Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2023 i Adirondack Life

ENDURING LEGACY Curt Stager’s article “For the Record” in the February 2023 issue is an unflinching description of the distortion caused by racial prejudice. The perpetuation of vicious untruths carries forward for generations, contaminating a whole race. The recent publicity of a Saranac Lake couple forced to permanently leave their home and relocate out of the Adirondack Park to escape the cruel, racist treatment their son was subject to is evidence of the shameful legacy that Stager so effectively wrote about. Eric Lawson Saratoga Springs, NY FUN AND GAMES The last time the World University Games (Northern Lights, February) were in Lake Placid was 1972 and I was there! It was winter recess at SUNY Plattsburgh. A group of sorority sisters and I were invited to work at the Lake…

ORSON PHELPS named Adirondack peaks Skylight, Saddleback and Basin and was beloved by his clients for his quirky ways and philosopher’s heart. Bill Nye gave the “Hitch-Up Matilda” pass by Avalanche Lake its name when he hefted a client onto his shoulders there and carried her to safety. In Mart Moody’s charge were Presidents Chester Arthur and Grover Cleveland and Queen Victoria’s handmaid. Mitchell Sabattis had remarkable tracking skills and could determine the soundness of a canoe by sucking its bark for holes. And Alvah Dunning, moose and panther slayer, could coax a mink from its den with a “peculiar chirping.” These are among the earliest and best-known guides in the Adirondacks, launching a profession that almost 200 years later is still an integral part of life here. Plenty has…

BIG MOOSE LAKE, EAGLE BAY, NY 13331 The Waldheim. Seventeen cottages with fireplaces overlooking scenic Big Moose Lake. Established in 1904, The Waldheim has changed little since. Rates include three delicious meals served daily in a central dining room. Unstructured opportunities allow guests to relax, recreate or be with family. 315-357-2353. www.thewaldheim.com. LAKE PLACID, NY 12946 Grand Adirondack Hotel. The Grand Adirondack Hotel looks to its storied past to reinvigorate an iconic building and become a vibrant hub in the heart of Lake Placid for travelers and locals alike. It’s designed for those with an appreciation for new adventures and the laid-back luxury of the Grand Adirondack hotels of the past. Pets welcome. 518-523-1818. www.grandadirondack.com. Marcy. Experience Lake Placid’s newest restaurant, Marcy, at the Grand Adirondack Hotel. Marcy offers thoughtfully…

The young couple and their four-year-old daughter were living in an apartment in Kharkiv, 20 miles from the Russian border. Rockets flew overhead. The thunder of explosions and plumes of choking smoke were constant. The parents feared for the safety of their daughter, who after months and months of war, was beginning to remember little else. They had to get out. Five thousand miles away in Lake Placid, Beth Brunner was frustrated. She wanted to do something to help the Ukrainian people. Not just write a check, but something “direct.” Brunner searched, and eventually connected with the organization North America for Ukraine. “The mission,” she says, “is to help match Ukrainians, desperate to escape, with sponsors in the US.” Brunner asked her husband, Frank, about his comfort in hosting a…

The loons had called Charles Daniels to the water ever since he made his first trip to the Adirondacks in 1900. That was the summer after his father had walked out on his mother and him without providing a penny of support, completely cutting them out of his life. Charley was barely 15, skinny and small, and the anxiety that had crippled him through childhood was only getting worse. Charley’s mother, Alice, made the bold decision to vacate Manhattan to spend a summer in the great outdoors, hoping it would help rid the boy of what doctors called “nervousness.” The concept that an excursion into the wilderness could actually be pleasurable had begun only three decades earlier, after a young Yale-educated preacher, William H. H. Murray, published his bestselling Adirondack…

Tell me if this story sounds familiar: when the pandemic started, at first you wondered how long it would last. But after the first couple months it became clear that you should settle in for the long haul and make the best of a bad situation. For me, that meant homesteading. I looked around at our acres of underutilized land, and I saw an opportunity to finally try things I had always wanted to but never had, due to travel and outside commitments. I know I’m not the only one who took on chickens as a pandemic project. Tomatoes and raspberries too. But the big one, for me, was making my own maple syrup. I spent the first pandemic winter scheming and preparing, but the random YouTube videos I watched…

A few months ago I came across a 1788 handwritten letter by a French nobleman, the Chevalier de La Luzerne, that was being auctioned in a gallery in Boston. I was astounded, to say the least. After many years of looking for items related to the history of the town of Lake Luzerne, this was the first time I came across something by Luzerne himself—the man who is our town’s namesake. I purchased the letter to donate to the Hadley/Lake Luzerne Historical Society. I really believed that was the end of it until I discovered a painting of Luzerne by the renowned artist Charles Wilson Peale at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. I found that I could acquire a very good digital reproduction of the painting and have it printed on…

It’s doubtful that moules frites and Upper Jay were ever mentioned in the same breath before chef Zack Ryder opened the Ice Jam Inn restaurant in late 2020. Buttery, brothy bowls of the Belgian-style mussels, served with golden waffle-cut fries, are one of the inn’s signature dishes, along with banh mi, maple-roasted brussels sprouts and a fiery chicken sandwich called the Crosby, Stills and Nashville. Ryder graduated from Hyde Park’s vaunted Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in 2017, but he deep-fried his first basket of spuds in his mother’s hometown of Keene, just a few miles from Upper Jay. His late uncle Sean Baird owned a restaurant there called Tip-A-Canoe, where Ryder began washing dishes in his teens. After the CIA, Ryder worked as a sous chef at a popular…