No Place I'd Rather Be: Wit and Wisdom from Adirondack Lean-To Journals

"If you go hiking in the Adirondacks, it won't be long before you come across a lean-to placed in some scenic spot to provide shelter for the passing hiker. If you take a look inside, you're likely to find a journal stored in a plastic baggie. If you take it out and start to read, you probably won't be going anywhere for a while. This book is made up of the interesting things people write in lean-to registers. The entries are by turns inspirational, hilarious, pathetic, and downright crazy. They provide insight into the minds and motives of people who, for diverse reasons, have chosen through physical hardship to reach places of solitude, beauty, and sometimes misery and danger..." Thus begins this book, the inspiration for which came to author Stuart Mesinger on a backpacking trip in the West Canada Lakes Wilderness. Mesinger was reading the entries in one of the West Lake lean-tos when, "the idea struck that someone ought to make a book out of these entries - and that someone ought to be me." The result is what past Adirondack Mountain Club president Thomas Wheeler described as "Entertaining and thought provoking. The logs are the blogs of the lean-tos…There is something to entertain and offend virtually everyone."