The story of Russell Dunn, author for would-be adventurers in and around New York state, begins next to the Great Sacandaga Lake, the watery ceiling to 28,000 submerged acres of land located in the 6-million-acre Southern Adirondack Park.
At one time, before its intentional flooding was completed in 1930, the area was a natural basin containing modest communities where human beings lived and died and worked and slept and dreamed alongside all varieties of terrestrial life.
Ultimately, it was the shape of the basin itself which suggested to some clever engineers that it would be the perfect location for a man-made reservoir—in the name of Hudson River flood control. Thus, three years shy of 100 years ago, as a consequence of the creation of the Conklingville Dam, the Great Sacandaga Lake was born.
Size-wise, compared to the Sacandaga, the Ashokan Reservoir, the drinking trough of New York City tap water, is a piddling puddle.
So submerged now, under 38 billion cubic feet of dam water, are the old cemetery plots—most, but not all, of the inhabitants exhumed. And then whatever structures were left standing to be flooded: barns and houses of the communities of Fish House, Batchellerville, Osborn Bridge, Conklingville. Maybe it’s a rock bass or a walleye that now swims through the kitchens and living rooms and out through the glassless window frames to wonder at the sunlight shining down through the rippling limits of their sky.
But Russell Dunn, born in 1947, didn’t come along to look down below and wonder at the edges of the lake until the far side of the century.
“Barbara and I have a cottage up at Great Sacandaga Lake,” Dunn says. “It’s an enormous reservoir. I started exploring around the lake and finding out about all of these interesting places—Torrey Rock, the Italian Gardens of God, High Rock and Sacandaga Park—that had vanished when the lake was created.”
At the time, Dunn labored still as a medical social worker in a home care agency.
“It was existentially justifiable,” Dunn allows. “I wasn’t one of these people sitting behind a desk, just shuffling papers. I really felt like I was contributing.”
Unbeknownst to Dunn, sitting down and shuffling papers was still in the cards for him.
In his 50s, wandering the lake, his innate curiosity led him to research and discover the histories attached to the land and, in the end, exhibiting a sort of historian’s mania, they were too good not to share.
Dunn began writing articles for a local newspaper, the Sacandaga Times. For a time, Dunn straddled the two worlds, home care on one side, incipient paper-shuffling on the other, but always motivated by adventure and exploration. The publishing of his first book in 2002, Adventures Around the Great Sacandaga Lake, came about almost as an afterthought. It was a sort of creeping horror that had entered his consciousness.
“After a couple of years of writing articles, I realized, goodness gracious, all these articles that I’ve written are going to end up in the landfill. They’ll just vanish.”
Like the communities beneath the lake: drowned, effaced and forgotten.
“I got involved with Nicholas K. Burns. He was my first publisher. And he really started me on the course of being a writer. But the only thing I regret about the book at the time was that he didn’t want to include postcard images, which I love and that showed parts of the lake. And he didn’t want to include maps and all those kinds of things.”
When Burns went out of business, Dunn reclaimed his intellectual rights and republished the book.
“I think in 2012, and I put in all the antique postcards that I wanted and put in the maps and expanded it and made it into a terrific book, more like what I actually wanted.”
Dunn has since done business with four other publishers, authoring more than 47 guidebooks total in approximately 25 years—five of them, the History Hikes books, written with wife and collaborator Barbara Delaney.
“My wife and I got involved as licensed hiking guides,” Dunn says.
Kayaking, parachuting, scuba diving, hiking—Dunn’s lust for the exploration of the wholesomely natural is apparently without limit. Caving, for instance.
“We weren’t hardcore cavers, but part of the fun was just going out to try to find these caves. It was like going on a treasure hunt. Then we both eventually gave it up. We both have had knee replacements and really, you know, crawling in a cave no longer has the same attraction.”
And there are the waterfalls.
After Nicholas K. Burns Publishing, Dunn hooked up with Black Dome Press, and then began perhaps his seminal phase—perhaps also his most well-known—as a guidebook author: his waterfall period.
In 2003, Dunn put out the Adirondack Waterfall Guide. In 2004, it was the Catskill Region Waterfall Guide. And in 2005, it was the Hudson Valley Waterfall Guide. Three years running, making a living chasing waterfalls. 2006 was apparently a year without waterfalls, but Dunn returned to the hustle in 2007 with the Mohawk Region Waterfall Guide, before leaving New York behind entirely and publishing the Berkshire Region Waterfall Guide in 2008.
The man makes a living chasing waterfalls, and Black Dome Press has done its part to support Dunn’s curious mode of existence, publishing 13 of his guidebooks, having sold a total of 51,671 copies of Dunn’s works so far.
The best-selling title for Black Dome Press has been Dunn’s Adirondack Waterfall Guide: 14,400 copies so far. The Hudson Valley Waterfall Guide has sold 3,900 copies.
Dunn’s guidebooks are an admixture of straight-ahead signpost directions, historical anecdotes, practical advice and, most entertaining, warnings of a more existential nature for anyone concerned with returning from these adventures alive.
