Most write-ups of Jay in August stop at the covered bridge. You already know the covered bridge. You have walked your dog across it, you have watched a niece jump off the flat rocks upstream, and you have parked in the Douglas Memorial Park lot when it was full and when it was empty.
What visitors miss, and what changes the shape of the month if you actually live here, is that August in Jay and Upper Jay is not organized around a single landmark. It is organized around a five-mile stretch of Route 9N that runs from the Village Green through Upper Jay and down into Au Sable Forks. Three institutions along that corridor set the weekly clock. Two of them just changed. If you read the corridor instead of the calendar, you get a better August than anyone driving up from Lake Placid for the day.
The corridor, not the crowd
Think of 9N in August as one long room with four doors. The Village Green in Jay is the front. The Upper Jay Art Center is the middle. Sugar House Creamery sits off to one side on a hillside pasture. Au Sable Forks, with the newly muraled Ausable Theater, anchors the back.
Each has a fixed weekly window when it is actually open. Learn the windows and the month plans itself.
| Stop | Address / anchor | Best window |
|---|---|---|
| Jay Village Green & Amos & Julia Ward Theatre | Route 9N, Jay | JEMS event nights, summer weekends |
| Jay Craft Center | Jay hamlet | Open seven days a week in summer, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. |
| Upper Jay Art Center / Recovery Lounge | 12198 Old 9N, Upper Jay | Announced show nights |
| Sugar House Creamery farm store | 18 Sugar House Way, Upper Jay | Wed, Sat, and Sun, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. |
| Asgaard Farm & Dairy store | 74 Asgaard Way, Au Sable Forks; Saturday 10 a.m.–2 p.m. | Saturday morning |
| Ausable Theater | Main Street, Au Sable Forks | Event nights, exterior anytime |
The interesting thing about this list is what it reveals about local time. Sugar House is closed Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Asgaard is a four-hour Saturday window. If you want to eat well in August without driving to Lake Placid or Plattsburgh, Saturday between 10 and 2 is not a suggestion, it is the entire game. Everything else in the week bends around that.
The three Saturdays that matter
August has five Saturdays in 2026. Three of them are load-bearing.
Saturday, August 8 — Dance Party at the Recovery Lounge. The Upper Jay Art Center hosts a Dance Party with David Sommerstein in the Recovery Lounge, the same room that in July staged four nights of Sarah Ruhl's Melancholy Play. If you have not been to UJAC in a while, it is worth remembering what the building actually is. It sits in a former Ford assembly plant and showroom on Route 9N, built in 1920 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. The performance space was named the Recovery Lounge as a wink to the founders' upholstery trade, and it has become an essential gathering place in the Ausable River Valley, staging classic and contemporary plays with an ever-expanding troupe of local actors.
Saturday, August 15 — Jay Day. The annual Jay Day Celebration runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the Historic Jay Village Green, with music, food, refreshments, and activities. With 40-plus vendors, it is a festival worth planning around, and the pie contest is open to seasoned bakers and dessert lovers alike, with winners announced shortly after. One detail that gets buried in the general listing is the art angle. Norte Maar hosts the annual Jay Invitational of Clay at the Jay House, with an opening reception and artists present at the Jay Day Fair. That means one Saturday, one green, and a cross-section of regional ceramicists all standing in the same field.
Saturday, August 22 — Art Party at UJAC. The Upper Jay Art Center's summer benefit runs from 7 to 11 p.m. at 12198 Old 9N. If you have been meaning to buy work by an Ausable Valley artist and never quite got around to it, this is the annual moment when the walls are hung with pieces you can take home.
Notice what those three Saturdays do. They spread across the corridor. August 8 pulls people to Upper Jay. August 15 pulls them to the Jay hamlet. August 22 goes back to Upper Jay. If you live on the corridor, you can pick one and skip two without missing anything you cannot recover in September.
The bridge is the postcard. The holes are the plan.
You already know the covered bridge in a general way. Here is what to actually tell your visiting sister-in-law when she asks.
The historic Jay Covered Bridge spans 175 feet over the East Branch of the Ausable River. It was originally built in 1857 by George M. Burt using a patented Howe Truss design, removed in 1997, completely restored using original hand-hewed beams in the interior, and returned to its original location in 2007. It is now a pedestrian and bicycle bridge, and part of Douglas Memorial Park, overlooking the popular swimming spot known as "the holes" and the waterfalls upstream.
