LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — In the center of the small village of Lake Placid they reach toward the sky like two beacons: Two 65-foot climbing poles, set last Saturday for the ESPN Great Outdoor Games. The poles not only serve as signals for the events getting ready to begin, but as monuments to a tradition of outdoor skills that started more than 100 years ago.

	Two 65-foot climbing poles are set in Lake Placid's competition oval in anticipation of this weekend's Great Outdoor Games.

Lumberjacks will soon climb those poles and cut similar ones. Nearby, archers and marksmen will shoot targets and anglers will be casting for prized fish. On television it will play out as the newest of great sporting events.

In reality, there's nothing new about these sports, especially in Lake Placid. Perhaps it's fitting these games have gained exposure in an area better known for Olympic competition. Lake Placid and the surrounding Adirondack Mountains have seen these activities as a part of life for more than 100 years. Few areas of the country can boast such a rich tradition in almost every discipline of the Great Outdoor Games like the Adirondacks. It could be said these mountains were made for these sports. Really, they weren't good for anything else, which has proven to be a good thing.

These mountains are as beautiful as they are rugged. They encompass more than 6 million acres, filled with jagged ridges, hard-to-get-to mountain ranges, more than 2,750 lakes and 30,000 miles of brooks, streams and rivers — an outdoorsman's paradise.

Perhaps William H. H. Murray said it best in 1869 in his book "Adventures in the Wilderness:" "In beauty of scenery, the ea'y and romantic manner of its sporting, it is a paradise, and so will it continue to be while a deer leaves his track upon the shores of its lake or a trout shows himself above the surface of its waters."

Roosevelt was hiking here when he learned that President McKinley had died, making him president in the middle of the vast wilderness in the Adirondacks.

It paints a pretty and accurate picture of the Adirondacks. But there was nothing easy about these mountains for early settlers, at least in a conventional sense. Indians once lived nearby, where they used the Adirondacks for hunting, trapping and fishing. But even they spent most of the year living in easier regions like the Champlain, Mohawk and St. Lawrence valleys. Prior to the American Revolution, this was a wild place "hostile and unfit for civilized man." Its primary purpose was to allow Colonists a place to cut giant white pine to be used as masts for the British Navy.

After the American Revolution, farmers were lured to the mountains with the promise of cheap land. But most of them didn't stay long, opting instead for the more productive and accessible lands to the south and west.

What the farmers didn't like, though, was the exact thing sportsmen soon fell in love with, the rugged landscape supported streams burgeoning with trout, and hillsides full of game. Arthur Fitzwillian Tait captured the mountains in paintings depicting his hunting adventures in this new wilderness.

The images were the forerunner of today's outdoor magazines and websites. Sports soon arrived to explore this new wilderness, testing their skills much like the athletes in this week's Great Outdoor Games. Among those was Theodore Roosevelt, who visited here as a teenager, and hunted, fished and hiked or "bully tramped" through the mountainsides. It is believed that the president, who championed the causes of conservation, built a foundation bully tramping where most men wouldn't go. It was here that Roosevelt was hiking and vacationing with his family, when he learned that President McKinley had died from a terrorist's gunshot and subsequently became president in the middle of the vast wilderness in the Adirondacks.

Meanwhile, logging and mining interests had expanded in the mountains, putting into practice the work that is now defined as sport in the lumberjack events.

Rugged men entered these hillsides in the fall to cut logs, skid them to the bank of one of the many rivers, then ride them down the river in the spring, when melting snows rolled out of the mountains. It was described as riding an "unwielding mass in motion."

It would have been hard to convince those men that the legacy they helped create nearby would some day be celebrated in such a fun and exciting format as the Great Outdoor Games. But were they able to join the spectators below those towering poles this weekend, witnessing the rare athleticism of the timber sport field, it's difficult to image those pioneers would do anything but nod their head in approval at the modern-day incarnation of their proud tradition.