Adirondack Family Time™

March 24:  Special Tour Marking World TB Day: Tour the grounds of the former Trudeau Sanatorium. Meet at 1 pm  inside the Park Avenue gates, where street parking is available. Tour is free of charge. Call  518-891-4606  to reserve a spot .  May 1: Daffest Walking Tour:  A walking historic tour will leave Riverside Park at 10:30 am  led by Director of Historic Saranac Lake, Amy Catania. Your group will stroll from Riverside Park along the shores of Lake Flower to the Bartok Cabin. $5/person, free to Historic Saranac Lake members. In May -- History Matters Seminar Series: We are planning our third annual spring seminar series, featuring topics of local history. Stay tuned for a schedule of talks. May 13:  Preservation Celebration: featuring workshop sessions on window preservation, the National Register and the rehabilitation tax credit program, followed by a hard hat tour of the Hotel Saranac. More details and registration information coming soon. Stay tuned to  hotelsaranac.

Celebrate the spring season with everything maple  in Thurman, NY! March 22 - 23 and March 29 - 30 Pancakes served at 190 Valley Road, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. High school kids serve hot dogs and more, 151 Chas. Olds Rd.,  11 a.m. - 3 p.m. Check out the schedule above!

There are a variety of places that a person can visit to see maple sap collected, especially this weekend as maple producers join together for the first of two New York State  Maple Producers Association Maple Weekends , March 22-22 and 29-30. My husband and I have had our experiences (and disagreements) with making maple syrup. It is hard work, but each year we can say we did it. We enjoy attending other large-scale  producers so we can continually fine-tune our own backyard maple-making system.    In order for the sap to flow temperatures must rise above freezing during the day and drop below freezing at night. Depending on where you visit t his weekend should not be a problem. It is supposed to be high 30s in certain areas, allowing the sap to thaw and flow throughout the day. This is a great weekend activity for families.  Each producer may have different activities planned such as samplings, face painting, petting zoos and horse-drawn wagon rides. It is best to check with

© Diane Chase, Adirondack Family Time By Diane Chase An Adirondack Full Moon Ski, Hike or Swim?  One Adirondack family activity we always enjoy is taking our cross-country skies and hitting a trail. The kids find it exciting and we get to experience nature in a new way.  You can take your family to enjoy a planned event or find a quiet place and have kids find out what animals are starting to wake up at night! Always bring a headlamp whether you are out on your favorite trail or participating in an organized event! Enjoy!

The Sugarmaker’s Companion includes:  A focus on maple syrup as a healthy, local, sustainably produced alternative to corn syrup and other highly processed artificial sweeteners; Discussions about organic certification, sugarhouse registration, and the new international grading system; Information on marketing to create a profitable business model based on scale, interest, access, and more; Detailed analyses of the economics of buying and selling sap; Information on ways to process and market other tree saps, including birch and walnut; Ways to enhance diversity in the sugarbush and interplant understory crops for value-added products such as ginseng, goldenseal, and mushrooms; and, An economic analysis of utilizing maple trees for syrup or sawtimber production. In addition, readers and sugarmakers will learn plenty of practical, how-to skills, such as: If, and on what scale, syrup production is right for them; How to find trees for tapping; The essentials of sap colle