Category: High Peaks

A Limerick Collection There once lived a lumberjack named Lefty Leroux Whose proper first name wasn’t Lefty but Lou One night Lou drained his flask Had a fight with his axe Rendering his right handed digits too few ********** One of the many exercises I’ve enjoyed throughout my career...

He awoke well before dawn. No alarm clock required. Because every black & gold tabbed Roger’s Rangers desciple has Standing Order #15 : “Don’t sleep beyond dawn. Dawn’s when the French & Indians attack”, hard wired into them. But it wasn’t musket bearing foreign maurauders or tribal war parties...

A 2026 SL Winter Carnival Prequel My wife Robin & I decided to make our annual Saranac Lake Winter Carnival roadtrip a day early this year, in part because she’s in the midst of getting ready for her own week long mother/daughter road trip to Florida, but mostly to...

Far More Than Wrinkled Brown Lines on a Map As I put pen to paper it pains me to know that in today’s cell phone technology driven GPS “land navigation” environment, many folks are reading the title & thinking to themselves: “Contour lines? What’s this guy yammering about now?...

Author’s Note: I penned the first drafts of this story as a poem in the summer of 1983, while working out of Lake Colden’s Interior Headquarters as a trail hand on the NYSDEC trail crew, during one the two summers I served as assistant to Lake Colden’s caretaker. I...

With a month long string of record breaking temperatures, low water extremes, droughtlike conditions, and a fire hazard driven state wide burn ban, as I climbed from my old friend the Saranac River’s waters after an unseasonably warm October afternoon bottle dive, I couldn’t help but wonder. Was this...

Fall Foliage, BBQ Chicken, Broken Bridges & an Ampersand SOS My wife Robin & I celebrated our 35th wedding anniverary in our traditional way, with a day trip to take in the fall foliage in and around my heart’s home of Saranac Lake. Due to life circumstances beyond our...

Climate Change, Chainsaws & a Camping Chronology This piece begins with a question: How many folks out there have spent ten days or more at a single stretch with family in a remotely pitched ADK camp? I’m not talking about “going into camp”, sitting in hunting camp playing cards...

Why do some people think defacing our beloved Adirondack lean-tos is acceptable? For many folks out there; hunters, hikers, campers, explorers, outdoorsmen and other Adirondack souls of like ilk, these lean-tos are more than just cedar log structures providing a convenient stopping point on our trek through life’s wood....

MIDDLE SARANAC LAKE EDITION It was an early Saturday morning in the middle of July. My brother Ray & I were camped in our usual Middle Saranac Lake Bull Rush Bay lean-to spot. I arose from lean-to embraced slumber, stretched, and went down to the lake to inhale the...