Aurora Pfaff

Oct 23, 2024 | adirondacklife.com | Annie Stoltie |John McMahon |Erin Schumaker |Aurora Pfaff

Photograph by www.jwild.photography Sometimes you can see the past. Floorboards worn lacquer-smooth. The squeeze of a narrow staircase, built for function—just to get upstairs for sleep. Rooms that go to rooms that go to rooms. You’ll find all of this at The Birch Store, in Keene Valley, one of the oldest continuously operating shops in the Adirondacks.

Oct 19, 2024 | adirondacklife.com | John McMahon |Erin Schumaker |Annie Stoltie |Aurora Pfaff

Illustration by AJ Smith In the mid-1970s, my parents bought a small, run-down cottage on Fourth Lake, somewhere between Old Forge and Eagle Bay. It was a single-level clapboard building with a century’s worth of furniture down a mile of dirt drive from the main road. We had two neighbors but neither was visible from the cottage. Surrounded by a dense pine forest that grew right to the lake’s edge, the place was secluded.

Oct 1, 2024 | adirondacklife.com | Erin Schumaker |Annie Stoltie |Aurora Pfaff |Edward Kanze

Photograph by Nancie BattagliaIn its heyday, Skanendowa Lodge, a family compound of Adirondack cottages on Tupper Lake, drew high-society guests from Washington DC—writers, senators and presidents keen on escaping the sweltering summer in the city for the mountains.

Aug 29, 2024 | adirondacklife.com | Annie Stoltie |Aurora Pfaff |Edward Kanze |Brian Mann

Adirondack Experience’s annual FallFest, in Blue Mountain Lake, happens October 6. Photograph by Nancie Battaglia Celebrate the harvest or lift a stein to the season at colorful gatherings throughout the park—find a bushel of fall fun at our events calendar.  Once the days shorten and temperatures drop, trees break out their fall coats—the costume change is a result of chlorophyll production slowing and stopping, allowing other pigments a turn in the spotlight.

Aug 6, 2024 | adirondacklife.com | Annie Stoltie |Aurora Pfaff |Edward Kanze |Brian Mann

Festival cofounder Roger Kalia conducts a concert at the village’s Shepard Park. Photograph courtesy of Lake George Music FestivalScholars say composer Samuel Barber wrote Adagio for Strings in Austria. But watch a sunrise from Lake George’s shoreline—waves lapping, light breaking through the dawn mist—and you can imagine how Barber’s heart-stirring masterpiece that crescendos and crashes might have been inspired by this place. It’s possible.