Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2025 i Adirondack Life

INGREDIENTS: 8 egg yolks2 cups heavy cream1 cup pumpkin puree½ cup maple syrup¼ cup sugar2 teaspoons vanilla½ teaspoon grated nutmeg½ teaspoon cinnamon½ cup sugar (for topping) DIRECTIONS: Preheat oven to 350°. In a large mixing bowl whisk together egg yolks, cream, pumpkin puree, maple syrup, ¼ cup sugar, vanilla and spices until very smooth. Divide the mixture among 8 6-ounce ramekins or ovenproof cups. Place cups in shallow baking pan; pour in enough boiling water to rise halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Bake until the edges look set and the center of the custard still moves slightly, approximately 35 minutes. Remove the ramekins from water and refrigerate until cold, 2 to 3 hours. Bring to room temperature; sprinkle the tops of each cup with sugar and broil 6…

In 2037, give or take a year or two, New York voters will be asked, as they are roughly every twenty years, whether they want to call a constitutional convention to reform the state’s chief governance document. It will have been seventy years since a convention sat to write or revise our constitution, and it’s impossible to predict how voters will lean. Such a convention is expensive, and there is always the chance that a new constitution will be no improvement over the last. But New York has never gone this long without a serious attempt to modernize its constitution. If voters approve, the usual pressing issues will present themselves to the delegates, whoever they are: the need to rationalize New York’s baroque judiciary, how to fairly draw legislative and…

Frenette is a celebrated name in the Adirondacks. Michael Frenette’s father, James, served on the Adirondack Park Agency’s board for more than a decade, and Tupper Lake has a ski-trail system named after him. Michael’s brother Robbie builds guide-boats and runs Raquette River Outfitters outside of town. Even the “skyline” of Tupper Lake can be traced to the Frenettes: the Oval Wood Dish factory, with its lonely smoke-stack, was founded in 1918 by his mother Susanne’s family. Michael has held his own in his prominent family. In 2017, he oversaw the deconstruction of Anne LaBastille’s Twitchell Lake cabin and its relocation to Adirondack Experience, in Blue Mountain Lake. He spent two decades restoring Great Camp Santanoni, in Newcomb, winning both New York State and Adirondack Architectural Heritage (AARCH) preservation awards…

Just as George Washington was wrapping up his second term as president of the fledgling United States of America, Richard and Anna Keese and their 11 children lived in a snug, hand-hewn home in what was called the Union. Their community was a Quaker settlement established in the early 1790s, just south of today’s Peru. They were among the earliest “Religious Society of Friends” in this country, after being persecuted for their beliefs in England. In Union, they freely practiced their religion, which opposed war and slavery, and they farmed the fertile sweep of land between the then-unnamed mountain range and Lake Champlain. When the Keeses first came here they put up a log cabin, long since lost to time. The house was an upgrade, its interior walls whitewashed with…

I was a bad hiker for a long time. On my first outing, I wore sneakers up Big Slide Mountain. I can still see the face of the guy atop the summit that day. “Interesting,” was all he had to say. On my second hike, my brother ran out of water on the descent off Algonquin Peak and I convinced him to refill his bottle at the MacIntyre Brook. He got giardia. The following year, we marched past the turnoff to Mount Redfield and Cliff Mountain because we didn’t realize that unmarked trails wouldn’t have signs. We were approaching Mount Marcy when a stranger helpfully explained that cairns are not just rock piles in the woods. The next year, we camped in a rainstorm near the base of the Seward Range…

SOME MEN COME HOME with sorry old cars, some men come home with sorry old dogs, some men come home with sorry old Army buddies. Bob Card, who had always found edificial reclamation projects difficult to resist, came home with a sorry old movie theater. Fortunately his partner, Helen Zyma, was not (entirely) dismayed. She became Card’s accomplice as the couple assessed the condition of the Strand Theatre in Old Forge and turned it into such a bedazzling Art Deco showpiece that this summer it was presented with a 2025 Preservation Award by Adirondack Architectural Heritage (AARCH). Beyond the architectural significance, the Strand is an incubator of stories and relationships, time passed on first dates and rainy days spent in the popcorned dark. It has marked time not by the…

My boots were still damp from that afternoon’s chores when I slipped them on again, sighing loud enough to earn a sharp look from my mother. It was 1954, and I was 12 years old—one of eight children growing up in a small, weathered house in Paul Smiths, deep in the Adirondacks. Raising a family of our size on a single income wasn’t easy, and I knew better than to complain, especially on nights like this. It was past 9:30 p.m., long after bedtime, but sleep wasn’t on the schedule. Tonight, we were picking up dinner. With a clap of her hands, Mom signaled it was time. My siblings and I piled into the back of our 1953 Ford, crowding close for warmth, the vinyl seats cold against our legs.…

Who doesn’t love a visit from Santa? Now imagine a whole brigade of the big guy in red, 750 strong, floating down the sparkling slopes. It’s not the stuff of sugar-plum dreams, it’s Whiteface Mountain’s most colorful holly-day, Santa Sunday. That’s when anyone decked out in Mr. or Mrs. Claus gear—or sporting a Grinch or Buddy the Elf getup—can ski for free all day long. Midmorning, the group meets atop Little Whiteface for a group photo and a run down the Excelsior trail. This year’s Santa Sunday happens December 14, during Lake Placid’s Holiday Village Stroll weekend. Learn more at whiteface.com.…

Creature Feature “I ’d seen my share of world-class Adirondack architecture, from Marjorie Post’s Topridge to Bill Rockefeller’s Camp Wonundra to the magnificent new Lake Placid Lodge, but this was rustic in the extreme. Every structural member in the vaulted ceiling and every ornamental embellishment had been shaped by the carpenter’s own teeth.” So begins naturalist Edward Kanze’s imagined aquatic tour of a beaver lodge in his latest work, The Nature of the Place: On the Flora and Fauna of the Adirondacks (North Country Books, 2025), which takes an equally deep dive into the private lives of other regional beasts, both tiny and strapping, aviators and land-rovers, along with a peek at the rich inner workings of our trees, fruits and flowers. It’s a book decades in the making, combining…

Kate Messner said her latest middle-grade novel, The Trouble with Heroes (Bloomsbury, 2025), took eight years to write, spilling out of her on the trails and summits of the 46 High Peaks. The voice of a seventh-grader, Finn Connelly, took shape on those long days full of mosquitoes and mud, sunshine and boulder fields. Finn is a resentful, isolated kid who’s built a fortress around himself since the recent death of his father, a New York City firefighter. One destructive, impulsive act earns a criminal mischief charge that brings him into contact with Kelly Thomas, the daughter of Edna Grace Thomas, a fictionalized version of Grace Hudowalski, the first woman to climb the 46 Adirondack High Peaks and a founding member of the Adirondack 46ers. Hudowalski encouraged aspiring members to…

MONDAY, JULY 21st, an unseasonably cool day during a hot and humid Adirondack summer, presented an opportunity to hike something ambitious. Eager to get back into climbing High Peaks after a long hiatus, I decided on Algonquin. It would be an opportunity to see, firsthand, the new slides caused by the torrential rains just over a week ago, on Mount Colden. At the High Peaks Information Center, I learned that the windchill would bring temps down into the 30s on the summit. The wind wasn’t much of an issue when I reached the top at 1:30 p.m. Summit steward Eli Steinberg pointed out the new slide, already named for Brendan Jackson, a backcountry ranger who recently died on the job. The Jackson slide is seven miles as the crow flies from…