Two things people miss. First, the wooden Howe Truss bridge is the last of its kind in the Adirondacks, and the longest of the 22 covered bridges that remain in the state. That is a stronger claim than the sign at the parking lot makes. Second, the swimming below the bridge is not a beach. The area below the bridge is popular for swimming, with rocks to sunbathe on and jump from, deep pools of water in between, and a natural waterslide or two depending on how high the water is. There is no lifeguard. After heavy August thunderstorms up in the High Peaks, the East Branch runs fast for a day or two even when the sun is out. The river is always swift, even after periods of drought. Point the sister-in-law at the flat rocks above the falls on a settled afternoon, not the day after a storm.
For a change of pace, walk Henry's Trail. The half-mile accessible walking trail has pods themed after Adirondack animals — Bald Eagle and Red-tailed Hawk, Honeybee, Snowshoe Hare and Cottontail Rabbit, Fisher, Deer Mouse, and Bullfrog — with musical instruments in each. It is the best twenty minutes with grandchildren in either town.
What "Water Wonder" tells you about Au Sable Forks right now
If you have driven through Au Sable Forks in July or early August, you saw it. A 3,000-square-foot mural stretches across the Ausable Theater's brick exterior in deep blues, centered on a kingfisher in flight, with floating bubbles holding images of workers from an old paper mill, a fly fisherman, and local artist Rockwell Kent. The piece, titled "Water Wonder," was funded by the Essex County Land Bank's ARTSCAPES program and is the largest piece of public art in Au Sable Forks.
The mural is the visible part of a longer story. The Ausable Theater first opened as the Hollywood Theater in 1937, and over the decades served as everything from a dual-screen movie theater to a manufacturing space for luges ahead of the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid. In 2021, Jason Andrew and his husband Norman Jabaut bought the building and began an ambitious renovation. The couple has raised more than $70,000 through grants, fundraising, and their own savings, with a total estimated cost of around $300,000. Interior work is ongoing, but the exterior has flipped from blighted to landmark in one summer.
You do not need to buy a ticket to appreciate it. Park on Main Street, walk the mural, then have lunch at 20 Main Tavern. That is a new August routine that did not exist last year.
A Saturday that actually works
Here is the corridor stitched into one day, using only what is open when it says it is.
- 9:30 a.m. Coffee at home. Do not skip this. Sugar House does not open until 10.
- 10:15 a.m. Sugar House Creamery farm store, 18 Sugar House Way. Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. It is stocked with farmstead cheese, raw milk, veal, and beef, alongside meats, eggs, vegetables, and bread from Mace Chasm Farm, Blue Pepper Farm, Juniper Hill Farm, North Country Creamery, Reber Rock Farm, and others. Ask for Little Dickens if you want something silky and spreadable, Mooncake if you want a semi-soft with an edible rind, or Dutch Knuckle, an Appenzeller-inspired cheese suitable for cooking.
- 11:15 a.m. Asgaard Farm & Dairy, 74 Asgaard Way, Au Sable Forks, farm store hours Saturday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pick up goat cheese and, if you have never had them, the sea salt goat's milk caramels. This is also the former home of the artist Rockwell Kent. He lived on the 150-acre working farm from the 1920s until his death in 1971, and the surrounding Adirondack panorama inspired some of his most iconic paintings. Current owners David Brunner and Rhonda Butler put the farm back into production in 2003, and in 2020 it was recognized on both the State and National Registers of Historic Places.
- 12:45 p.m. Lunch at 20 Main Tavern in Au Sable Forks, or a sandwich at the Ice Jam Inn back in Upper Jay if you want the river view. The Ice Jam Inn offers Adirondack dining with the ambiance of Adirondack scenery, dine in or take out.
- 2:00 p.m. Walk the "Water Wonder" mural on the theater exterior.
- 3:00 p.m. Douglas Memorial Park. Swim if the river is calm. Walk Henry's Trail if it is not.
- 7:00 p.m. Whatever is on the Recovery Lounge calendar that Saturday, from a Sommerstein dance night to the August 22 Art Party.
Groceries, art, a mural, a swim, and a show, all within a five-mile stretch you already drive twice a week.
When you're ready to talk about property
The people who understand this corridor best are the people who live on it in August. If you own a home in Jay, Upper Jay, or Au Sable Forks and you are starting to think about how the mural, the theater renovation, and the steady rhythm of UJAC change what your property is worth in the next few years, that is a conversation Bob Miller Real Estate has been having with owners along Route 9N for a long time. Contact Bob for a local market consult.
