A Ranger’s Life
On April 30, after 26 years as a forest ranger, Rob Praczkajlo retired. He’s having a hard time with it. You live rangering. Dispatch calls on a blizzardy night and you roll out of bed, ready to hike miles to find a lost hiker in armpit-deep snow on Marcy. A...
Liquid Assets: Southern Adirondack Waterfalls
The Sacandaga River and its tributaries are strung with so many tumbling, bubbling stretches that strolls along these picturesque waterways make irresistible outings. The region is so waterfall-rich that leapfrogging from one cascade to the next can feel like the best...
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Nature & Environment
The Tree Guardians
Angello Johnson burns the midnight oil. By day, he works in the land resource department of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe of Franklin County, of which he’s a member, at the northern edge of the Adirondack Park. On nights and weekends he teaches Mohawk tribe members the art of weaving long, pliable black ash tree strands into intricate baskets.
Bird Notes
Want to go birding in the park? Let guide Joan Collins show you the way Know Before You Go: Learn the birds around your home first. A feeder is a great way to attract them. Most species are habitat specific, so branch out by visiting marshes, bogs, forests (boreal,...
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.
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
Liquid Assets: Southern Adirondack Waterfalls
The Sacandaga River and its tributaries are strung with so many tumbling, bubbling stretches that strolls along these picturesque waterways make irresistible outings. The region is so waterfall-rich that leapfrogging from one cascade to the next can feel like the best...
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....
School of Fish
There is no better salve for post-traumatic stress, A. J. Beaudoin believes, than the call of the loon and the morning mist rising from an Adirondack pond.
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
Adirondack Homes & Camps 2026
Inside a secluded Tupper Lake camp, a former Lake Placid speakeasy and a 19th-century hotel-turned-home on Lake George—plus cozy seasonal cocktails, dazzling rustic lighting and more.
Home & Camp
Addition and Subtraction: Are Mergers the Answer for Adirondack Schools?
On a Friday morning in March, Devon Harris—one of the original members of the Jamaican national bobsled team—addressed a group of about 100 K–12 students in Minerva Central School’s gymnasium. A motivational speaker, Harris told the story of his improbable journey from the streets of Kingston (“I was just a kid from the hood,” he said) to the national stage. And of course the team’s immortalization in Cool Runnings, a 1993 film starring John Candy.
Frankie’s Chicken Riggies
Chicken riggies—mouthfuls of chicken, sweet and hot peppers, onions and rigatoni smothered in a white-wine marinara—is an upstate favorite born in Utica’s deep-rooted Italian community. Start your own love affair with the dish at Frankie’s Taste of Italy, in Old Forge, where owners Frankie and Tina Zammiello—now joined by their son, Julian—serve up meals inspired by their family’s Sunday feasts.
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.
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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