Lake Placid is in the heart of the Adirondacks. This map of the Adirondack Park shows how glaciers raked back and forth across this area gouging out streams, rivers, and lakes. Lake Placid is one of the bigger glacial lakes. What surprised me was the Lake is in the shape of an "H" with two islands in the center of it.
This town is an Eastern version of a ski town. It's all about the snow and ice here. Everyone awaits the snow for skiing, snow shoeing, snow mobiling, and, of course this close to Canada, for the hockey season to begin. The Olympic sites provide good paying jobs for the people who maintain them since they are New York State employees. The day we went to see the facilities, I talked to a woman who was resurfacing the enclosed areas of the bobsled track. She was guzzling water since it was enclosed, and the heat and humidity was taking it's toll on her. Terrible weather (hot/humid) has been the norm this summer.
All people could talk about in Lake Placid was the weather. They've never seen such a hot summer. In the Lake Placid area, which is just a few hours north of Saratoga Springs, the weather has also been without rain. Here it's been hot, humid AND rainy. The summation of the coming autumn was: "Well, it's been so darn hot here, I expect there won't really be any leaf color. The weather will plunge, and the leaves will fall off the trees. That happens sometimes." That made me feel better since I've been trying to figure out how to see some 'color' up here before we leave. It's just not going to happen.
We toured the outdoor venues left over from the 1932 and the 1980 Olympics, as well as the Olympic Museum. I will say the ski jump site was just flat scary. First we took the ski lift to the top of a mountain, then, we took an elevator another 27 floors up to the place where the jumpers are at the top of the hill. That's the large ski jump. Ski jumpers are just adrenaline junkies. No one who wasn't would ever do this.
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| The cars below really give you some perspective! |
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| You can walk up, and up, and up. The top of these stairs are where the jumpers start |
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| Ski jumper at Lake Placid in 1980 Olympics |
The museum was filled with interesting exhibitions. My favorites were the torches, the medals, and the clothes. Here's the 'wall of USA Olympic uniforms'. As you can see, some were more successful than others.
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| 1932 to 2014 |
I asked someone if Lake Placid would ever host another Olympic game, and the answer was an emphatic "NO". In 1932 there were 14 events in four categories: sledding, skating, skiing, and ice hockey. Almost all the events were men only. This was the last Winter Olympics without alpine skiing. There was cross-country, ski jumping and the Nordic combined - all for men only. There was no downhill or slalom. There were three demonstration sports: curling, sled dog race, and speed skating for women.
By 1980 there were 38 medal events. This Olympic games is best remembered for two things: The American, Eric Heiden, collected five gold medals in speed skating, and the American men's hockey team composed of college kids (no American professional hockey players were allowed to compete in 1980) beating the world champion Soviet Union team. It's still called the 'Miracle on Ice', and it was the first time I can remember hearing the "USA" chant. I remember watching that game; it was thrilling.
Today, the Winter Olympics has 102 events. There's no possible way the tiny town of Lake Placid would be able to host a modern event. The population of the area is so sparse, as well as hard to get to, all the event venues would be wasted once the games were concluded. The expense to create the venues would be astronomical. There's also no infrastructure to support a modern Olympics. Everyone seems more than happy to be a touristy ski town with a few world class athletes walking around.
Of much more interest was the rest of our mini-trip. First, we stopped in Elizabethtown at the History of the Adirondacks Museum. What fun! There were two exhibits which were really fascinating: First, there was an exhibit of New York suffragettes. Here's Alice Paul, a woman almost lost to history. She was directly responsible for the national campaign to get the vote for women. She worked for Civil Rights her entire life.
The other exhibit I loved was the gallery of World War I propaganda posters. This is the 100th anniversary year of the end of that war (November 11, 1918). There have been several exhibits commemorating a war nobody really remembers or even understands. My grandfather fought in the trenches with the American Expeditionary Force, the fancy name for the American army sent to Europe in 1917. It was the first mechanized war. There was long distance artillery, tanks, machine guns, and airplanes dropping bombs.
When the United States entered the war it was deadlocked in trench warfare which consisted of men being routinely slaughtered by automatic fire as they 'went over the top'. (The real war criminals in WWI were the Generals on both sides - using 19th century tactics in the first industrialized war - causing huge numbers of men to be killed and wounded.) This is also the war that introduced 'chemical weapons'. The mobilization of men and material by the United States turned the tide of the war in favor of England and France and their allies. The Armistice of WWI also sowed the seeds that resulted in WWII.
The propaganda posters were designed to overcome the pacifist popular opinion as well as 'sell' the idea of getting involved in a foreign war.
And, some posters shilled popular songs related to the war
And this was the first war in which women were asked to 'step up' into the manufacturing work place and replace the men in the armed services. Women never left the workplace after 1917. Right to vote for women was closely tied to their mobilization during WWI, and the result was women's suffrage passed as a Constitutional Amendment in 1920.
If you want to see the landscapes of the Adirondacks, the Olympic sites, the Olympic Museum, and the History Museum, well, just click away on the pix. If you look at the pictures as a 'slideshow', you can see the picture captions:
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