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The Creek’s Rising
If it takes a village to raise a child, what does it take to
revitalize just a quarter-mile stretch of downtown? For a formerly fading Adirondack hamlet, an optimistic group of North
Creekers has made all the difference.
No matter the size, most business districts in the park rely on
sales from through-traffic—you’ve probably seen caravans of
vehicles snake along main drags in Old Forge, Lake Placid and
Lake George. Not that main-street traffic is enough to sustain
a community: think blackened storefronts in Port Henry and
Au Sable Forks. But ever since the early 1960s, when North
Creek’s merchants encouraged a Route 28 bypass so local garnet mines’ rigs would circumvent their quaint downtown, the hamlet’s Main Street has been an aside, a
place you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking
for it. Add to that the 1964 opening of Gore Mountain Ski Area, a grander alternative to North Creek’s
Ski Bowl, once a tame hill where visitors could unbuckle bindings and tramp downtown for a meal or
postcard. Gore was built on the other side of the
bowl, with an entrance miles away from Main Street,
which meant skiers could ride the slopes, then, oblivious to the hamlet’s offerings, drive home or to the
next town for repast and rest.
That was then. In the last three years 15 businesses have opened and are thriving along Main Street.
If, early on a Thursday morning, you were to peek
inside newcomer barVino, a slick small-plate eatery
and wine bar, you’d catch the North Creek Business
Alliance’s weekly meeting. This group of 25 or so
merchants gathers around Michael Bowers’s bar, discusses their challenges and brainstorms solutions,
such as launching a popular shuttle that, this winter,
delivered skiers from Gore to downtown. (About 99
percent of the alliance’s projects are funded with private money.)
Bowers, a 61-year-old with a white beard and
sawdusty voice, seems to lead the business-community cause with his “a rising tide floats all boats”
message. His aim is to band together for a greater
good. “When you create positive energy it works,”
he says. (He’s a charismatic guy. Spend just a moment with him and you’re ready to move to North
Creek and open shop.)
Sarah Hayden Williams, proprietor of Café Sarah,
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says the alliance has helped: Instead of waiting for government
or other entities to fix things, “we’re finally asking ourselves, ‘Why
can’t we do this?’ ” She explains, “The difference is that people are
working together and talking about [North Creek’s] problems.”
And she should know—even at 38, Williams is a Main Street oldtimer. Her café has stayed afloat for almost a decade.
According to Bowers, if ever there’s a place in the Adirondack
Park that has it all, it’s North Creek: just hours from New York
City and Boston; right beside the Hudson River, with its wild
white-water rafting; nearby hiking and biking; the historic Hudson River Railroad; a formidable ski area. Still, he says, “People
Michael Bowers in
front of his barVino, in
North Creek.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NANCIE BATTAGLIA
A real Main Street revitalization by Annie Stoltie
have to want to come here to stay and
come here to eat. That’s the goal—to
make this a four-season destination.”
Town of Johnsburg supervisor and
North Creek native Sterling Goodspeed
agrees: “The key to becoming a destination is establishing a place where there’s
enough to keep you here.” He cites an
Olympic Regional Development Authority (the state agency that runs Gore) project, called the “interconnect,” as a reason
for the hamlet’s growth. By December
new runs and a triple chair lift will link
Gore to the Ski Bowl, reviving a oncebeloved spot, and pushing skiers within a
couple hundred yards of Main Street. The
plan appears to inspire economic confidence among locals, but if the park’s financial woes are any indicator, now is still
a shaky time to take business risks.
But that’s not stopping Bowers, who
owns the wine bar, a pizza place and vintage clothing and interior-design boutique, among a handful of other ventures.
When he arrived from Delaware and
launched his first North Creek business,
in 2008, he invested everything he had
in the hamlet’s downtown, including his
family (his wife, son and daughters work
alongside him). And others are doing the
same: Laurie Prescott Arnheiter, of Hudson River Trading Company, is expanding her upscale store. Greg and Sharon
Taylor refurbished a motel once described
as a derelict drug den into the spiffy Alpine Lodge. The classy Copperfield Inn
has reopened. Then there’s the Barking
Spider bar and a bunch of happening
restaurants, including Common Roots,
Laura’s, Andie’s and Marsha’s.
Hurdles remain, such as shrinking the
town’s shoulder season, though in the first
weekend in May the venerable Hudson
River Whitewater Derby and the firstever Adirondack Adventure Festival,
which features outdoor activities, will
help. Other issues, says Williams, involve
infrastructure: underground power lines,
a new sewage system and fresh sidewalks,
“which will set this place apart.”
