Tag: Outdoors

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...

What the Hell Just Happened?!? A January 2026 Pictorial Retrospective ********** It all began innocently enough as we trekked towards the new year. All had been quiet on the western front as December ushered in winter. We got our first real snow near the end of the month. It...

As I sit here basking in the warmth of my woodstove as the thermometer plummets to 28 below zero & we all wait for winter’s next windswept storm surge of ice, cold & snow, I thought I’d share a humorous take on a familiar tome. Because a little levity...

Adventures Await As we bid farewell to 2025 and welcome 2026, I wanted to share an exciting Monroe Wildlife Area announcement. For those who haven’t yet heard the news… Through the National Wildlife Federation, The Monroe Wildlife Area is now officially CERTIFIED ! This has been an undertaking I...

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...

A Whitetail Deer Hunter’s Tale It was finally here. The day I’d been waiting for. Opening day of 2025’s Southern zone rifle season. When I was a boy growing up in Saranac Lake, the Southern Tier was shotgun only. They had no rifle hunting season. As a result, two...

Little did I know that what began as a three hour tour would end up as an epic adventure, leaving me stranded on… It all began innocently enough, taking advantage of summer 2025’s dry weather to reconstruct my Swamp Pond’s beaver blown outlet channel & dam with one sunny...