MISQUAH — Loon Ridge Resort is full this week — all twenty-two units, plus the four cabins, plus the campground — for what general manager Renée Fontaine calls “the last real one.” Fair week and the last full week before school starts downstate arrive together every year, and the resort books it out by February.

Then it stops. “The Sunday after the fair is the loudest quiet on the Chain,” Fontaine said. “We go from a hundred and forty people to about thirty, in a morning. The lake changes color. I’m not being poetic. The boats stop stirring it up and it changes color.”

September and early October run on a different clientele — couples, fishermen, the leaf people in the first week of October — and the resort closes for the season the third week of October, which this year falls a few days before the stop sign at Birch and Second is scheduled to finally be installed, a coincidence Fontaine says she intends to be present for.

Roughly a third of this week’s guests will rebook for next August before they check out, which Fontaine describes as the single most reliable statistic in her business and the reason she has never had to advertise. Asked once again about a locals’ rate for the off-season, she gave the answer she has given this newspaper every year since 2019 and appears prepared to give indefinitely: she is always happy to think about it.

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