Category: Essays & Stories

If that’s not an official holiday, it oughta’ be! Well! This is it! Saturday is October 1st. The time of year every hunter has been waiting for. In New York State, October ushers in the opening of bow season, fall turkey and duck hunting, as well as most small...

A Cancer Fighting Canine’s Morning Paw Patrol Photo Shoot Featuring: Captain Blue As folks may or may not know by now, our Monroe Paw Patrol family recently received some very devastating news. Captain Blue, our canine Paw Patrol Leader, was diagnosed with lymphoma. Captain Blue is only six and...

The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Duck      The day dawned with a twist.  A hunter’s life lesson hard learned as my Zen Boat canoe silently sliced morning mist.      I jumped a pair of wood ducks along the shore to my left as my hand painted Zen Boat...

The 2022 Adirondack Canoe Classic AKA: “The 90 Miler” An Adirondack Outlaw Photo Chronology ********** I suspect that being in the right place at the right time is one of the tricks of being a photographer. I also suspect that sometimes it’s by design, and sometimes by chance. I...

Ari Rae Marra’s Adirondack Outlaw Christening Bull Rush Bay 2022 was not only our Monroe family’s 50th anniversary camp celebration, it was also an Adirondack Outlaw camp celebration as Ari Rae’s first. Plans and preparation for this big event began late last fall. The NYSDEC built a brand spanking...

OR “THE GREAT RAT CAPER OF 1981”      It was fall, 1980.  My friends and I had somehow managed to survive our way to senior year at Saranac Lake High School.      I wasn’t a great student in high school.  I never really studied or applied myself.  I copied...

A Middle Saranac Lake lean-to look-back collection of memories, artifacts, legends and photos.      My family first visited Middle Saranac Lake’s site 63 Bull Rush Bay in 1972.   The photo above depicts the lean-to that was there by that time. It quickly became the cedar log summer home...

The story is fiction. The issues are real. Some moments call for a good man with stones. **********      It was a Thursday. Not unlike any Thursday in any small town. An unassuming grey-haired man in his late fifties quietly parked his forest green pickup truck in the downtown...

The original version of this story 1st appeared in the June 17, 2021 on-line edition of the Adirondack Almanack      I had an interesting conversation with my brother a while back in camp. It began innocently enough, with an observation he made about the difficulties the Saranac Lake Elks...

An SLHS ’81 Classmate Collaboration By Jackie Ely & Dick Monroe (With a cameo assist by Karen Barrow Pittman) Winter’s Long March Behind Me Birch Trees Framing My Thoughts Sitting Alone in a Park Contemplating Ice-Covered Mountain Lake Waters Quietly Waiting for Spring (And waiting…and waiting) Soaking In April’s...