Adirondack Life

I’ve known Alison Haas for almost 30 years—first as a fast, fawn-legged 13-year-old who joined my varsity relay team when I was a high-school senior. And decades later in the Adirondacks when she was hired at the Lake Placid Olympic Museum. We’d grow

Passing through a forest it’s easy to focus on the familiar, the exceptional. Is that deafening teacher, teacher call an ovenbird hiding in a brambly thicket? Did a red eft just slither between a tangle of twigs and a mud puddle? There’s dazzling div

You care about the Adirondacks and do your part to be a good steward along the trail, on the water and in all the wild places in between. But what about your private property? Whether you own land the size of a beach blanket or have a sprawling estat

Emmett and Ethan Smith are on a mission to change the way you think about the electricity that powers your house—to think about it as a local good, like something you buy at the farmers’ market, something rooted in Adirondack history, and something t

The recent wave of interest in growing native plants to provide food and habitat for wildlife, from foraging birds to pollinating insects, is exciting. It has created an industry demand for attractive, garden-worthy plants that aren’t just aesthetica

FOR MIKE AND MARCI PHINNEY, the lake house they built in Hague isn’t just their dream home, it’s a showcase of the kind of green architecture their Saratoga Springs firm, Phinney Design Group, specializes in. The structure, a hybrid of Japanese and A

FOR THE LAST WEEK I’VE BEEN IN THE ADIRONDACKS, not visiting my new land. My land is just a couple miles up a hill from the cottage I’ve been renting for the past two summers. I’ve run up that hill again and again to the roundabout near my land on my

HANDFUL OF YEARS AFTER HE WON a gold medal in the first-ever Olympic golf championship at the 1900 Paris games, Charles Sands bought land for a cooperage in Clemons, on Lake George. Just how Sands, New York City–born and an Olympic competitor in both

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN a million years, I overslept. It was 7:15 when my right eyelid peeked open to see maple leaves glowing green in the June morning. I’d spent the night 25 feet up in the forest canopy in McCollums, north of Paul Smiths. Twenty yea

In 2017 I announced a bid for the US House of Representatives. A few months before the campaign launched, I listed my five-bedroom/five-bath house in downtown Keene. The timing was not ideal, and the market was unrecognizable from today, but the deci

Having spent many happy days on the shores of Tupper Lake, we wanted to make it our second home. We didn’t have a big budget, but both of us are architects, so we had lots of creativity and a desire to keep our hands busy. We wanted a modern Adironda

In 2013, Franklin-Essex-Hamilton Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) decided that, when it comes to career goals, Building Trades students should start small—tiny, even. Since then juniors and seniors at the Adirondack Educational Cente

When I was in my 20s and early 30s, I spent most winters living in Belize. I appreciated the respect and care Belizeans gave their aging family members. It was inspiring, and influenced my decision to build a tiny house on 120 acres of wildlife refug

Farmer Dillon Klepetar scratched his head through a wool cap, holding an oversized wrench in his other hand. He’d been retrofitting the farm’s tractor to run on diesel produced from pig and beef fat, making it the only one of its kind for miles. Alth

Farmer Lissa Goldstein likes her produce to be pretty—red radishes free of any trace of the soil that cradled them; gently dimpled blueberries; kohlrabi the color of an Adirondack twilight. The vegetables should be wholesome and look the part. She’s