Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2014 i Adirondack Explorer

THE ADIRONDACK cabin where Howard Zahniser wrote much of the federal Wilderness Act is now protected by a conservation easement donated to the state by the Zahniser family. In addition, the family gave the state five acres on the edge of the Siamese Ponds Wilderness Area, which will be added to the Forest Preserve. Howard Zahniser, then secretary of the Wilderness Society, was introduced to the Adirondacks by the conservationist Paul Schaefer in 1946. He was so smitten with the region that he bought thirty-one acres and built a rustic cabin near the hamlet of Bakers Mills. He referred to the Adirondacks as the place “where wilderness preservation began.” Zahniser labored for years on multiple drafts of the Wilderness Act, often writing in his Adirondack cabin. President Lyndon Johnson signed…

THE STATE has purchased a 5,770-acre tract next to the High Peaks Wilderness for $3.8 million from the Adirondack Nature Conservancy as part of a multi-year deal to acquire former Finch, Pruyn lands for the Forest Preserve. Known as MacIntyre West, the tract lies below 4,607-foot Santanoni Peak and includes sixteen-acre Lake Andrew and 3,081-foot Mount Andrew. Neil Woodworth, executive director of the Adirondack Mountain Club, said people exploring the Santanoni Range will now be able to camp closer to the trailhead. In the past, hikers have had to hike more than four miles to find a lean-to and campsites on state land. MacIntyre West opened to the public on October 1. However, hunting clubs that used to lease the tract will retain exclusive use of one-acre parcels around twenty-eight…

LAWYERS FOR the landowners who sued Adirondack Explorer Editor Phil Brown for canoeing across their property returned to court in early October, arguing that the waterway in question should be closed to the public. A five-judge panel of the state Appellate Division’s Third Department heard the appeal in Albany and is expected to issue a decision this year or early next year. Last year, State Supreme Court Justice Richard T. Aulisi ruled that the remote two-mile waterway—comprising Mud Pond, Mud Pond Outlet, and part of Shingle Shanty Brook—was “navigable-in-fact” under the common law and therefore open to recreational paddlers. The route is part of a longer waterway that connects two portions of the state-owned William C. Whitney Wilderness, By paddling it, travelers avoid a threequarter-mile-long carry across public land. In…

HIKERS looking for a short climb to a view should check out the new trail up Goodman Mountain south of Tupper Lake. The state Department of Environmental Conservation, with the help of volunteers, created the trail this year and dedicated it to Andrew Goodman, a twentyyear-old civil-rights activist murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi fifty years ago. The slaying of Goodman and two fellow activists— James Chaney and Michael Schwerner—was dramatized in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe. The victims were helping African-Americans register to vote during Freedom Summer. The 1.75-mile trail leads to open bedrock on the summit of the 2,176-foot peak, offering good views to the east, south, and west. For the first 0.75 miles, the trail follows the route of…

FRANCES BEINECKE earned her environmental chops in the Adirondacks and rose to the top of her profession, having served as president of the Natural Resources Defense Council for the past eight years. Although she is leaving NRDC in December, her retirement is but a slight redirection in a life of advocacy and activism. She has just published a book that sets forth her own agenda, while aiming—as usual—to rally others. The World We Create: A Message of Hope for aPlanet in Peril details the consequences of the globe’s dependence on fossil fuels and provides a road map for achieving an energy future free of carbon emissions. The book is, in Beinecke’s words, “a call to action,” a familiar cry from an environmental warrior who has been on the front lines…

THE DILEMMA IS CLEAR: residents and visitors to the Adirondack Park rely on safe roads in winter, yet de-icing methods have caused a steady increase in sodium and chloride in the Park’s sensitive waterways. But do we really face a choice between pavement safe enough to send school buses over, on one hand, and protecting the environment from a growing threat, on the other? A series of reports and symposiums by AdkAction, Paul Smith’s College, and the Adirondack Council raises hope that changes in road management and driver attitudes could stem environmental degradation without sacrificing the mobility that our standard of living depends on. Maybe the biggest hopeful indicator is the roster of people and organizations who have begun working toward solutions. A September symposium at Paul Smith’s brought together…

