Google “floating picnic table” and it’s easy to fall into a rabbit hole, chasing one link after another to curiouser and curiouser contraptions. I stumbled onto one of those contraptions a couple of years ago as I noodled around on Pinterest.
August 2019
Favorite Lean-tos
Reader’s favorite lean-tos
Lean-to Etiquette
Forest ranger Megan McCone monitors 50,000 acres of state land, including parts of Saranac Lake Wild Forest and all of the St. Regis Canoe Area. Her work vehicle of choice is a canoe, and she enjoys her encounters educating paddlers and campers about backcountry behavior, including lean-to etiquette.
Close Encounters of the Lean-to Kind
My father loved fishing and would go anywhere, by any means, to fish in new places. My mother, not so much. Many years ago he talked her into flying to Fourth Lake for an overnight fishing jaunt.
Sheltered Past
In 1869, four years after the end of the Civil War, hundreds of men and women from Boston and New York headed to the Adirondacks. A book called Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks by William Henry Harrison Murray, a prominent Boston preacher, inspired them and the thousands who followed in successive years.
Chagall in Cranberry Lake
Reviled as a “degenerate” by the Nazis, celebrated by the Paris art world and investigated for suspected Communist ties by the FBI, Marc Chagall prompted little more than bemused shrugs from the townspeople of Cranberry Lake in the summer of 1944.
Olympic Flames?
It is early in the morning, a day after the Notre-Dame fire in Paris, and I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about work. I’m the director at the Lake Placid Olympic Museum, where I’ve worked for 15 years, and I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights thinking about “what-ifs.”
Behind the Music
Recently, a historian friend known for sleuthing regional nuggets found the album Old Time and Jugband Music by a group called Cranberry Lake. She sent it to me with a note that said, “I think you need this LP.”
Adi-rookie
I admit it was a bit of an ambush. “Make a loon call,” I commanded my friend Maria, shoving my phone up to her mouth and pressing record.
Kindervolk
The keg had been tapped, the morning’s firewood–stacking conga line completed, and the day’s festivities were well underway when I walked up Kindervolk’s dirt driveway on a Saturday afternoon last August.
On Sale Now
December 2025
Pulling back the curtain on the rough-and-tumble world of backcountry guides, plus Old Forge’s beloved Strand Theatre, the life of a master woodworker, Santas on the slopes and more!
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