Gentle Giant: Remembering Lake Placid’s Jim Tolkan
It’s a soggy March afternoon. The sky spits rain and the roads are slushy, lined in dirty snowdrifts. But inside Jim and Parmelee Tolkans’ Lake Placid living room—more an atrium, with its floor-to-ceiling windows and potted trees—it’s cozy and bright. Panza the Corgi...
Paddling in P.M.
I’ve always been dazzled by the stars; the sheer number, the twinkling, their ability to enchant from an incredible distance. For as long as I can remember, my first order of business outdoors at night is to crane my neck for an unbridled view of the evening’s canvas....
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Nature & Environment
The River Fixers: How the Ausable Freshwater Center Is Healing a Critical Waterway
By the time Tropical Storm Irene moved on, the Ausable River’s rage had washed away portions of Au Sable Forks, Jay, Upper Jay, Keene and other hamlets. Roads and homes, businesses and roadside attractions, including the actual Land of Makebelieve, a former theme park in Upper Jay, were swamped. A total of $25 million in damages sat on the ledgers…
Eternal Love
The best years of my life have, so far, passed in a crease of the Ausable River Valley. The love of my life, our children, our friends, our trials and triumphs—it’s all happened here. Recently, after the kids were tucked in and the dog walked, my husband and I sat on our front porch, the river roaring after days of rain, the creeping night swallowing the Jay Range in the distance.
Music Lessons
It is easy to imagine that spring in the Adirondacks is a concert. The trills of toads and background refrains of frogs and the choral fervor of coyotes. The staccatos and crescendos of waterfowl and the tremulous songs of meadow and forest birds. A white-throated sparrow whistling “Taps” at dusk while I sit in a rocking chair on the porch of my Long Lake cabin.
Travel
Sweet Pursuit: Maple in the Adirondacks
In the Adirondacks, maple is embedded in our flavor landscape. Today—from backyard taps and stove-top boiling to networks of tubing and high-tech evaporators—the process of transforming sap into syrup endures, as does our love of that sweet liquid gold.
Flying High with Tate Frantz
Frantz is a boyish-looking 20-year-old who grew up here in Lake Placid. Over the last year, he has emerged as the most successful American male ski-jumper ever to compete on the World Cup circuit.
Adirondack Store & Gallery: The Evolution of a Style Pioneer
Fifty-five years ago Tad and Linda Sturgis’s Adirondack Store was featured in the winter issue of Adirondack Life. By then, the couple’s emporium had been thriving for more than a decade.
Recreation
Look Before You Leap
Adirondack swimming holes can look mighty inviting on a warm spring day. Before you take the plunge, though, take note of conditions that can lead to hidden dangers:
Is There a True “Adirondack” Dog Breed?
Sometimes big adventurers come in small packages.
The Adirondack Ice Bowl
Spectators—some in horned Viking helmets—watch from behind shin-high borders and burn barrels while players chase pucks toward six-inch-tall nets. Absent are goalies, time stops and thrown fists. This is the Adirondack Ice Bowl, an easy-going pond-hockey tournament in the heart of the Adirondacks.
History
Malfunction Junction in the Adirondacks
Malfunction Junction, Dysfunction Junction, Spaghetti Junction, Crazy Corners—or, often for first-timers, What the Hell. Those are a few of the epithets for the intersection of Routes 9 and 73, in New Russia, a head-scratching tangle of road plopped into the middle of...
About Orra
She rushed from her campsite at Marcy Dam to Lake Colden after being summoned in the deep of a September night. A man splitting wood for his party’s campfire had sliced his ankle to the bone with an ax.
Manhunt Revisited: 10 Years After the Dannemora Escape
A mother accompanied her child to the school bus with a rifle slung over her shoulder. Guns were loaded and propped near doors and windows. People slept with hammers and baseball bats. They locked their houses, camps, cars and trucks—some for the first time ever. Armed officers lined roadways, searched passing vehicles, and swept forests and fields while the chop of helicopters drowned out the sounds of Adirondack springtime.
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.
Home & Camp
Adirondack Reads 2025: New Books of Regional Interest
The Adirondack 46 in 18 Hikes: The Complete Guide to Hiking the High Peaks (North Country Books, 2025), by James Appleton, offers a strategic roadmap to tackling the High Peaks.
Rustic Invention: The Art of Paul Lakata
Artist Paul Lakata brought home one of the most coveted honors at the Rustic Furniture Fair in September 2024. The annual exhibition, mounted by Adirondack Experience, in Blue Mountain Lake, showcases artisans who specialize in crafting classic and contemporary rustic furnishings.
Character Study
Every Adirondack small town has its own cast of characters whose presence becomes as familiar as its landmarks, and just as entwined with its sense of place. For the better part of five decades, the affable Keene Valley artist Frank Owen has played a recurring role around town, with frequent appearances at the Ausable Inn, where you may find him chatting up hikers, contractors and anyone else who happens upon the only local watering hole.
From The Archives
The Derry Queen
The making of a riverboat legend 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...
New Wave
How will the latest land rush affect the future of the Adirondack Park? In early December, John Davis, a wilderness advocate, was riding his bike on a dirt road near his home—a cabin deep in the woods—a few miles outside of the town of Westport....
My Adirondack Life
How can the park become more diverse and welcoming to people of all backgrounds? Here’s what growing up black in the North Country taught me When people ask me about my life as a black person growing up in the Adirondacks among a predominately...
A Glass House of Our Own
An early Philip Johnson getaway on Willsboro Point Among the Great Camps, peaked roofs and proud lodges of the Adirondack Park, an early modernist work by one of America’s most influential architects remains overlooked and underappreciated by all...
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