Adirondack Sasquatch (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780970310460)

I was born in 1930 and went to medical school and practiced Psychiatry here in Buffalo all my life except for 8 years in the USAF in NYC and Japan. I always liked camping, skiing, hiking, sailing and have been a long time member of Sierra Club and the Adirondack Mountain Club. My Dad was born in an Adirondack logging camp on the Little River near Aldrich, New York. My grandfather, Tom Beahan, together with his older brothers, John and Barty, jobbed a logging contract there for Peter Yousey from 1902 to 1907. Gramma, Minnie Beahan, and my great aunt, Oliva Beahan, lived in log camps with them, cooked for thirty men, tended and bore children. The family never made much of this history. Dad was only three when they moved to a camp near Natural Bridge so he hardly remembered Aldrich at all. The big thing early in his life was coming to Buffalo and to make a decent living, something that was not easily done up there. Uncle Raymond and cousin Bessie were older. Once they began to mellow they were able to describe that Camp on the Little River to me. When I was a kid Dad used to take us to visit Gramma and Grampa in Carthage on the edge of the Adirondacks every summer. Even though their place had double bitted axes and crosscut saws and an outhouse it didn't dawn on me that we were lumberjacks. But when I discovered the picture of Grampa's logging crew and added things up, it set me to writing. In connection with this book m sons and I have paddled Canoes all over the Stillwater Reservoir and down the Beaver River which it impounds. My Dad worked as an assistant cook on the construction of the big earthen dam at Soft Maple a few miles down river. We hiked around a good deal of the five ponds Wilderness North of Stillwater and once we made the trip on foot from Stillwater up to Wanakena. The Sasquatch must have had an eye out for us. We never did catch sight of him.