AdirondackLivingOct2025

(Enterprise photos - Parker O’Brien)

ABOVE:

Matt Skeels, left, and Royal McDonnell paddle toward the finish line of the 90-Miler boat race in Saranac Lake.

90-MILER

RACE 2025

ABOVE:

Paddlers race toward the finish line of the 90-miler boat race in Saranac Lake.

ABOVE:

Eileen Visser paddles with her dog during the third and final leg of the 90-miler on Sunday in Saranac Lake.

ABOVE:

The voyageur canoe team, Fullest Throttle, which features in no particular order Jon I., Trisha I., Will M., Charlotte S., Margaret S., Brady B., Amy F. and Evan F. paddles toward the 90-miler finish line.

Lighting up the past

By Chris Gaige

For one hour on Aug. 30, there was a smattering of bright spots in the otherwise dark Adirondack night sky.

Fire towers across the state were illuminated between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. on Saturday as part of an annual tradition. Now in its 12th year, the lighting pays homage to the fire lookouts who staffed the towers from 1909 until 1990, as well as the preservation and restoration efforts that have subsequently taken place to maintain the historical structures through today.

The lighting, which is usually correlated with Labor Day weekend each year, is organized by the New York State Chapter of the Forest Fire Lookout Association. For 2025, there were 35 towers across the state participating. Some local towers included:

• Adirondack History Museum (town of Elizabethtown)

• Mount Arab (town of Piercefield)

• Azure Mountain (town of Waverly)

• Buck Mountain (town of Long Lake)

• Hurricane Mountain (towns of Elizabethtown and Keene)

• Owl’s Head Mountain (town of Long Lake)

• St. Regis Mountain (town of Santa Clara)

A complete list of participating towers for 2025 can be found at nysffla.org/light.html. The webpage includes a map, as well as the surrounding locations around each tower where the illumination was expected to be visible.

Organizers emphasized that it was not a hiking event, and that viewers did not need to hike into the dark woods to catch a glimpse of the fire towers — and that hiking at night without proper preparation and equipment can be dangerous. Instead, there were ample spots “from civilization” to view the lights, and even enjoy planned festivities to celebrate the towers.

The Lake Clear Lodge and Resort — where St. Regis Mountain’s tower lighting can be seen — held its eighth annual “Light Up Your Senses”

event from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. on Aug. 30. It was held rain or shine, with guests being invited back on Sunday if the rain date for the actual tower lighting is required — something that fortunately was not needed this year.

The event — which also serves as a fundraiser for the Friends of St. Regis Mountain Fire Tower, the nonprofit organization that oversees its maintenance — included an Oktoberfest dinner, a presentation on the tower’s history, a presentation from the Adirondack Sky Center & Observatory on astronomical features in the Adirondack night sky and live music from Peggy Lynn.

In Elizabethtown, the Adirondack History Museum’s tower — an amalgamation of components from towers that were removed from West Mountain near Raquette Lake and Kempshall Mountain near Long Lake — was illuminated. It is right next to the museum, and people were able to walk right up to it. The light from Hurricane Mountain’s firetower, located about 7 miles away, was also visible from the museum, according to Board President Peter Slocum, who participated in the lighting.

“It’s a fun event,” he said. “It’s a nice chance to look at the Adirondack scenery and recognize the fact that it’s a beautiful environment for us in part thanks to the sacrifices that people made by going up there all those years and watching for fires.”

Volunteers at each tower read aloud the names of those who served there when they were active. Fire watchers were instituted by the state after particularly devastating fires that ripped through the Adirondacks in 1903 and 1908, burning hundreds of thousands of acres.

They were gradually phased out in New York in the 1970s as increasing commercial aviation activity rendered an effective means of spotting fires. This left the towers slated for deconstruction.

“They were kind of mothballed and then, eventually, the state decided they would dismantle the ones that were in wilderness areas as nonconforming uses in the wilderness,” Slocum said. “But then it turned out that a lot of local folks in different communities … said ‘Hey, this is part of our historical heritage, we’d love to keep these.”

Slocum said there were protracted legal battles and while some towers throughout the park were removed, advocates were successful in saving others, including those on Hurricane and St. Regis mountains, from demolition. This was accomplished when the Adirondack Park Agency reclassified small, 0.5-acre plots of land at the mountain summits from “wilderness” to “historic,” which allowed the structures to remain in place. An Enterprise report from 2019 detailing that history and process is available at tinyurl. com/mstsxtkv.

Preventing the fire towers from being torn down was only part of the battle. The other, Slocum said,

was maintaining their aesthetic and structural integrity. This time-intensive process was largely made possible by volunteer efforts, he noted.

