Innholdsfortegnelse for Adirondack Homes & Camps 2025 i Adirondack Life

A tree house is an escape to nature, a haven from the elements that is made within the elements. From their long and functional use as perches aloft, providing safety from the reach of wild animals to their use as surveillance points for hunters, birdwatchers, and young children, tree houses have been around for quite some time, and shall continue to be. Part of their appeal is what I call “the allure of the skies”: “What do the birds see? What is their vantage? I want to experience it!” But beyond that, they’re just outright fun in their unconventional and often primitive basis. Their affordability, in some cases, additionally makes them attractive. Having built tree houses for as little as $200 and others almost completely free of cost with the…

We have, for a very long time, thought about a roof one way: as a device to keep out the rain. That’s important, and ever more so as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of downpours. But something else falls on our roofs every day too, a staggering quantity of energy, streaming down from the sun. And now we have the technology to make full use of it: to harvest that windfall, to store it in batteries, and in the process to make your home your increasingly self-sufficient castle. I can talk a little about solar power at these latitudes because we’ve relied on it for most of our power for a quarter century. My wife and I put up our first panels back when they were expensive—but since…

Tell people you had a summer job at an Adirondack camp, and most assume you ran herd on a bunkhouse full of homesick, sunburned kids. My summer job wasn’t like that. It was altogether different, because Kamp Kill Kare was an altogether different kind of camp. Kill Kare was—and still is—a Great Camp, a large and rustic lakeside estate. It rates its own chapter in Craig Gilborn’s Adirondack Camps and is featured in Harvey Kaiser’s Great Camps of the Adirondacks. Adjacent compounds were owned by J. P. Morgan and Alfred G. Vanderbilt. Call it an upscale neighborhood. Kill Kare as I knew it had been completed around 1917. In 1969, my first season there, it was the summer retreat of the very wealthy and by then quite elderly Mabel Brady…

EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS BEFORE the Beatles, the sickly Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in New York City to a pulsating throng of adoring fans and, like John Lennon, pondered whether he might be more popular than Jesus. This was far better treatment than he had received across the pond, where he’d been fleeced by publishers, and highbrow Europeans had wrinkled their noses at his newly released tale of Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson was bound for the Rocky Mountains in hopes of reclaiming his health, but his fragile constitution was so rattled by the cacophonous city, it was feared he wouldn’t make it that far. Instead, he was assigned to the care of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, of Saranac Lake, who was said to be working miracles on tuberculosis, then the world’s…

IN JULY OF 2016, my wife, Nan, and I were invited to spend a few days with friends at a remote camp on Upper Ausable Lake in the Adirondacks. It is part of the Ausable Club, and getting there involves paddles in a guideboat and a hike over a portage. One morning I got up early, made some coffee, took a mug down to the dock, got into a guideboat and rowed into the middle of the lake. I was surrounded by tall mountains with lovely rock faces, and I could hear the call of loons. I thought to myself, Why don’t I have more time like this in my life? And then my thoughts morphed into the idea that I could find a small, rundown camp to rebuild or…

As fans of HBO’s The Gilded Age will know, Polish-born soprano Marcella Sembrich was a buzz-worthy addition to the The Metropolitan Opera’s premier season, in 1883. By the time the international superstar retired from the operatic stage, in 1909, she had wowed audiences there more than 450 times. Sembrich moved on to a successful career as a concert singer, then turned her attention to teaching. She built her Bolton Landing studio on Lake George in 1922, hosting promising students there every summer from 1925 to 1934. A 1927 New York Times article described the scene: “In the studio, which holds about 100 persons, also take place the afternoon pupils’ concerts. … These receptions are full of color with an appeal to the eye as well as to the ear.” The…

When I (Howard) sat down at my office desk to write this, I realized that I sat down at my second-grade school desk in this same spot 88 years ago. My home today, where I live with my wife, Ruth, was the Harrietstown schoolhouse in 1937. My family lived just up the road “a piece,” which in country parlance could mean a mile or a hundred yards. Today in what was the schoolhouse, the beautiful, original Douglas fir floor looks like it might have been installed last week, not early in the last century. The building has 10-foot ceilings and six-foot-high windows, created to let in lots of light. The original ceilings were sheets of patterned tin because heat rises and warms the tin, which then warms the building. We…

It’s the smell of the camp when I arrive. It’s the unforgiving creaks in the staircase that have tattled on generations of kids coming home late. It’s the amber glow in the dining room as the light from the banquet lamps and candles bounces off the patina walls. It’s seeing the barely visible words hand-painted by my great-grandmother on the original living room wall. It’s all these things and more that ground me to my true home—Camp Good Enough. The Beginning: A Brewery Plan Turned Family Legacy In 1851, my great-great-grandfather Ben-jamin Brandreth, then a New York State Senator and a successful businessman, decided he would buy land in the Adirondacks in hopes of adding a thriving brewery business to his portfolio. He bought Township 39—24,000 acres—within the town of…

Fewer than 400 babies are born to Essex County families annually. This year my son was one of them. I learned I was pregnant in June. The sun was up before five, but I was up earlier. I had been waiting to take the test. The blue line was so faint, just barely there. I woke my husband, Adam, and we stared into each others’ eyes. A spot in an Adirondack day care facility is a precious find. For every six children in the Adirondacks, there is just one slot. Securing ours was among the first priorities. The day care staff we met asked how old our child was. Adam and I looked at each other bashfully and I placed my hands on my not-yet-round stomach. “Wow,” our doctor remarked,…

In 1933, Paul Schaefer formed a hunting club comprised of men from counties neighboring the Adirondacks that lasted for eighty years. Many of its members worked for the General Electric Company. It was named the Cataract Club for the springtime cataract of water, fed by a swamp at the top of Eleventh Mountain’s wild ridgeline, which fell precipitously into the valley below. The club members focused all their hunting efforts within this area Paul came to know so well, the 114,000-acre Siamese Ponds Wilderness. Schaefer was known for his keen eye with a rifle, his long, loping gait, his great physical endurance in the woods, his tales of fighting for the protection of the wilderness, and his deep respect for its wildlife. Many of the hunting and fishing adventures that…