The Mountaineer in Keene Valley, is set to host the 17th Annual Adirondack Backcountry Ski Festival the weekend of March 15-17, 2019.
Backcountry skiing combines all of the elements of touring, climbing and downhill skiing into one winter mountaineering experience. » Continue Reading.
The Keene Valley Library Association has announced it has received three grants to implement “Adirondack Community: Capturing, Retaining, and Communicating the Stories of Who We Are.”
This multi-year local history project collects and organizes audio stories and related photographs from Town of Keene community members through an online platform to share the social and cultural history of the community. » Continue Reading.
Local historian and author Margaret Bartley is set to give a talk on the impact the 1918 Influenza Pandemic had in the Town of Keene at the Keene Valley Library.
Bartley has collected individual stories and photos that help convey the impact the public health crisis had on the relatively isolated community. She will detail the devastating flu’s impact on Keene and the surrounding Adirondack region. Bartley estimates 90% of the hamlet’s population was infected. At one point in 1919, there were so many deaths town officials struggled to bury the bodies. » Continue Reading.
There’s nothing quite like autumn in the Adirondacks — the brilliant reds, vibrant oranges and pulsating yellows. And that’s just the construction barrels, road cones and flashing signs warning people to find someplace other than the shoulder of Rt. 73 in Keene Valley to park their Subarus.
Welcome to the wilderness — not to be confused with the Scranton/Wilkes Barre stretch of Interstate 81. » Continue Reading.
The Adirondack Chapter of The Nature Conservancy is bringing science and nature together for a one day nature fair at their Keene Valley, New York office. Though a lot of the Nature Conservancy’s hard work is behind the scenes, the August 9 celebration is an opportunity for the staff to showcase their specialties and demonstrate how they continue to work to support communities and nature.
According to Associate Director of Philanthropy Erin Walkow, the idea for a nature fair sounded like the perfect way to connect the public with all the different departments within The Nature Conservancy. » Continue Reading.
The Keene Valley Library Association is seeking volunteers to participate in 35-minute focus groups as part of the planning process for a community history initiative, “Adirondack Community: Capturing, Retaining, and Communicating the Stories of Who We Are.”
Focus groups will be held at the Keene Library on Tuesday, June 26 at 4 and 7 pm and at the Keene Valley Library on Thursday, July 5 at 4 and 7 pm. At these meetings, volunteers will help decide categories to organize stories. Suggestions of family, friends, neighbors, and former residents who may be interested in sharing a three-minute story are also welcome. » Continue Reading.
For the 14th year, Keene Valley’s The Mountaineer is using The Great Adirondack Trail Race to help educate about fragile river ecosystems. Located right on the Ausable River, The Mountaineer’s outdoor specialty store provides all the right equipment for hiking, fly-fishing, skiing, rock climbing, and of course trail running.
According to Assistant Manager Chuck Bruha, all The Mountaineer events are used as community fundraisers, but the Great Adirondack Trail Race has always been earmarked to support the Ausable and Boquet River Associations. » Continue Reading.
The Keene Valley Library Association (KVLA) has been named a 2017 Children’s Book Project Grant Award recipient by the Pilcrow Foundation. This $800 award funds the library’s acquisition of new children’s books.
The Pilcrow Foundation’s Children’s Book Project provides new, quality, hardcover books to rural public libraries. These books will become part of the permanent collection at the Keene Valley Library, which serves the Town of Keene’s 1,105 residents. » Continue Reading.
Guidebook author Russell Dunn’s new guidebook Keene Valley Region Waterfall Guide: The Search for Cool Cascades in the Heart of the Adirondacks (Black Dome Press, 2017), leads the way to more than 100 waterfalls in the High Peaks Region of the Adirondacks, from North Hudson to Keeseville, and from St. Huberts to Lake Placid.
The book includes 145 full-color photographs, three maps, and a foreword by Neil Burdick, editor of Adirondac. » Continue Reading.
Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve will hold a public forum focused on the ten strategies outlined in its recently published guidebook Pathways to a Connected Adirondack Park – Practical Steps to Better Land Use Decisions.
The community forum takes place at 7 pm, September 5, 2017 at the Keene Valley Congregational Church in the church’s Van Santvoord Room off Rt. 73 in Keene Valley. Public participation is encouraged. » Continue Reading.
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has announced a new model for Cycle Adirondacks 2017.
Now in its third year, the August 19th to 25th fully supported road bicycling tour will feature three primary hub communities – Schroon Lake, Keene Valley and Saranac Lake – with two consecutive nights at each. Organizers say the result will be more ride distances and options to pedal as few as three days or as many as six during the week long event.
On days the tour doesn’t move between hub communities, guests will have the ability to choose short or long ride distances. They may also choose to take a day off their bike in favor of other activities, such as hiking, canoeing, browsing shops or restaurants. The Wild Center will be a featured activity on Aug. 24 when the tour stops in nearby Saranac Lake for the third straight year. » Continue Reading.
Keene Valley was, the first time I saw it, jaw-droppingly astounding. All those peaks and ridges, jagged, monumental, stretching high into the sky, more and more dramatic as we drove up from the south.
It was a beautiful day, many years ago, and a friend and I had a vague idea about scaling a mountain or two. Maybe we’d go over The Brothers to Big Slide and down.
Well, we hiked and climbed a long way, but we were greenhorns, rather unprepared, and we never made it all the way around. One of us injured a leg; the other had an unfortunate encounter with a toxic plant. We had to turn around and go back the way we came. » Continue Reading.
I have been making art inspired by the Adirondacks since the early 1980s, shortly after moving to just outside the park in Saratoga Springs. Initially my subject matter arose out of family camping and hiking trips, an invitation from a friend, or just wandering by car or canoe as I looked for a vista or close-up scene with an interesting set of juxtapositions and a compelling light.
More recently I have taken another approach on some painting trips as I look for the locations used by nineteenth century artists who depicted the Adirondacks. When I look at the actual motifs that inspired another generation of artists I have a better understanding of the choices they made to enhance or alter details. And when I paint at their locations I understand how my choices differ from theirs. The explorations are a stimulus to my own creativity in new settings. » Continue Reading.
The Ausable River Association (AsRA) in the final days of an Adirondack Gives campaign to acquire survey equipment essential to restoring the Ausable watershed’s streams and culverts. The Gives website, hosted by the Adirondack Foundation, provides crowdfunding opportunites for Adirondack non-profits. AsRA’s staff hopes to provide pre-design measurements of four priority culverts in the Ausable watershed this October to meet a 2015 construction schedule. » Continue Reading.
In 1896, New York City resident Prestonia Mann purchased an Adirondack estate in Keene and set about to create a summer community based on the 1840s Massachusetts Transcendentalist utopian experiment, Brook Farm. She sent an invitation to her circle of acquaintances – mostly progressive social reformers and educators – describing the place she named Summer Brook in homage to the earlier colony:
It includes a large common hall, a cottage, and about twenty acres of land traversed by a fine trout brook. The region—at the northern end of Keene Valley—is in the noblest part of the great wilderness. The land lies 2,000 feet above the sea, upon a small plateau jutting out from among the foot-hills of Mount Hurricane, in the midst of wild and rugged scenery, commanding a splendid mountain range from Whiteface on the north to Tahawus on the south.
Unfortunately, a hotel upstream, The Willey House, was dumping all of their raw sewage into the same “fine trout brook”, known as Gulf Brook. » Continue Reading.
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