NEW YORK STATE'S AIR-CONDITIONED ROOF Photograph by Harrison Howell Walker A SPECIAL OPEN-AIR "POST OFFICE" FOR WOULD-BE INITIAL CARVERS Calling cards, envelopes, or scraps of paper with scribbled names and addresses may be posted here in Ausable Chasm by those who feel the urge to leave their marks in famous places. Thus the water-sculptured rocks are saved defacement by deep chiselings. When winter comes, with its gales that sweep through the gorge, the "post office" is house-cleaned. But the still small voices of the Adiron dacks to me are the thin, sad piping of the white-throated sparrow and the lisping of the stout-hearted little chickadee. I have heard chickadees steadfastly calling their names near the very top of mile-high Mount Marcy, in the "five-foot centenarians," the stunted balsams near timber line. SOLITUDES OF "TEEMING" NEW YORK Driving on up the Fulton Chain from Eagle Bay, I entered the big county of Hamilton-population only 2.3 persons per square mile. The Belgian Congo in the heart of Africa is nearly five times as densely populated as this cityless county in supposedly teeming New York State. Above Inlet the road penetrates a part of the State's 2,170,000-acre Adirondack Forest Preserve. It took a constitutional amendment to build this road. Before a tree could be cut or a bowlder blasted, an amendment to the State Constitution had to be approved by the people in a referen dum, for their fundamental law provides that these lands shall be kept forever wild. At the village of Raquette Lake every winter hundreds of carloads of ice used to be cut and shipped out of the mountains. "To keep the cutting channel from freez ing up during the night, a rugged French Canadian was hired to drag a float back and forth," a former resident recalled. "Each night before beginning work, he invariably bought two pints of whisky never a quart, always two pints. I learned why. "He put one bottle of whisky at one end of the channel and the other pint at the other end. He'd take a drink out of one bottle, then start off with his float to get a drink out of the other bottle. He'd keep that up all through the night. The wind was cold and the whisky warming. No won der that channel never froze." CALLING ON A HERMIT At North Point on Raquette Lake I heard of a "hermit" who lived on the far shore of Outlet Bay. Peering into the velvet blackness of the Adirondack night, I wondered just what sort of man would choose to live way over there, all by himself amid the silence and 727