“Each firetower had a group of volunteers working on restoring the towers, with help from the state,” he said. “We were able to put in new flooring, stairways and safety fencing so that people could go enjoy them — and they’ve become extremely popular hiking destinations.”

In fact, there is now an entire hiking challenge dedicated to the fire tower peaks in the Adirondacks. More information can be found at tinyurl.com/zwbcxfp3.

Slocum said one of this weekend’s goals was to stoke interest in fire tower stewardship in the next generation, which he said is crucial to their ongoing viability.

“A lot of the volunteers who worked on the early stage of restoration are getting up there, so we’re working on finding younger people to do the climbing and that’s worked out pretty well,” he said.

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DIANA FRIEDLANDER

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TOP 5

Short Family Hikes in the Inlet Region

By SPENCER MORRISEY

Rocky Mountain

ACTIVITY: Hiking

DIFFICULTY: Moderate

DISTANCE: 0.6 miles, one way

DIRECTIONS: The trailhead is located just east of the Uncas Road and state Route 28 intersection in Inlet, along Route 28 at the same location as Black Bear Mountain.

Black Bear Mountain

ACTIVITY: Hiking

DIFFICULTY: Moderate

DISTANCE: 2.25 miles, one way

DIRECTIONS: The trailhead is located just east of the Uncas Road and state Route 28 intersection in Inlet, along

Route 28 at the same location as Rocky Mountain.

Ferds Bog

ACTIVITY: Hiking

DIFFICULTY: Easy

DISTANCE: 0.2 miles, one way

DIRECTIONS: From the intersection of state Route 28 and Uncas Road in Inlet, follow Uncas Road. Continue for just over 3.5 miles to the small trailhead on the left.

Cascade Mt. Waterfall

ACTIVITY: Hiking

DIFFICULTY: Easy to moderate

DISTANCE: 3.6 Miles, One Way

DIRECTIONS: From the intersection of state Route 28 and Big Moose Road in Eagle Bay follow Big Moose Road. Continue for around 1.25 miles to the Cascade Lake Trailhead on the right.

Snake Pond

ACTIVITY: Hiking

DIFFICULTY: Easy

DISTANCE: 0.5 mile, one way

DIRECTIONS: From the intersection of state Route 28 and Big Moose Road in Eagle Bay follow Big Moose Road. Continue for around 8 miles to Twitchell Road on the right. Follow Twitchell Road for 1 mile to the small trailhead on the left.

Camp Sagamore is seen on Aug. 2. The camp was originally built by William West Durant between 1895 and 1897. The camp gradually fell into disrepair between the 1950s and 1970s and, for a time, appeared slated for demolition as the land would be returned to forest preserve. Beginning in 1975, however, preservationists rallied to protect the camp and successfully amended the state constitution to allow for a land swap that added nearby undeveloped land to the forest preserve while transferring land that the camp and its adjoining buildings sit on to the nonprofit Sagamore Institute of the Adirondacks for preservation. On May 16, 2000, it was designated as a National Historic Landmark.

Great Camp Sagamore celebrates 50 years of preservation

By Chris Gaige

RAQUETTE LAKE – Perched on the shores of Sagamore Lake and tucked deep into the woods four miles down a dirt road, Great Camp Sagamore’s rustic opulence in many ways defines the story of Adirondack preservation.

Its buildings sit eloquently between mowed lawns and well-graded gravel paths, hosting visitors over a robust summer of public tours and other special events put on by the Sagamore Institute of the Adirondacks, the nonprofit organization tasked with preserving the great camp and telling its story – from the 1890s through today.

On Aug. 2, Sagamore’s annual Gala and Benefit for Historical Preservation was held, with this year taking on added significance as 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of when the camp was acquired by the Sagamore Institute of the Adirondacks, a nonprofit preservationist organization that operates the property today.

There were around 200 guests. The evening featured a silent auction, cocktails, dinner and remarks from staff and board members. Executive Director Emily Martz noted that visitations to Sagamore was up 17% this year, on the heels of a 20% increase last year.

“We’re here because of those who came before,” she said. “Fifty years ago, a small group of people had the vision ... passion and the persistence to save this place.”

Great Camp Sagamore’s story goes back to the 1890s. It was originally constructed from 1895 to 1987 by William West Durant, who was the son of railroad magnate Thomas C. Durant. William West Durant pioneered the Adirondack Great Camp style, designing and building several others, such as Uncas and Pine Knot. Several generations of Durant’s descendants were in attendance at the gala.

Durant built Sagamore – not to be confused with the Sagamore Resort in Lake George – as a private family camp, though struggling family finances forced him to sell it shortly after it was built. It was bought in 1901 by Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Sr., the great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt I, nicknamed “the Commodore,” for the vast railroads and shipping businesses he built in the 1800s.

