Arcadia Publishing’s niche is “rarely explored pockets of (American) history.” The latest pocket it explores is “Aviation in the Adirondacks,” by Aurora Pfaff. Part of Arcadia’s “Images of Aviation” series, the 128-page book bears a 2024 publication date.

“Images” is key here. Following Arcadia’s formula, this one is heavy on old photos, many of them from the Saranac Lake Free Library’s Adirondack Research Room, along with Historic Saranac Lake, the Adirondack Experience (aka ADKX) at Blue Mountain Lake, the Tupper Lake and Keene Valley libraries, and more county and town historical organizations. Also acknowledged are descendants of some of those daring young men in their flying machines. Extended captions explain, if not always thoroughly, what’s going on in each picture.

Pfaff is identified as “a writer and editor living and working in New York state’s Adirondack Park” who “dreamed of becoming an astronaut” but “took her first flying lesson in 2022.” Well, it’s never too late, they say. She explains that she covers the period from 1912 into the 1960s because it marked the most “progress, change and activity.”

Chapter titles reveal the breadth of her treatment: among the seven are “Notable Names and Faces,” “Adventures in the Wilderness,” and “Tragic Endings and Close Calls.” Here are death-defying barnstormers, flying circuses, daredevil airmail pioneers, first-in-the-nation aerial fish stocking, wildfire suppression, Colonial Airlines service, ski planes, Santa’s Toy Lift for Orphans, “flying boats” and float plane fly-ins to remote ponds, the latter now largely prohibited.

Why 1912? The initial pictures reveal that that October one George Gray become the first to land a plane in the Adirondacks, when he lurched to a stop in a farmer’s field near Vermontville. From then on, first landings, whether in Wilmington, Old Forge, Piseco, or anywhere, were occasions for townsfolk to rush to cheer the plane and its dashing, heroic pilot.

We learn that Charles Lindbergh flew into Lake Placid in 1939 to recruit for the U.S. Army Air Corps, ancestor of today’s Air Force, and that Amelia Earhart vacationed at Lake George. We meet aviators renowned in their own ways, like Clarence Petty, Herb Helms and Dwight Church, who was practically the inventor of aerial photography, with the Adirondacks as his frequent subject. Noah Rondeau, entrepreneurial hermit of Cold River, boards a state helicopter to be whisked to a sportmen’s show in Manhattan, where he was a popular attraction. Two boys gawk at uber-rich cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post’s private prop-jet at the Lake Clear airport, parked while she “camps” at the family’s Topridge compound on Upper St. Regis Lake. Onlookers examine a tied-down Goodyear blimp at a site identified only as “Saranac Lake,” sometime in the 1930s.

Many photos are not of planes, but from them: Saranac Lake in the 1950; Stony Wold sanatorium; the Tahawus mines when they were still producing ore. And we see the down side (literally): A biplane lies crumpled at the base of the Wilmington Nazarene Church after colliding with its steeple one Sunday in 1928 — with services in progress. But the region’s most notorious crash, of a Plattsburgh Air Force Base B-47 into Wright Peak in 1962, is curiously not included.

Be that as it may, this volume is an interesting and educational wander through a perhaps too-little regarded aspect of Adirondack history.