FUN FACT

in Saratoga Springs High School (and serves as an adjunct instructor at SUNY Adirondack), a job that melds well with guiding: he educates in both roles and his teaching schedule leaves summer and weekends free to lead trips.

“This is certainly the busy season,” he said. “I’ve been out every weekend since mid-January.”

Skylight Mountain Guides employs five other part-time guides, who are out most weekends. “The three good months of winter for back-country skiing are January, February and March,” Haas said.

Adventures range in time commitment (six to eight hours), difficulty and activity, depending on customer preference and experience.

“Sometimes people are very specific about what they want to do, they have a goal, they want to ski off the top of a High Peak, or they want preparation for a Western trip and need to ski offtrail terrain, open slopes and practicing avalanche safety,” Haas said. “Other people say, ‘I just want a good day,’ and it’s more about the flexibility of going where the snow happens to be good.”

Trips can be in the Gore Mountain/ Indian Lake area, the High Peaks or into the Green Mountains of Ver- mont. “That’s the great thing about the Glens Falls/Lake George region,” Haas said. “You drive an hour in any direction and you’re still surrounded by mountains.”

Haas has skied in France and Switzerland, and throughout the United States (including Alaska). He met his wife, who is also a guide for Skylight Mountain Guides, at a ski clinic and now they adventure as a family with their son.

Despite expertise in skiing, mountaineering and climbing, and being a certified Wilderness First Responder, Professional Avalanche and AMGA Rock Instructor, Haas is grateful for the guidance StartUp ADK provided.

“I know how to take people back-country skiing, but all the other aspects of business — banking, or if you need to get a loan, or manufacturing or retail space, legal, marketing — the course did a great job highlighting how I needed a team of professionals not just as a startup but in years two, three and four,” Haas said. “I had decades of guiding experience, I knew the Adirondacks well, I knew the clients, I knew prospective guides, and still this would have been really difficult for me to do with any confidence or success if I didn’t have the experience going into starting a business with StartUp ADK.” www.grampsoldschool.com

Few people see potential in a dilapidated structure overrun by nine decades of weeds, raccoons and the elements, but Jill Tefft did.

She drove past Center Falls Schoolhouse — just a stone’s throw from her childhood home in Greenwich — almost daily. She had just returned to her hometown with her husband and couldn’t stop thinking about the “For Sale” sign on the one-room schoolhouse property.

“One day, I said to my parents, ‘We should buy that schoolhouse and turn it into an airbnb,’” Tefft recounted. “They were like, ‘An air what?’”

But Tefft remembered in the years she lived out of state that every time she visited the region for special events or to see friends and family, there were few options for places to stay. “There are no brand-name hotels in Washington County, and we struggled with where to stay. Do we stay in Saratoga? But then we have a half-hour drive. Do we stay with family? That’s nice, but there are challenges with that too,” she said.

As her family discussed the 1850 structure, her dad said something that convinced her. “He said, ‘Did you know your grandfather went to that schoolhouse?’ I said, ‘That’s it. We need to go look at it.’”

On their first visit, they weren’t allowed in the building. “It was vacant since the school was shuttered in the mid-1940s, they closed the