On the last Sunday of summer, the whole shoreline of the Great Sacandaga sets itself alight. Nobody runs it. Everybody knows the schedule.
The first fire is always someone else’s. You are on a dock on the Great Sacandaga with a paper plate going soft in your hand when a light catches at the far shoulder of the lake — low, orange, no bigger than a porch lamp — and then the point of land beside it answers, and the cove past that, and inside twenty minutes the whole western arm is a broken necklace of flame laid along the water. Nobody announced it. Nobody ever does.
They call it the Ring of Fire, and it comes on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, after the light goes off the water and just before the season goes with it. Camp by camp — year-rounders and summer people, the lakeside pubs, the kid who has been dragging pallets down to the water all week — the shoreline lights itself until the fire runs nearly unbroken from one arm of the reservoir to the other. From a dock near Northville you can stand and count them: forty, sixty, more than you can hold, each one a family’s whole summer burned down in an hour.
Tickets are available, and still free. You really ought to get yours early.
They come in every size. Down one stretch of shore it’s a single road flare stuck in the sand, a small red apology for a fire; next door it’s a proper backyard campfire; and around the point somebody has spent the better part of a week building a stack of pallets the size of a school bus that will throw light onto the far shore and heat you can feel from a boat. It is, if you want to be plain about it, a competition — though nobody will say so out loud. The pallets start turning up along the shore maybe a week out, the piles growing a little every evening, and there is a particular silence on a dock when the blaze across the water is plainly bigger than your own. The unspoken rule is that your fire should read clearly from the far shore — that a stranger three miles off should look up from his own and think, well, would you look at that. It is the least Adirondack thing imaginable, this once-a-year vanity, and somehow the most: a whole lake showing off for itself, in the dark, for no prize anyone hands out.
The water it burns over is younger than the tradition’s grandparents. The Great Sacandaga is not a lake but a reservoir — a hundred and fifteen miles of shoreline, by the state’s count — filled in 1930 when the Conklingville Dam closed and the Sacandaga River backed up over a valley of farms and hamlets — bottomland, orchards, a scatter of villages, all of it cleared and then drowned to keep the spring floods off the cities downstream. On a still Labor Day night the fires double themselves on the surface, each flame standing on its own reflection, and it is easy to feel the light is reaching for something underneath.
And the reservoir is worked, not just admired. It is held high all summer for the camps and the boats; then, right about now, the Hudson River–Black River Regulating District begins to let it down through the dam, clearing room for the spring melt still months off. So the water recedes exactly as the light does. By Labor Day weekend the lake is dropping fast enough to change the map: the sandbars surface around Sand Island, the shallows inside Mosquito Bay go to flat, and Beacon Island grows a margin of new beach it will hold until spring. Docks are left reaching for water that has quietly stepped back. The sun goes earlier; the water goes lower; the fires this weekend stand a little higher above the surface than they did in July.
The reservoir gives the show its strange arithmetic. By midnight the near fires burn low, and the water — which spent all of July and August taking on heat — is warmer than the air above it. That is the tell every local knows without being taught. When the lake is warmer than the night, summer is already over.It just hasn’t told the calendar yet.
No one can tell you for certain who started it. The version most people settle on puts it around 1988 — a handful of camps on one shoreline deciding to see the season out with a fire, and the idea crossing the water the way the fire itself now does, point to point, until it had circled the whole reservoir and become the kind of thing that has simply always happened. There was a stretch when the odd firework went up over the middle, someone’s cousin back from Pennsylvania with a trunk full, and there still is now and then — a bright percussive surprise over the dark that the bonfires pretend not to be impressed by.
What there has never been is a ticket. This has not stopped the joke, repeated on docks up and down the lake every single year, that tickets are available and still free— that you really ought to get yours early, that they’re going fast. Keeping up the pretense that admission exists is, by now, a tradition almost as old as the fires themselves. You will be told, with a perfectly straight face, that you got in just in time.