Bowers believes North Creek can be “a
model for the Adirondack Park and a catalyst for change.” He adds, “Our egos are
on hold. We’ve got a lot more to do to
build this town.”
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JERAMY BALDWIN
Meditation on a Mountain
Wilmington’s iconic peak by Annie Stoltie
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Whiteface Mountain dominates a swath of northern Adirondack skyline, unmistakable with
its slide-gouged pyramid profile, capillary-like ski trails and summit silo. It’s no wonder the peak was the
first in the region to be named: Native Americans, homesteaders and explorers alike simply looked to its
snowy faces and pale anorthosite scars and knew what to call it.
By the time Verplanck Colvin surveyed the 4,867-foot mountain in 1872, it was already a tourist destination. Wilmington’s Whiteface Mountain
House, where the Wilson Farms gas station sits
today, advertised horses to haul adventurers to
Whiteface’s summit. Photographer Seneca Ray
Stoddard described staying at the inn and riding up the mountain in his 1874 The Adirondacks Illustrated. From above, “the mighty,
sweeping dome of heaven came down all
around and blended with the mountain edges
… below, the country lay spread out in the glory
of its autumnal dress, its gold and crimson,
brown and green, its pearly lakes and threads of
silver, its purple hills and mellow distance.…”
Some five decades later Russell M. L. Carson, in Peaks and People of the Adirondacks, a
book that inspired generations of peak-baggers, fretted about a proposed paved path up
what he called “the most graceful of all Adirondack peaks.” Carson dreaded the thought
of indifferent, unappreciative picnickers “desecrating” Whiteface’s summit as they had, he
wrote, atop New Hampshire’s Mount Washington when its highway was constructed. He
hoped the road would never be built, and that
future hikers “who shall attain the summit by
strength of leg and sweat of brow, may always
find there their inspiration for a prayer of
thanks for an untarnished top.”
Artist Rockwell Kent, of Au Sable Forks,
also argued to keep the mountain “inviolate” in
a 1934 New York Times editorial. “Serene and
beautiful, unscarred, unbuilt upon, it is the focal
point some part of every day or night for every
human eye in view of it.” He was further riled
by the plan to memorialize World War I soldiers on Whiteface’s crown: “To put a dead
thing on a living mountain—to kill a mountain to commemorate death!”
But the following year President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, who otherwise would have
been grounded, appeared before a thrilled crowd
at the road’s crest and dedicated it the
Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway.
Kent went on to paint Adirondack scenes,
particularly the view from his Asgaard
Farm, depicting an undefiled Whiteface.
Most Adirondackers have their own
mountains—Owls Head for Long Lake,
Baker for Saranac Lake, Chimney for
Indian Lake. But Whiteface, with its
stature, easy access and Olympic status,
is the peoples’ peak. Even the most casual tourist knows it’s there, and because it’s
there locals build their lives around it.
Which is why so many of us claim it as
our own and edit it, as Kent did, subtracting annoyances or adding drama. It’s why
Stoddard waxed rhapsodic and Carson
passionately pleaded. The mountain bears
the burden of our recreational, philosophical and emotional needs.
My Whiteface is a reminder of why I
stay. Since I came to the Adirondacks I’ve
looked to it for reassurance, that a more
metropolitan, more happening, more significant setting couldn’t top the peak’s
magnificence and the park it symbolizes.
At the Wilmington farmhouse I rented
in my early years, Whiteface hung in the
backyard. Between my day and night jobs
I’d sit on my duct-taped pleather sofa
and, through the picture window, marvel
at the million-dollar view. And an extraordinary southeastern angle was visible
from my next place, in Jay’s glen. Back
then ADIRONDACK LIFE was headquartered at Paleface Lodge, in Jay, where I sat
in a soaring A-frame with a glass wall
facing the mountain. Night and day
Whiteface loomed during a period when
restlessness or love or ambition could
have lured me away.
Now I live and work too deep in the
valley to see it. Sure, it fills the sky during my errands to Wilmington or Lake
Placid, and I stop to appreciate the mountain when I can. Like Stoddard I anticipate fall, when the leaves turn and it
looks as though Whiteface’s base is on
fire, swallowing its snowy summit. It’s
that kind of scene that leads me to imagine my children someday leaving, experiencing far-off places with new landscapes. On visits back here, to me, will
they see the mountain and know that
they’re home?
Whiteface Mountain
from Lake Placid.
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Shed Heads
The Zen of
antler hunting
by Annie Stoltie
network of blood vessels called velvet. Though
Reed spends lots of time in winter deeryards,
he says that he “hardly ever” finds sheds.
