On an early-summer morning, Niki, Lisa, my dog Wally and I sit on the carpeted floor of Adirondack Life’s office in the red brick church on Jay’s Village Green. Wally’s chewing a bone, Aerosmith’s rock ballad “Crazy” drifts from a passing motorcycle

It is, of course, difficult to predict the future. But since I have a half-decent track record, let me offer an Adirondack forecast for the next 50 years, secure in the knowledge I won’t be around to see how I’m wrong. Thirty years ago this autumn, f

In early May of 2001, my wife and I packed up our 10th-floor apartment in Manhattan, loaded the kids in the car with our closest belongings, and headed north for a new life in the Adirondacks. We’d bought the house just two months before, the first o

The cover, an old mill in Warrensburg, last water-powered gristmill in the state—I recall it clearly from 50 years ago. The millpond, clean as a mirror, and the building, mottled gray-brown clapboard, were framed with thick foliage, the sky and water

This time at Cold River—the last time—his touch was light as pollen, no snapped twigs or boot-prints on the familiar trail. It was the place Gordon returned to no matter where he was, Blue Mountain Lake or Tahawus, a tiny clearing with a cabin no big

WHAT’S CHANGED IN 50 YEARS? WE ASKED PHOTOGRAPHERS TO REVISIT THESE ADIRONDACK SCENES Water-skiing is still a popular activity on this lake near Eagle Bay, but it has been joined by contemporary water sports such as stand-up paddling. Peak-top campin

In 1852, a group of surveyors surprised an old man living in a crude shelter near Herkimer County’s Ice Cave Mountain. He ran off so quickly that they didn’t see much more than a flash of the red patch on the bottom of his drawers. Ever heard of “Old

I drove for nearly an hour on quiet roads through the northernmost part of the Adirondack Park. T-shirt shops and twiggy Great Camps are scarce around here—along with nearly everything but the occasional cluster of tidy raised ranches and mobile home

My friend Adam Welz, a South African naturalist and journalist, identified fish crows flying around an island in mid-lake when he was visiting our cabin on the Saranacs in the summer of 2012. I had never noticed them. He had kept up enough with his o

Nearly everyone can name a place or two or, if they’re lucky, three, that for them is like no other. Those are the places that generate the emotional resonance and mystery and power of a recurrent dream—the kind of dream that psychiatrists like to an

On a hot, oppressive day in the summer of 1988, an ecologist’s Chesapeake Bay retriever named Muddy made off with my socks and trotted to the end of a log that jutted into Little Howard Pond. The ecologist shouted at poor Muddy, ordering her to retur

I am not nostalgic. I do not wish for the good old days. It seems to me that today is the good day. I am, however, endlessly intrigued by the details of history. I am curious about how human life and the world around us change; I am interested in how