Campfire Stories: The Adirondacks: Tales & Travel Companion

By Ilyssa Kyu (Editor) and Dave Kyu (Editor)

• Curated story collections explore the rich and diverse legacies of the Adirondacks
• Contributors include Robin Wall Kimmerer, Joseph Bruchac, Bill McKibben, Alan Steinberg, June Frankland Baker, Henry Abbott, William H. H. Murray, and Matt Dallos
• Local recommendations for outdoor exploration, select cultural activities, camping options, gateway towns, and more
• "How to Visit Well" and "Community Resources" sections offer tips on sustainable travel while highlighting cultural, Indigenous, and conservation organizations

Expanding on the bestselling Campfire Stories volumes, which feature shareable tales from our national parks, this new series from Ilyssa and Dave Kyu immerses readers in the storytelling endemic to America’s beloved natural spaces, offering unique tours through diverse histories, lore, and landscapes.

Part story collection and part travel companion, each eye-catching volume begins with an anthology of "campfire stories"--from classic passages to original poetry, historical excerpts to fresh perspectives, treasured folk songs to local myths. Through the magic of storytelling, readers are deeply drawn into each distinctive terrain. These tales are then followed by a mini-guide: community-sourced recommendations for outdoor activities, cultural landmarks, and historical points of interest that will enrich the reader’s experience, as well as tips on how to best travel lightly and respectfully through these scenic and varied public lands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mountaineers Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2025
• ISBN: 9781680517491

Book preview

]>

ADIRONDACKS

STORIES

O gentle mountains—you who first arose

Above primeval waters in the West—

We honor you, as every campsite shows,

And love your ancient streams and rocks the best.

Time laid his hand on you so long ago,

That there are steeper crags than yours to scale,

But none, wherever mountain winds may blow,

With friendlier slopes, now smoothed by ice and gale.

We who have built our fires by your streams,

And climbed to view the sunrise from your peaks,

When we are far from you, the heart still dreams

Of the calm peace you bring to him who seeks.

Sweet Adirondacks, in our lonely hours,

Your pines are with us, and your mountain flowers.

—P.H.W. BACHMANN, ADIRONDACKS

]>

In the Adirondacks

MATT DALLOS

Excerpt from In the Adirondacks: Dispatches from the Largest Park in the Lower 48

To get there from any direction go up. Higher than the valleys all around, the Adirondacks is a place set apart. Where boreal plants venture south to meet temperate. Where the air is chill and the summer short. Where there’s a home garden center called Zone 3, and a theme park called the North Pole. Where 1920s silent film directors shot Siberia, Alaska, and Switzerland. Up there, where the frontier held on until the twentieth century. Some people are convinced it still does and always will. Where one county the size of Rhode Island has zero traffic lights. Up there, where you can still see the stars. Where the breeze is balsam and pine. Where the sick went to take the fresh air cure. . . .

It’s forest, mostly, and lakes and streams and marshes and swamps and bogs and fens and rivers where there’s too much water for trees to grow.

There are mountains, too, rolling, billowing, peaked. But to call the Adirondacks the Adirondack Mountains is to ignore most of what’s there.

Many millions of years ago the metamorphic bedrock of the Adirondacks began to rise. No one seems to know exactly why. Erosion tore into the bedrock dome. Glaciers plucked and grated, gouged and scraped. The bedrock—crumpled and contorted, all zigzags and curlicues—is a billion years old. Fifteen thousand years ago, the most recent glaciers began melting. They took their time. Silt, sand, pebbles, stones, cobbles, and boulders hung suspended in the stagnant ice, dribbled to the ground. I liked to stand on mountains with a good view and imagine boulders hitting bedrock in plinks and bangs. Before trees migrated back north, the Adirondacks was rubble.

All that rock, all that sand, it dammed creeks and rivers, a lake or wetland in every nook. Adirondack bedrock, mostly granite, some schist and gneiss, is impermeable. Every drop of rain and every drip of melting snow either runs off or puddles. If you could pick up the Adirondacks and tilt it, it would slosh. Rivers mingle swampy and then take the long way down, threads of dark water that bow and sweep and curl. Beavers, loggers, and industrialists built a bunch of dams, creating even more lakes that looked a lot like all the others. . . .

In 1892, New York state designated the Adirondack Park. Most people call it the Adirondacks, or the ‘Dacks, or the Park. Some call it the A-D-K. At about six million acres, it’s the largest park in the lower forty-eight. New Jersey, Vermont, and New Hampshire: each state is about the same size as the Adirondacks. Everyone who tries to make sense of its scale notes how multiple national parks could fit inside, arranged like a kindergartener’s pasted collage. I’ll repeat the calculus because even as a cliché it’s astonishing: Glacier, Yellowstone; Grand Canyon, and the Everglades combined. Or Death Valley, Olympic, Yosemite, and the Great Smoky Mountains. You could live in the park for your entire life and still be a tourist on the other side. In the nineteenth century, Adirondack guides would only escort sportsmen through one region. When guides approached the boundaries of their local knowledge, they passed their clients on to someone else. Often I imagined it as much bigger than it really is. It would feel, roughly, the size of Alaska. Alaska is seventy times the size of the Adirondacks. It takes only two and a half hours to drive across the Adirondacks, a fact I try to ignore so I can dwell in my own inflated sense of