It had been a busy Monday morning. I'd hiked up to the Cathedral Rock fire tower and back, and then I'd taken a driving tour of the Adirondack hamlet of Wanakena. But Wanakena is best known as the location of the State University Of New York (SUNY) Ranger School. I had to go see it, so I turned at this sign which indicated that the school was three miles thataway:
And what a spectacular three miles it was, with waters on both sides of the road. This was a lake on the left whose name I didn't know. Its waters were dotted with untold thousands of white water lilies:
And I passed by the Pinecone Restaurant. I figured it must be a college hangout, but then noticed that it was closed and for sale. You can see that it sat on the shore of the Oswegatchie River:
We saw many beautiful scenes of the Oswegatchie River, which at that point was also an arm of Cranberry Lake:
And there were many nice, well tended homes/summer camps along the shoreline:
Most of the cabins were decidedly woodsy looking:
And then I arrived at the Ranger School:
They had tennis courts, badminton nets, baseball fields and what I guessed to be apparatus for woodsman's days contests:
And one very large building, which suggested to me that all the classrooms and perhaps even living quarters where housed in one location. That would be quite handy in the wintertime except I would think that ranger students would be spending a great deal of time outdoors anyway:
They had docks on the Oswegatchie/Cranberry Lake:
And a separate maintenance building:
They had lots of canoes. I supposed that a ranger would have to be quite skilled with a canoe, It was all very beautiful, but I had many more miles to travel and several more stops I wanted to make before I returned to the farm. I'll post more tomorrow:
The Lake you didn't know the name of is called the "setback". So many times my husband has traped Mink, Beaver, Muskrats from that setback, and caught frogs(when he was a kid) to take back to town (Wanakena) to sell to one of the older residents.
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