and bears the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Emergency Response seal.
Similar tales of woe have played out across the Adirondacks, in towns like Corinth, Tupper Lake and Moriah: industries built on the exploitation of natural resources bring jobs and prosperity, only to leave environmental and economic devastation in their wake when the market shifts or the resources are exhausted.
But across the street, hidden from view on private land, the narrative takes an unexpectedly hopeful turn.
The Ice Man
I received my first pair of ice axes as a wedding present in 2002. They were yellow and used and bore both rust and a certain color of nail polish that distinguished them from others. My wife and I tried them on the ice at Pitchoff, in the Cascade Pass, on Route 73. They hurt like hell.
The Loner
When John Maday and two other investigators from the Warren County Sheriff’s Office came upon the campsite, the first thing they saw was a man’s feet inside his crude lean-to of pine branches, blankets and tarps. The campsite was built on a flat area just below the summit of Park Mountain, at the southern tip of the Pharaoh Lake Wilderness Area.
One Giant Year
I had often considered taking on a yearlong photo project of the same location, so when Adirondack Life asked if I’d be interested, I didn’t hesitate in answering, Yes! After much thought and scouting, I chose a spot along the Giant Ridge trail that met all the criteria—Adirondack character, scenic drama, weather options, good angles of light year-round and relatively easy access.
Searching for Snow
A friend is such an avid cross-country skier that he clicks into his bindings and heads out when there is frost on the ground, just the lightest slick of ice on the grass. He swears it’s like gliding over silk, and of course it’s even more ephemeral than real snow. The season for frost skiing is, say, about an eyeblink, when you wake up and see that the yard sparkles in the early-morning sun.
Lost on Marcy
Forty-three years ago Buddy Atkinson, a 20-year-old from western Massachusetts, called home to say he’d arrived safely in the Adirondacks. He parked his dad’s aging Lincoln Continental at the Adirondak Loj, signed the Van Hoevenberg trailhead register, and then he was gone.
On Sale Now
February 2026
Meet Lake Placid’s Tate Frantz, a top ski-jumping contender at the Milan-Cortina Olympics—plus Fourth Lake ice hockey, North Creek Ski Bowl lore, brews at Lake Clear's historic Charlie’s Inn and more!
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