As you leave Lake Placid, keep an eye out for the strangest skyline in the Adirondacks: two enormous ski jumps, like giant slides reaching up into the sky, standing right at the edge of this little village. Those are the Olympic jumping complex, and they're the clue to what makes this place so remarkable. Because Lake Placid isn't just a town that hosted the Olympics once as a fluke — it became, and still is, one of the great winter-sports capitals of the world.
Think about it: a village of twenty-five hundred people, up in the mountains, that somehow staged the entire Winter Olympic Games in 1932 and again in 1980. To pull that off, they built world-class venues right here — the ski jumps you're looking at, a bobsled and luge run carved into a nearby mountain, speed-skating ovals, ski trails — and here's the thing: they never tore them down. So to this day, Olympic and world-class athletes come from all over the globe to train right here, and you can come watch them fly off those jumps in the summer, or ride the bobsled run yourself. A tiny mountain town that decided it would host the world — and never really stopped. Roll on out toward the mountain.
Photo: Qmwne235 · CC BY-SA 3.0