The show is a circle, so the best seat is on the water. Every public launch and carry on the reservoir and the lakes around it.
/guides/paddling →By one in the morning the piles are embers and the coolers are light, and the far shore goes dark a fire at a time, in no particular order, the way a town goes to bed. Somewhere a screen door. Somewhere the first loon of the returning quiet. In the morning the summer people will load the cars and the year-rounders will watch them go, and the lake will hold its warmth another week or two — generous and doomed, the last of a heat it can’t give back.
What carries across the water between the fires. Fire-themed by unspoken law — nobody agreed to this, and everybody obeys it.
Nine lakes, nine ways to close a season — dispatch by dispatch. bearings from Marcy summit.
Lake George doesn’t slip out quietly. The Adirondack Independence Music Festival lights Shepard Park for three straight evenings, and by the Labor Day finale the water off the village is a wall of boats rafted three deep, engines cut, everyone tilted back at the same sky. Then Tuesday comes, the meters go quiet, and Million Dollar Beach belongs to the gulls again until Memorial Day.
Schroon closes its Main Street for a street dance, and after dark the fireworks go up over the town beach — a whole village standing in the road with its neck craned. Within the week the diving raft is hauled up the ramp and the first docks come out of the water, the lake handed back to the loons.
Up at altitude the send-off smells like woodsmoke of a different kind. The I Love BBQ Festival takes the North Elba showgrounds for the weekend — a USA Luge fundraiser, of all things — with pitmasters, a blues stage, and a crowd that came for ribs and stayed for the light going long and gold over the Sentinel Range. It’s the last big gathering before the town turns its collar toward a winter it’s very good at.
Saranac’s send-off is really a welcome. A week after Labor Day the Adirondack Canoe Classic — the 90-Miler — comes down the chain and finishes on Lake Flower after three days and ninety miles of paddling from Old Forge. Until then the guideboats go up on their racks and the town turns, slowly, toward the Winter Carnival it is already, quietly, thinking about.
The fire department runs a chicken barbecue and a country band plays the field at Mt. Sabattis, and after dark the fireworks go up off the water while the floatplanes sit quiet at their moorings. Then the last carries fly out, and fourteen miles of lake goes still enough to hear a loon clear from the bridge.
The Fulton Chain ends its summer with a genuinely absurd and beloved spectacle: three thousand numbered rubber ducks tipped off the covered bridge into the Moose River, bobbing downstream toward a finish line and a raffle. Kids line both banks. It’s the exact opposite of the Ring of Fire in every way but one — nobody organizes their whole life around it, and everybody shows up.
Come Labor Day the W.W. Durant — Raquette Lake’s historic dinner boat — trades summer sightseeing for its autumn card: Saturday dinner cruises and Sunday champagne brunches gliding past the Great Camps and shorelines just starting to color, weekends clear to Columbus Day. The season doesn’t end here so much as slow to the pace of a boat.
The Saturday before the holiday, vintage planes drop onto the grass strip at Piseco for the Lions’ fly-in breakfast — pancakes and scrambled eggs served under the wings to anyone who drives or flies in. It’s the region’s last big summer gathering, and the kind of thing that only happens where the airport is also a field somebody mows.
Sacandaga’s blaze has a shy cousin an hour up the road. On the same Sunday night the camps around Piseco light their own shoreline — the Ring of Flames, they call it — a smaller, darker, more private echo circling one of the clearest lakes in the park. If the Great Sacandaga is the season’s fireworks, Piseco is its last candle, blown out slow.
One more before the thermocline flips — the warmest water of the year is right now. Every beach to hidden pond.
Flatwater at dawn; the Saranac and Fulton chains carry you pond to pond.
The 46 with the window open and the black flies gone. High summits already wear morning frost.
Smallmouth on the shorelines, walleye at dusk, panfish off the dock, lake trout down deep.
One flavor a day — Donnelly's, and every cone worth the stop.