Amirault says that antlers “stand out” for
him. “There’s a certain shape I see.” But his
success has much to do with perseverance. In
early spring when the snow melts he and Mr.
Bojangles set out at dawn with maps, compass, cell phone and orange clothes, since
that’s turkey hunting season. An area is targeted, particularly the knobs and rises that
deer favor. They scope the ground, square foot at a time, trolling
logging sites or bushwhacking in the High Peaks or the Sentinels. The same terrain is often hiked repeatedly. It took four
treks up Stewart Mountain to get the match shown above—one
antler was embedded in cliffside ice, its porcupine-gnawed twin
rested on a ledge above. Still, there are times Amirault finds
nothing but trash or the remnants of abandoned hunting camps.
He carries out what he can.
His wife, Kim Frank, says shed hunting is “a Zen thing for
Jeemer,” and he agrees the act of walking and searching is meditative. The even-tempered guy does it, he says, because “it’s
fun” and he “likes to be outside.” A bonus is his encounters with
live deer—seeing the animals that give these gifts, even a tawny
blur, in their realm instead of on a highway’s shoulder. Getting
lost is a downside. One morning last April he entered the woods
Searching for the cast-off adornments is an amped-up, experts-only version of Where’s Waldo?. Imagine spotting one of
these twig-camouflaged artifacts in the cluttered forest; they’re
often buried, just a tine poking through a pile of leaves or dangling among a tree’s branches. Then up the antler ante, as Amirault does, by finding its match. (He’s done it seven times.) It’s
a formidable challenge: a buck’s rack doesn’t usually fall off his
crown at once; antlers drop separately in the animal’s wintering
area, within a range of a mile.
Males who win battles with competing suitors—usually the
ones with the most powerful headdresses—win the right to
mate. Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife
biologist Ed Reed explains that after rut, in early December,
deer lose their bony appendages because of a dip in testosterone.
A new set sprouts in May, covered for about four months in a
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PHOTOGRAPH BY MATT PAUL
You know the feeling you get when you finally find the car keys,
a glove, whatever it is you’ve been looking for: triumph, maybe
relief. Jim “Jeemer” Amirault describes it as “clarity.” The 50year-old carpenter from Upper Jay has found a hobby—rather,
“feverish obsession,” he says—in collecting shed white-tailed
deer antlers from the Adirondack woods. In two years of scouring the region, Amirault and his standard poodle, Mr. Bojangles,
have unearthed 61 of them.
in Lake Placid and wandered in a panic
until twilight, when he emerged in Ray
Brook. You can’t follow deer tracks, he
warns. They “tend to go in circles. They
don’t need to go home—they are home.”
They’re certainly a presence at the
Amirault house. Piles of antlers are strewn
about, handled affectionately by Jeemer,
Kim and Liza, their 12-year-old daughter. They trace the graceful grooves, study
what appear to be generations of sheds
by the same animal, know the adventure
behind each specimen.
Utica wildlife artist Tom Yacovella
shares the same relationship with his collection of 317 sheds. For five decades he’s
plucked them from Adirondack forests,
mostly from Inlet to Tupper. Every single
antler, be it a spike or eight-pointer, triggers a memory: where it was found, the
weather that day, the person he was with.
Still, says the 72-year-old, they’re “worthless. If I leave this earth there’s no one
who’s going to appreciate these antlers.”
So Yacovella began sculpting. From
his hundreds of “bones,” as he calls them,
he shaped brisket, mandible, muscles,
metatarsals, without altering an antler in
any way, “for the integrity of the animal.”
Two years and 303 sheds later he’d
completed his masterpiece: a life-size,
anatomically correct, three-dimensional bedded buck. Called “Tribute to the
Whitetail,” the 61-inch-long, 41-inchhigh work is extraordinary, priced at
$100,000 and on display at Lake Placid
Lodge. “I’ve got a lot of love and respect
for the white-tailed deer,” says the artist.
“It was my way of giving back.”
Yacovella, who used to stalk the creatures for sport, says, “Now I have such an
aesthetic feeling for them, it’s hard for
me to hunt them. The more you understand something the more you come to
love it.”
“Deer have a hard enough life with
everybody chasing them,” adds Amirault.
“I want them to live.”
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{ShortCarries}
Hear “Shed Man,” a tune by Jeemer
Amirault’s friends in the band Monsterbuck, and see a photograph of Tom
Yacovella’s sculpture, “Tribute to the
Whitetail,” at www.adirondacklife.com
beginning November 1.
November/December 2010
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