Every Other Lake Is Closing for the Season. This One's Just Getting Started.
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Drive along Lake Desolation Road right now, in the back half of September, and the place looks like it's shutting down for the year. The dock chairs are stacked. Tinney's Tavern's gravel lot has room to spare on a Tuesday afternoon. If you didn't know better, you'd guess this hamlet in Middle Grove was easing into a long, quiet winter the same way every other lake community in Saratoga County does.
You'd have it backward. Lake Desolation doesn't wind down when the leaves turn. It's warming up for its busiest stretch of the year, and the reason comes down to one number most people never think to ask about: elevation.
Lake Desolation sits at roughly 1,600 feet in the Kayaderosseras Range, high enough that it freezes solid before almost anything else in the county. Saratoga Lake, Ballston Lake, the ponds and reservoirs closer to sea level all take their time. Lake Desolation doesn't wait. That head start on ice is the whole reason a tavern on its shore built a second identity around winter instead of treating it as a slow season to survive.
The same elevation cuts the other way for half the year. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation manages a 2,128-acre conservation easement tract along Lake Desolation Road that's open right now for hiking, hunting, fishing and boating, with trails leading out to the ruins of the old Granger Glass Factory and the wetlands around Archer Vly. Access runs from Lake Desolation Road and Plank Road, and none of it is groomed or plowed for machines. Snowmobile trails on that same tract only open once winter arrives. So the property runs on two completely different rulebooks depending on the month, and September sits right in the gap between them: too late for the summer crowd, too early for the sleds.
Tinney's Tavern has occupied 498 Lake Desolation Road since the 1950s, long enough that it's been called a landmark for close to seventy years. For over a decade it belonged to Kevin Joyce. In April 2024, ownership passed to Bill and Karen Miller along with Sean and Jaimee Willcoxon, who also run Performance Industrial, a commercial and industrial cleaning company. Sean Willcoxon had spent 26 years in the restaurant business before that move.
"I had an itch to get back into the business and Bill was also interested."
That's how Willcoxon described the decision to take the place on. What the new ownership did next mattered more than the transaction itself. The tavern's winter identity, dormant for a few years, came back with them.
Tinney's has run outhouse races on the frozen lake since 1986, in partnership with what was then the Mulleyville Snowmobile Club. Teams of five build their own outhouses, mount them on skis or snowboards, and push them across the ice, one rider seated on the throne for the ride. The tradition went dark after 2019. Under the new owners it came back in 2025, and this year's edition ran on Saturday, February 21, with registration from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the tavern's parking lot, races from 2 to 4 p.m. on the lake itself, an awards ceremony on the ice right after, and the band Big Sky Country closing things out in a heated tent at 5 p.m.
The event isn't just a novelty anymore. It's become a fundraiser, and the beneficiary rotates. The 2025 race raised money for Expedition Yeti and Folds of Honor New York. In 2026 the money went to Expedition Yeti again alongside the Nash Weston Onorato Memorial Foundation, which supports parents who've experienced a stillbirth or infant loss. A bar that could have treated winter as something to get through instead turned its coldest asset into the thing people show up for.
Tinney's parking lot doubles as a trailhead. The Saratoga Snowmobile Association, formed in 2020 when the Mulleyville and Sacandaga clubs merged, maintains roughly 70 miles of funded and unfunded trail across the Kayaderosseras range, at elevations running from 1,400 feet up past 2,000. That network threads through a specific string of towns:
Riders who start at Tinney's picked up new mileage last winter that didn't exist the season before. In December 2025, the Hans Creek Trail opened after nearly a decade in planning, an 11-mile connector running from Northville near South Shore Road and Fayville Road, through the towns of Providence and Edinburg, on land owned by the Boeselager family. About eight miles of it crosses a conservation easement the state DEC bought from the Open Space Institute in August 2024. It was built to be ready for the 2025-26 winter season, and it links the county's northwestern trail system all the way to Great Sacandaga Lake for the first time. Saratoga County helped fund the construction and bridge work through its economic development and trail grants, and Edinburg contributed equipment and personnel to finish the job.
None of that changes what's parked outside Tinney's on a September afternoon. But it changes what's waiting down that trail once the lake locks up again, and it means the loop that starts at Lake Desolation Road now reaches farther than it did two winters ago.
What makes Lake Desolation unusual isn't that it has a winter identity and a summer one. Plenty of lake towns do. It's that the winter identity is the main one. The saratoga.com guide to snowmobiling in the county points riders straight to Lake Desolation Road for parking near Tinney's, and calls it a hotspot in its own right, not an afterthought on a longer route. Most of the county's lakes get quieter once the water freezes. This one gets louder.
Right now, in late September, that reversal is invisible. The dock chairs are stacked, the trail signs are bare of snow, and the tavern's lot has space in it on a weekday. That's not the lake shutting down. That's the lake between jobs, waiting for the one thing that actually starts its year.
The Shayna Goodson Team spends enough time in Greenfield and Middle Grove to notice these shifts before they show up anywhere else, whether that's a tavern changing hands or a new trail connecting to one that's been there for decades. If you want that kind of read on what's actually happening in this corner of Saratoga County, get in touch.
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