Dunn advises that during hunting season, the intrepid waterfall hunter should wear bright colors and make frequent sounds so as to avoid being mistaken for a wild animal and shot by hunters. Or when standing near the base of a waterfall, he advises that one should keep an eye out for kids at the top, who, known for their impulsivity, might randomly heft a rock over the edge without regard for anyone below.
Always know where you are, Dunn advises. Don’t presume to be a master rock climber. Avoid cornering any wild animal at the bottom of a deep gorge. Keep in mind that nature is wild and inherently unpredictable.
The advice is funny because it’s a bit uptight, like the laws from the 1920s prohibiting women from wearing abbreviated bathing suits. And yet, his advice suggests a mature awareness of human nature. It’s the sort of advice that one might dispense over the kitchen table to a young man.
In your fuse box under the dashboard, never, ever, replace a cartridge fuse with a .22 bullet.
From a geological standpoint, Dunn says comparing waterfalls to shooting stars, it’s in their nature to be short-lived. He lays it out:
“A waterfall’s self-destruction is inevitable. The greater the quantity of water crashing down onto the bedrock below, the more powerful is the jackhammer force created. The incessant force of erosion and disintegration.”
Like spring-wound clocks, Dunn says, all these waterfalls are slowly running down over hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
“Many of the most spectacular waterfalls in New York state have been pressed into industrial service,” Dunn writes. “Like beasts of burden, waterfalls were put under yoke, domesticated, and all too often desecrated in the process.”
Mills and factories took root by the falls, undershot and overshot waterwheels were constructed to turn the turbine and hydroelectric dependency followed. Useful for power generation, their natural beauty became a secondary consideration—a tale as old as time, until something else even better came along.
In the blank and total embrace of fossil fuel combustion, the waterfalls were forgotten. Their factories and mills were left abandoned. They fell into ruin or eventually were torn down.
“All that remains of these previous enterprises are old foundations, cinder blocks, pipes, and bits of bricks and glass,” writes Dunn.
It’s a charming coda. The waterfalls had slipped their chains.
Still, when Dunn wrote his Hudson Valley waterfall guide, he worried about what would follow after the petroleum caches ran dry. He worried that the techno-expansionists would be looking to horn in on the untapped sources of renewable, nonpolluting, continuously available energy. Appropriating the falls “for utilitarian purposes,” Dunn expected them to lock horns with the environmentalists.
As the foreword to the Hudson Valley Waterfall Guide was written by one of the high priests of environmentalism, Ned Sullivan, the president of Scenic Hudson—that well-moneyed environmental darling which roams the Hudson Valley buying up riverfront, stream-front, creekfront, and brook-front property in the name of perpetual preservation—an attempt was made to solicit comment.
Sullivan did not respond to questions about whether Scenic Hudson seeks out and purchases the land contiguous to waterfalls.
But it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if Scenic Hudson maintained a stable full of their foaming, frothing, misting, relentlessly pounding waterfalls, guaranteeing the churn and boil continues on unencumbered over the glorious centuries unto their self-destruction.
“In the books,” Dunn explains, “I implore the reader to take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footsteps. You know, that kind of bland statement that we often use. But it bothers me that people, you know, despoil things.”
Dunn tells a story wherein the owner of some land blessed with a waterfall became so exasperated by people partying around his waterfall that he blew it up.
“He actually dynamited it to level it out,” Dunn said, leaving the name of the waterfall dynamiter mysterious. “And you think about it. A private individual has the right to do that? I guess he does. It’s his land.”
Curiously, Dunn does not dwell on one of the most interesting features of waterfalls: that they are engines for the generation of negative ions.
What happens is, when water droplets collide with each other, as in the crashing of ocean waves against a beach or rocky cliffs or shore, the tumult ejects negative ions into the air.
Termed spray electrification, the separation of electric charges accompanying the aerodynamic breakup of water drops creates a fine spray of drops, a mist floating in the air that carries with it a net negative charge.
Breathe the negative ions in through our lungs and, once entered the bloodstream, the negative ions are alleged to kick off chemical reactions that increase levels of the neurotransmitter and peripheral hormone serotonin. Deficiencies of serotonin have been linked to depression and anxiety.
The more violent the waterfall is, the higher the number of negative ions will be produced. The most irresistibly powerful class of waterfalls are called cataracts, sometimes powered by freshets, a rush of melted snow hurtling along to the sea. The term conjures a sheer drop and a never-ending roaring flow of water. Basking in the mist of a cataract of rushing water is the next best thing to sucking air in the aftermath of a lightning bolt strike. Allegedly.
Asked whether he feels any kind of responsibility for revealing the hidden treasures of New York state to the uninitiated, Dunn is of two minds.
“I am ambivalent about that,” Dunn says. “Because I write about waterfalls and because sometimes waterfalls kill people, I dread the thought of somebody finding a body at the bottom of a waterfall. And within their hand, grasped, is my waterfall guidebook. That would be terrible.”
While Dunn may be most well-known for his waterfall guides, most recently he has been possessed by a mania for enormous boulders—and rock formations: painted rocks, balanced rocks, perched rocks, historic rocks, profile rocks, “all different kinds of rocks that were interesting destinations in their own right.”
The author will be signing books and holding forth Saturday, March 7, from 1 to 3 p.m. at Inquiring Minds Bookstore & Café in Saugerties.
Join the family! 
