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Category: Curiously Adirondack
Adirondack Exercise Club | CURIOUSLY ADIRONDACK
Hardy Adirondack Mountain folk chant 1-2-3-4 as we prepare to stay warm during cold, snowy winters that can last half the year or more. It’s all about firewood: felling it, sawing it to length, hauling it out of the woods, splitting it, moving it, stacking it, moving it again a time or two, and finally…
Fifty Beds, Two Lakes, And An Otter: Bartlett’s Hotel In Its Heyday, 1854-1884
The late nineteenth century might be called the Golden Age of Adirondack Hotels. Among the humble and the grand, one establishment stands out above all the others for its character and for its characters: Virgil and Caroline Bartlett’s Sportsmen’s Home, which had its heyday from 1854 to 1884. “Bartlett’s,” as the place was often called,…
Catch Our Drift: Why Adirondackers Love Winter, Sort Of
Do we in the Adirondacks love snow and cold? Do we hate them? Hear dyed-in-the-wool locals speak their minds about our long, cold, crystalline season of white. Produced for Mountain Lake PBS by Josh Clement (http://www.joshclementproductions.com) and Ed Kanze (http://edwardkanze.com). Thanks to all our business and individual supporters for making Curiously Adirondack happen! Best…
Saranac Lake Remembers Its Curative Past
Most of us have heard William Faulkner’s famous line about the past not being dead. His wisdom is nowhere more apparent than in the Adirondack Mountain village of Saranac Lake. Here, from the 1880s to the 1950s and a little bit beyond, tuberculosis patients arrived from near and far to rest on porches, breathe crisp…
Kids As Pets: Why Your Next ‘Dog’ Might Be A Goat
In the Adirondacks, people love their pets. Some of them—the pets, that is—weigh two hundred pounds or more and thrive on pine needles, poison-ivy, and other delicacies you can’t buy at the mall. Ask these animals to sit up like trained dogs, and they’ll say Naaaaaaaaaaaa. Yes, goats! For many of us, they’re the pet…
All Roads Lead To Bloomingdale: 19th Century Crossroads Village Blooms Anew In The 21st Century
If Thornton Wilder had looked a little farther west, he might have set his Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Our Town” not in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire but in the Adirondack Mountain village of Bloomingdale. In the 1840s, the banks of a humble stretch of brook, a tributary of the Saranac River, gave rise to a…
A Whole Lotta Flutterin’ Goin’ On: Butterflies Fly At The Paul Smith’s VIC Butterfly House
Out in the Adirondack wilds, we see plenty of butterflies: one here, one there, one on sunny days just about everywhere. To learn about their lives and lore and to see a variety up close, there’s no better idea than to visit the Butterfly House. It’s in Paul Smith’s, at the Visitor Interpretive Center run…
A Taste Of Oak: Adirondack Coopers Bring Flavor To Regional Whiskey
Along a country road and down a long gravel driveway, Adirondack coopers Bob Hockert and Justin Bidelspach make world-class barrels fit for aging fine whiskies. They begin with select white oak boards cut by sawyers to their specifications. In the end, after much shaving, joining, charring, assembling, and the pressing on of hoops, a barrel…
Going “Ollywood”: How A Modern Adirondack Sawmill Produces Old-Time Forest Products
A scientist turned sawyer named Ollie Burgess turns trees into rustic building materials in the northern Adirondack township of St. Armand. It’s a bustling business, on one hand appearing straight out of the nineteenth century and on the other incorporating modern technology at every turn. Whether it’s rough-sawn native lumber or a mortise-and-tenon-jointed cedar railing…
Golly, Wally: Giant Beavers Still Surviving In The Adirondacks?
For years, skeptics have laughed and groaned while sightings and signs of an enormous aquatic rodent in the Adirondacks have multiplied. Those who believe in it have come to agree that the mysterious animal is the giant beaver, Castoroides ohioensis, believed extinct for 11,000 years or more. If the evidence of its presence stands up…