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.
Birding with Teddy Roosevelt
The hermit thrush is a compact bird, a snowball with big eyes topped with feathers the color of sugar-maple bark dappled in sunlight. It isn’t revered because of its looks, which camouflage it in a dense Adirondack forest. Its song, on the other hand, is ethereal and catching. Sixteen-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, hunting not far from Paul Smith’s Hotel in August 1875, was bowled over by this music, an unexpected gift after hours of fruitlessly searching for deer.
It was night, the moon not yet visible in the reflection of the small lake nearby. The evening felt oppressively quiet, the hoot of an owl or the laughter of a loon made deafening in contrast, and the looming pines on the other edge of the water were a blotch of soaking dark. But then the silence was pierced by a few spare notes “from the depths of the grim and rugged woods until the sweet, sad music seemed to fill the very air, and to conquer for a moment the gloom of the night; then it died away, and ceased as suddenly as it had begun.”
Planes and Pancakes
Most summer mornings on Piseco Lake, you’ll hear only natural sounds: lapping waves, twittering birds, the occasional plop-plop of a leaping fish. But on the penultimate Saturday of every August, you’ll hear repetitive, low rumbling as plane after plane circles the lake to land at Piseco Airport.
Once a year, 50 to 70 pilots in small planes—some antique, some state of the art—make their way to the airport for the annual Speculator Lion’s Club Fly-In/Drive-In Breakfast. Like many happenings in this still-wild corner of the Adirondacks, the Fly-In is a labor of love for the community.
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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