cover image An Adirondack Passage: The Cruise of the Canoe Sairy Gamp

An Adirondack Passage: The Cruise of the Canoe Sairy Gamp

Christine Jerome. HarperCollins Publishers, $20 (230pp) ISBN 978-0-06-016435-5

George Washington Sears was an outdoorsman, a contributor to Forest and Stream under the pen name Nessmuk. In July 1883, he launched the Sairy Gamp , a nine-foot, 1012-pound canoe for a trip through the Adirondacks, from Old Forge to Upper St. Regis Lake. In our own day, in late summer of 1990, Jerome, former managing editor of New England Monthly , and her husband John set out to retrace Sears's journey, she in a duplicate nine-foot Kevlar canoe, he in a slightly larger craft of 1012 feet. Jerome gives a captivating account of their journey interspersed with a biography of Sears, regional history and excerpts from Sears's story of his own trip. She takes us into a world of hermits and millionaires, of wild streams and glorious mountain scenery. These wilderness adventures, more than a century apart, will appeal strongly to canoeists and to readers familiar with the Adirondacks. Illustrated. (Apr.)