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2024 Season Open Dates:
Friday, May 24, 2024 – Monday, October 14, 2024
10am – 5pm | Open 7 days a week, including holidays
ADKX Research Library is open year round by appointment only.
In the Adirondack Library
This is a virtual program.
Lourie completed his trip. It took him three weeks and marked the first time anyone has traveled from the source of the Hudson to the mouth in a single vessel. The Hudson proved to be a very changeable river. It includes seven locks and nine power dams. The northern half is a true river with strong current, but the lower half is tidal, a sunken river from the days of glaciers. In its first 165 miles, it drops more than 4,000 feet to Albany. The second half falls no more than a foot.
Lourie’s account of his trip is a fresh look at one of America’s great and complex waterways, one of the few, in fact, that still contains its historical and biological species of fish. It is also the longest inland estuary in the world. Henry Hudson called it the “great river of the mountains.” Nowadays, too often the Hudson is stereotyped as a ruined, polluted industrial river. Its glorious past is compared to its present neglect.
In River of Mountains, Peter Lourie combines the Hudson’s rich history and descriptions of some of the region’s most impressive landscape with the residents of its mill towns, the loggers, commercial fishermen, and barge pilots-all of whom are proof that the river is still a thriving, vital waterway. So, come with Peter Lourie on his trip, come explore with him from a canoe one of this country’s great rivers, join him in his wonderful adventure.
Pete Lourie is the author of many books on adventure, exploration, and the environment including Locked in Ice, The Polar Bear Scientists, Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush, and River of Mountains: A Canoe Journey Down the Hudson. Elected as a Fellow at the Explorers Club in 2019, Pete holds a BA in classics from New York University, an MA in English Literature from the University of Maine, and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University. He has taught writing at Columbia College, the University of Vermont, and Middlebury College. For 30 years he has made his living traveling, writing, and photographing. He visits schools to share his adventures with students and teachers and lives in Weybridge, Vermont.