TUPPER LAKE, N.Y. >> In a clearing amid the dense Adirondack forest, a giant wooden troll lifts a maple-tree sapling toward the early autumn sky. Hundreds of boulders are splayed out around him, and children jump from rock to rock, their laughter filling the space.
“I feel like I’m in Minecraft!” Axel Karatayev, 6, yells to his mother as he leaps.
The 36-foot-tall installation, unveiled last month at the Wild Center in northern New York, is the state’s first permanent artwork by Thomas Dambo, the internationally acclaimed Danish recycle artist. The sculpture is named “Patrick Sapling” in honor of Patrick Dougherty, a now-retired American sculptor who spent decades creating works from tree saplings and whose last-standing outdoor installation is also at the Wild Center.
For Tupper Lake, with a population of about 5,000, the sculpture brings hope that a short-term surge in visitors will translate into a long-term boost for the town’s economy.
All summer, the town’s charming main street teemed with thousands of fans who traveled to see a different installation by Dambo called “Trolls: Save the Humans.” This traveling exhibition, which is on display at the Wild Center through Saturday, depicts six larger-than-life trolls as they attempt to teach humans how to rediscover and protect nature.
‘Proof of concept’
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Tupper Lake, a once-bustling blue-collar lumber town, enthusiastically welcomes the trolls. Miniature versions are hidden in local businesses, waiting to be found in a scavenger hunt created by the Wild Center and the regional tourism office. Raquette River Brewing created a troll-inspired German pilsner beer that’s served at local restaurants. A troll-themed play and workshops for building Dambo’s signature birdhouses have taken over the town’s arts scene.
“I’ve been here 37 years and I’ve never had a busier summer,” said Tina Merrihew, 59, who owns a half-laundromat, half-doughnut shop. “Amazing what trolls can do. They’re instigators.”
Growing up in Scandinavia, Dambo loved learning about trolls from Nordic folklore, he said in an interview. While studying at the prestigious Kolding School of Design, he got a gig working in a warehouse, where he saw how much plywood from around the world ended up discarded in Denmark.
The self-proclaimed “garbage artist” had an idea: What if he built an army of trolls and returned them to the forest? Dambo created his first examples in 2014 in Denmark, and over the years, he’s installed nearly 200 around the world.
His first traveling exhibition, called “Save the Humans,” launched in 2023 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Within a couple of months, the exhibition was booked by venues for the next seven years, Dambo said. So he launched another traveling team of creatures in 2025 called “Trolls: A Field Study.” This group of 12 smaller trolls are easier to relocate as they study the human species across the country.
Dambo’s migrating sculptures have left a stream of tourism revenue in their wake. During a three-month North American debut in Asheville, N.C., “A Field Study” generated more than $6 million in direct spending from November 2025 to February 2026, according to the local tourism board.
Dambo said he never set out to spur economic growth. But the fact that he’s made such a big impact from discarded materials is an “ultimate proof of concept that we should build our world out of trash, rather than drown in it.”
Town gets creative
While fun and fantastical, the intricate trolls are also symbolic of Tupper Lake’s difficult, decades-long transition from a once-proud logging town to one that relies on its natural resources in a new way for tourism.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Tupper Lake was a “booming little town” of mill workers, said Rick Dattola, the town supervisor. But the timber mills closed, a popular ski area shuttered and a resort development that promised more than 500 new jobs recently fell into foreclosure. No matter what the town tried, industry just wouldn’t return, Dattola said.
Only traces of the town’s once-busy sawmills remain. In late September, an early autumn mist hung over Raquette Pond at the town’s waterfront park, where a mill once set a world record for the amount of lumber sawed in a single day.
Across the park, a smokestack protruded into the sky, labeled with the letters “OWD,” a remnant of the Oval Wood Dish Factory. Once home to Tupper Lake’s biggest employer, the building is being repurposed into an affordable apartment complex.
Now, everything the town does for economic development is about tourism, specifically outdoor recreation, Dattola said. That transition from manufacturing was tough: It’s hard to keep taxes down and prices affordable when the tax base keeps shrinking, he said.
But things are improving, and the Wild Center has been a huge part of that, according to Dattola. When the center opened an elevated nature trail called the Wild Walk in 2015, attendance tripled — rising to more than 150,000 visitors a year, said Nick Gunn, the science museum’s marketing director.
After the summer of trolls, the center is on pace to break visitation records by 182%, Gunn said. About 75% of those visitors had never been to the Adirondacks before, according to post-visit surveys, Gunn said.
The visitor numbers reflect the true cult following that Dambo’s work has generated. Bettina August, 64, a retired filmmaker, drove from Florida to Tupper Lake in a converted minivan on her quest to see all of Dambo’s trolls. She’s at 39 and counting.
After building film sets for 25 years, August said she thinks the trolls are unique because of their grand size and the conceptual design that went into creating the experience of finding them.
“The thought process of it is amazing to me,” she said. “And it gives me an excuse to travel.”
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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