The Erie Canal was dying. Adirondack sawmills were falling silent. And in the final years of the nineteenth century, the upstate New York town of Forestport was struggling just to survive. Then the canal levees started breaking, and the boom times returned. The Forestport saloons flourished, the town's gamblers rollicked, and the politically connected canal contractors were flush once more. It was all very convenient until Governor Theodore Roosevelt's administration grew suspicious and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency began investigating. They found what a lawman called one of the most gigantic conspiracies ever hatched in New York. In The Forestport Breaks, Michael Doyle illuminates a fresh and fascinating chapter in the colorful history of the Erie Canal. This is the canal's shadowy side, a world of political rot and plotting men, and it extended well beyond one rough and tumble town. The Forestport breaks marked the only time New York officials charged men with conspiring to destroy canal property, but they were also illustrative of the widespread rascality surrounding the canal. For Doyle, there is a story with a personal dimension behind the drama of the canal's historical events. As he uncovered the rise and fall of Forestport, he was also discovering that the trail of culpability led to members in his own family tree.

Adirondack history is a tale written o~ the water. In the Adirondacks, people have traveled, conducted warfare, hunted and fished, gone to church, proposed marriage, and driven logs in, on, from, or by water. Without boats, small and large, Adirondack history—social, recreational, commercial, and environmental—would be an affair entirely different from what we have come to know. In this lavishly illustrated account, Hallie E. Bond presents a history of these boats—canoes, sailboats, power launches, outboards, and the indigenous guideboat—that figure prominently in the overall history of the Adirondacks. The pre-contact Indians paddled dugout and bark canoes; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these craft were joined by skiffs and bateaux. Between 1820 and World War II, a distinctive tradition of boat building developed, culminating in the famous Adirondack guideboat. As the nineteenth century progressed, a variety of small, fresh water, musclepowered boats was produced in the Adirondacks—an assemblage matched by only a few places in the country. There were the canoes and the men that made them famous—John Henry Rushton and Nessmuk—and the guideboats and their builders—H. Dwight Grant and Willard Hanmer. In the early twentieth century, the development of the internal combustion engine irrevocably changed not only boat use and design, but life and leisure in the Adirondacks. Bond skillfully captures the whole panorama of boats and boating in the Adirondacks, from early dugouts and bateaux to the highpowered inboards that won Gold Cup races on Lake George and the Kevlar pack canoes of today. Drawing on her experience as an historian and Curator of Collections and Boats at the Adirondack Museum, Bond places events and trends of the region in the context of national and international history and describes the significant contribution of the Adirondacks in the early twentieth-century development of recreation and travel in America. Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks also includes a descriptive catalog of boats from the museum's own collection with nearly two hundred illustrations in addition to those in the narrative, a list of boatbuilders active in the North Country before 1975, and a valuable glossary of terms.

One hundred full-color photographs illustrate this history and current health of upstate New York's Adirondack Park, the first private-public partnership dedicated to the protection of a U.S. wilderness area. "Here is the first lesson about the Adirondacks, captured in Gary Randorf's magnificent photos. It is not only alpine granite—in fact, of the park's six million acres, only about eighty-five, scattered on top of the tallest mountains, are that gorgeous pseudo-Arctic. Aside from the touristed High Peaks, the Adirondacks comprise millions upon millions of acres of Low Peaks, of beavery draws and bearish woods, of hills and hills and hills, countless drainages and muddy ponds . . . The second point about the Adirondacks, a glory carefully revealed in the words and pictures of this book, is that it represents a second-chance wilderness and, as such, a hope that the damage caused by human beings is not irreversible. It is metaphor as much as place."—from the foreword by Bill McKibben In The Adirondacks: Wild Island of Hope, Gary A. Randorf offers 100 photographs to illustrate this unique, comprehensive history and natural history of the Adirondack Park, the first private-public partnership in the United States dedicated to the protection of a wilderness area. Situated in northeast New York, this regional park of six million acres represents a unique blend of public wildlands intermixed with commercial forests, farms, mines, private parks, prisons, scattered homes, dozens of villages, and a year-round population of 130,000. The ongoing attempts over the last century to make the Adirondacks a park have made this region a "striving ground" for living with the land, rather than outside or above it. Much of the strife is over finding a right relationship to the land, treating it not as a commodity to be exploited but as a community to which all living things belong and upon which all depend. Today, the Adirondacks regional park with its six million acres "represents a second-chance wilderness"—as Bill McKibben writes in his foreword to this book. The concerns of this park are the same concerns that apply to all of America's parks, recreational areas, and wildernesses with the addition of how to maintain the fragile peace between human and natural communities. How that "second-chance" can be realized is the focus of Gary Randorf's text and stunning color photographs.

