He plans to keep the Floodwood Outpost open seasonally, four days a week — that’s his home on the portage connecting the Saranac watershed ponds with the St. Regis Wilderness — and cater mostly to bicyclists on the Adirondack Rail Trail. He also plans to continue to print maps and guides for paddlers and cyclists.

Cilley is happy to hand the paddle over to Farnham and Cerri. He’s looking forward to having more adventures with his wife Rivka.

“I’m 73, and it’s more than what I really want to do,” he said. “We want to travel.”

The sale of St. Regis Canoe Outfitters on July 7 is the latest in a string of changes to Saranac Lake’s business landscape. Cilley sees this as a good thing.

The new owners of St. Regis Canoe Outfitters, Steve Cerri and Maeghan Farnham, take a paddle from Rivka Cilley and Dave Cilley at the Dorsey Street store in Saranac Lake on July 13. (Enterprise photo — Elizabeth Izzo)

Over the past year, several Saranac Lake mainstays have changed hands, closed partially or closed entirely. Earlier this month, the Van Anden family, who have owned Lakeview Deli for nearly 40 years, closed the deli counter and are now leaning into the catering side of their business. Last month, Kathy and Roger Steinbrueck sold Scotts Florist to Isabel Williams after running the shop for three decades. Earlier this year, Lake Clear resident Todd Hoffnagle took over the Hhott House garden store — now called the Hot House — from Citizen Advocates. With the death of Nancy Moriarty, who owned and operated Lake Flour Cakery for 24 years, that business closed. Late last year, DJ’s Rustic Restaurant and Adirondack Tire, both longtime Broadway mainstays, closed their doors. Last summer, Chrissie Wais and John Levy took over the Belvedere from the Cavallo family, who ran the restaurant for nearly 90 years.

Cilley said there were a lot of business changes in Saranac Lake when he opened St. Regis Canoe Outfitters in 1984, too. He was part of the new group of business owners then. He said he has full confidence in the new generation, like Farnham and Cerri, who are taking the reins.

–

A life of loving the outdoors

–

Maeghan Farnham, left, speaks with St. Regis Canoe Outfitters Manager and Guide Amelia Dragone inside the Dorsey Street store on July 13. (Enterprise photo — Elizabeth Izzo)

The Dorsey Street store was bustling on July 13, with paddlers coming and going through the front doors as employees answered questions and carried canoes outside for washing.

Cilley was born in Calcium, Jefferson County, and grew up in Durham, New Hampshire. His parents ran a summer camp while he was growing up, and he later ran a camp for the Boy Scouts.

After graduating from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in botany, Cilley became an assistant manager at Eastern Mountain Sports’ North Conway, New Hampshire store. That led him to the Adirondacks: He was offered a manager position at EMS’s new Lake Placid location a few years before the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. After the Olympics he moved to Massachusetts for one year, but came back to the Adirondacks with his then-wife, Kathy Scott.

On a trip to northern Saskatchewan, he saw an outfitting business for sale. Seeing it sparked something in him.

“We wanted to buy a canoe outfitting business in Canada, but it became cumbersome, being Americans and having no money,” Cilley said.

He started working with Dick Beamish, who was the Adirondack Park Agency’s first communications director and founder of the Adirondack Explorer magazine.

“I guided cross-country ski tours for him, developed canoeing programs for him. I thought, ‘Why don’t I start doing this myself?'” Cilley said.

–

Getting started

–

Cilley started what would become St. Regis Canoe Outfitters out of his home on Church Pond.

“We outgrew that and moved the business in 1987 to Floodwood,” he said. “We ran St. Regis Canoe Outfitters from that place until 2001.”

He remembers running an office out of the Hotel Saranac in his quest to purchase a property on Dorsey Street from Gendron Lumber, right across the street from the Saranac River. He got divorced, bought his ex-wife’s share in the business, and was able to buy the Gendron property in Saranac Lake.

In 2004 he started Paddlesports Press and began publishing maps and guides, adding another dimension to the business.

At the time, “there were no maps of paddling routes,” Rivka said. “There was just the huge paper maps that you couldn’t take on a canoeing trip.”

Since then, they’ve also established Rail Trail Press, which recently published a waterproof map to the Adirondack Rail Trail.

–

New chapter

–

Dave met Rivka in 2009.

Her family is from the Philippines, but when they met, she was living in South Carolina and working as an art teacher at Bluffton Elementary School. She was also involved with a kayaking group and guided people on kayaking excursions.

“Dave met me through my next-door neighbor,” she said. “I took them kayaking.”

They just hit it off, Rivka said, and she followed Dave back to the Adirondacks that year. They were married in 2010.

Initially, Rivka worked at North Star Behavioral Health but retired from there in 2014. She loves working with kids, so she started SRCO’s youth outdoors programming. They work with the local school district, the YMCA and Camp Ampersand to put on programming that helps connect kids with canoeing and outdoors experiences. Rivka also leads historical paddling tours.

Farnham and Cerri don’t plan to change much about SRCO, but Farnham hopes to build upon Rivka’s work with youth programming.

“I’m trying to expand that part of it and work with the school more than I am now,” Farnham said.

–

Journey to SRCO

–

Farnham and Cerri see themselves taking on different roles. Farnham loves logistics and planning; Cerri has experience with the retail side of things — product ordering, fielding questions from staff, and some accounting.

Both, of course, share a love of the outdoors.

Farnham, a Fredonia native, met Cerri, who grew up in Derry, New Hampshire, while the two worked at Osprey Sea and Surf Adventures in Westport, Massachusetts. They worked together in Massachusetts for two years. After that, Farnham went off to work in Washington’s San Juan Islands for Seattle Adventure Sports, managing the logistics of 20 different paddling programs at local schools. Cerri moved to Killington, Vermont, and did mountain rescue work.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Farnham was finishing a graduate apprenticeship at Eastern Washington University and, like many people, wondering what to do next. Her partner was sent a job posting for SRCO, but it was Farnham who took interest in it. She studied at in SUNY Plattsburgh and liked the idea of moving back to the area.

She moved back to New York in 2021 and started working at SRCO. She contacted Cerri and told him about it.

“She told me this was a really complex but well-run and cool organization, so I ended up checking it out,” he said.

As it turns out, Cerri had already visited SRCO while paddling the Northern Forest Canoe Trail — he hadn’t realized it was the same place he’d stopped into before.

“It was really incredible,” he said.

Over the past year, Dave Cilley has taught Farnham about the business and slowly shifted responsibilities to her.

“The core model of this business is something that I really like and really appreciate, and I don’t want to change that at all,” Farnham said. They still plan to produce maps and guidebooks, but she and Cerri hope to expand the youth programs, build upon the guided trip programs and update the store’s technology.

“Generally speaking, we’re planning to keep it mostly the same,” she said.

Cilley has seen his early customers grow up, start families and bring their own children back to the Adirondacks. That’s a legacy that attracted Farnham to SRCO.

“I like that it’s complicated. There’s a lot going on here, and we offer a lot of different things. But really, I just like to help people go outside, and especially people who haven’t done it before,” she said.