The camp remained with Alfred until his death aboard the RMS Lusitania in 1915, at which point it was passed to his second wife, Margaret Emerson McKim, who continued to entertain at the camp until she gifted it to Syracuse University in 1954, which had used it as a conference center.

Fifty years ago, Sagamore’s story was very much in jeopardy. In 1975, the great camp and its adjoining buildings had faced two decades of deferred maintenance. Staring down

Howie Kirschenbaum, left, and Barbara Glaser stand to be recognized at Great Camp Sagamore’s annual Gala and Benefit for Historic Preservation – with 2025 marking the 50-year anniversary since the two began an odds-defying effort to preserve the camp when in the 1970s it was slated for demolition and return to forest preserve.

the stagflation crisis that gripped the nation in the 1970s, the university could no longer afford its already limited maintenance of the historic Adirondack Great Camp.

Looking to divest and focus on its more core educational aspects, New York state offered to buy the land. Much of what surrounded the 1,500acre property was already state forest preserve. This presented an issue.

Under its Article 14 ‘Forever Wild’ provision, the state constitution required that any buildings on land to be entered into the forest preserve would have to be destroyed, in keeping with the land’s wild purpose. The nonprofit Preservation League of New York State had just formed in 1974. Despite its fledgling status then, the league began an intensive lobbying effort with state officials to save Camp Sagamore from destruction, given its architectural and cultural significance to the Adirondacks.

A complex deal was worked out where the state acquired the vast majority of the roughly 1,500-acre parcel for forest preserve, while agreeing to give the 7 acres that the main camp and some of its surrounding buildings sit on to the preservation league with several deed restrictions. These ensured that the site would be preserved and maintained in a way that would benefit the public and in character with the surrounding wild lands.

After the acquisition, the preservation league then bid the site to a smaller nonprofit – in accordance with the deed restrictions and mission – that would focus exclusively on preserving it. The Sagamore Institute of the Adirondacks secured the bid for $100,000.

That group was run then by two preservationists who had been living in Upper Jay, Barbara Glaser and Howie Kirschenbaum. They were 25 and 31, respectively, when they first took over the sprawling site. The two received

a thunderous round of applause and a standing ovation at the gala as they were recognized for their herculean and odds-defying efforts to spearhead Sagamore’s preservation, turning it from disrepair to the gold standard of Adirondack preservation today.

“We were really young, and that was a good thing, because we had no idea the amount of work it was going to take to make this happen,” Glaser said. “The thing I’m so proud of is that we’ve kept this place alive. It’s become a national historic landmark. Its program this summer is totally full. It’s a vital part of the economy of the central Adirondacks in a way that thrives on the preservation of the resource, not the destruction of the resource.”

Great Camp Sagamore Historian Connor Williams credited much of what the site has transformed into today to Glaser and Kirschenbaum’s vision to see Great Camp Sagamore as something that could be much more than when they first took over, noting that they realized that merely using the space as a conference center left so much unrealized public benefit.

“They realized, ‘We have this really exceptional property – full of history, full of nature, full of opportunity,’” he

Club of

said. “’It’s going to take a lot of work to preserve it, but if we do, we can morph from being a conference center to being an exceptional, unique, one-of-a-kind experience – either in the Adirondacks or the whole world.’”

Williams said it was incredible to see the story’s trajectory over 50 years, from a small intrepid crew aiming to restore and grow Sagamore’s presence in the face of uncertainty, into a National Historic Landmark that tells the rich history of the camp – both in the context of the humans who used and preserved it, and the wilderness that surrounds it – to an ever-growing audience.

“I think that (Saturday’s) turnout and exceptional support really was evidence

Kirschenbaum,

and

smile with an original poster urging voters to approve Ballot Proposal 6, which amended the state constitution to allow for a land exchange whereupon nearby undeveloped lands of appraised at an equal value would be added to the forest preserve in exchange for the lands that Great Camp Sagamore’s Upper Complex sit on to be transferred out of the forest preserve to the nonprofit Sagamore Institute of the Adirondacks for preservation. Kirschenbaum, along with Barbara Glaser, led the effort to get the amendment passed through the state legislature and ultimately by voters, where it passed with more than 62.7% of the vote in the 1983 general election.

for the

that dreams, and especially historic dreams, can be realized,” he said. “That 50 years ago, a few young, energetic educators saw that a property that had been used exclusively as a vacation manner, and then later a conference center, could become something far more unique than either. ... They saw an exceptional opportunity to blend history, nature and community into a nonprofit organization where people could reflect on the present and prepare for the future while being surrounded by the past.”

More information on Great Camp Sagamore can be found at sagamore.org.

WITH HUNTER DOU G L A S W I NDOW F A S H ION S , THE POSSI B ILITIES A R E ENDLES S