An illustrated travel guide to the Adirondacks that includes listings of accommodations and restaurants, tourist sites, entertainment and shopping, and special events, along with maps and a history of the region.

New York State’s famous Adirondack landscape is immense, spanning over six million acres of public forests, lakes, rivers, mountains, and private lands. In full color featuring hundreds of detailed maps and photos, Mapping the Adirondacks celebrates it all with the first clear account of the original surveyor who explored and fully comprehended it—Verplanck Colvin. “Everywhere below,” Colvin wrote, “were lakes and mountains so different from all maps, yet so immovably true.”His monumental accomplishment helped motivate the citizens of New York in 1894 to legally protect it for generations to come. As an eighteen-year-old budding travel writer, explorer and surveyor, Colvin began personally mapping a half-million acres of true Adirondack wilderness in 1865. Then, shortly after the state began partially funding his audacious project, Colvin reinvented himself as the “Superintendent" of a “Survey of the Adirondack Wilderness” and hired another equally intrepid surveyor to help—his ever-dependable friend Mills Blake. They extended the scope and granularity of their survey several times, hired hundreds of Adirondack guides and other talented people to assist, and devoted twenty-eight years to the challenge of professionally surveying the Adirondacks. Author Thatcher Hogan has carefully gleaned narratives and illustrations from Colvin’s notoriously dense annual reports and reassembled them with additional historic photographs to chronicle a compelling, true story of rugged exploration. After a novice’s explanation of Colvin and Blake’s surveying terms, the book follows their progress with one hundred of Hogan’s new maps and summit views. The Adirondack landscape remains formidable and fascinating—many of the views are those that Colvin first discovered. Along the way, Hogan uncovers a story of intense ambition, physical hardships, and a weatherproof friendship. The state’s meager investment in their work paid off many times over. Colvin and Blake’s surveys provided New York with the incontrovertible evidence needed to prevail in hundreds of complex Adirondack land disputes. Most significantly, it enabled the state to consolidate and expand its extraordinary Adirondack Forest Preserves—the prized mountains, forests, and waters of today’s beloved Park.

"Consistently rated the best guides to the regions covered...Readable, tasteful, appealingly designed. Strong on dining, lodging, and history."—National Geographic Traveler Distinctive for their accuracy, simplicity, and conversational tone, the diverse travel guides in our Explorer's Great Destinations series meet the conflicting demands of the modern traveler. They're packed full of up-to-date information to help plan the perfect gateway. And they're compact and light enough to come along for the ride. A tool you'll turn to before, during, and after your trip, these guides include these helpful features: Chapters on lodging, dining, transportation, history, shopping, recreation and more! A section packed with practical information, such as lists of banks, hospitals, post offices, laundromats, numbers for police, fire, and rescue, and other relevant information Maps of regions and locales Explorer's Guide The Adirondack Book is a detailed, insider's guide to Adirondack Park and its gateway cities, including Saratoga Springs, Glens Falls, Lake George, and Lake Placid.

Backpacker brings the outdoors straight to the reader's doorstep, inspiring and enabling them to go more places and enjoy nature more often. The authority on active adventure, Backpacker is the world's first GPS-enabled magazine, and the only magazine whose editors personally test the hiking trails, camping gear, and survival tips they publish. Backpacker's Editors' Choice Awards, an industry honor recognizing design, feature and product innovation, has become the gold standard against which all other outdoor-industry awards are measured.