NO OTHER North American mammal inspires such a wide range of human emotions as the gray wolf. Feared and admired, cursed and revered, wolves are the stuff of legends and a symbol of America’s vanishing wilderness. Their reputation is larger than life; their role in the restoration of America’s wildlife heritage is bigger still. The passionate positive and negative responses that wolves inspire in people have left the issue of their recovery in suitable habitat throughout their historic range both contentious and undecided, but also full of promise. The howl of the wolf has been silent in the Northeast for over a hundred years. Over three centuries, as the great eastern forest was turned into farmland, wolves were shot, poisoned, trapped, and burned. By the mid-1800s, wolves were eliminated in…

Every fall in the Adirondacks our homes are subject to an invasion by small furry critters looking for food. Every other year or so the invading armies of small mammals are larger than in other years. This is one such year. The region’s masting trees—spruce, fir, oak, and beech—had a bumper crop of seeds late last year and last winter, something that typically happens every two or three years. When this happens, small mammals have plenty of food, increasing both their overwinter survival and their reproductive success. But when food supplies in the woods run short the following fall, as they have this year, then some of these mammals enter our buildings looking for food. The most common of these small mammals are the deer mice (genus Peromyscus). Two species…

LAST WINTER, my daughter Becky and her fiancé, Joe, wanted to climb one of the Saranac Lake 6, so we snowshoed up St. Regis Mountain. Although I like St. Regis—with its marvelous views of ponds and lakes—I am not an enthusiastic snowshoer. I mean, snowshoeing is OK, but I like cross-country skiing a whole lot more. As we walked through the woods, I kept thinking, “This would be a great ski trail.” The terrain is gentle enough that on our way off the mountain we encountered a guy in MicroSpikes running up the mountain. Becky and Joe, though, thoroughly liked the snowshoe trip. “It was a foggy day, but I still enjoyed the view,” Becky emailed me afterward. “I thought the fire tower on top of the mountain was cool,…

FOR ALL THE vaunted magnitude of the largest animal that ever lived, and still lives, consider the largest living trees. A few giant coast redwoods skyscrape nearly four hundred feet above their California roots, while the tallest tree of our eastern forests, the white pine, may shoot nearly two hundred feet toward the energy source that fuels its prodigious growth. By comparison a blue whale is puny. From stem to stern, the largest individuals measure not quite a hundred feet In the Adirondacks and across much of the North American landscape, trees loom larger than any other kind of organism. Every one of us is interested in them, or so I’ve found in the course of leading nature walks for thirty-five years. Still, what do we know of them? What…

The Adirondacks are a mishmash of municipal and county jurisdictions. Take Saranac Lake: it’s a village that straddles two counties and three towns, none of which is named Saranac Lake. Just to make things more complicated, a town in the Adirondack Park is what’s often called a township in parts of America that appreciate some sense of order. But if we are near Saranac Lake and announce we are going into town, we mean the village of Saranac Lake, not the town of St. Armand, which we may already be in and is one of the three towns that the village dribbles into. You get the picture. So add these towns and villages up, and you get 102 that are wholly or partially inside the Blue Line, from the cornfields…

AROUND 2 A.M. on a stormy night in August 2013, vicious winds from a microburst exploded onto the southeast shoreline of Upper Saranac Lake, directly onto the property of Mary Watson. The winds ripped trees into piles along a swath next to a 120-year-old main camp building. Just up the shore, in a home on the Watson property Sonny Young heard the mayhem and headed out. “I went down in the middle of the night, and when I got there, there were so many trees blown down,” Sonny recalls. “Nothing hit the camp, but I had to go down the shoreline and up through the woods to make sure they were all right.” This was more than just exceptional neighborliness. It was in the line of duty for the Watson…

STANDING NEXT to a small, unnamed stream near where it empties into Mountain Pond on a cool September day, scientist Dan Kelting reads a sensor he just dipped in the water to measure electrical conductivity, which is used to gauge road-salt concentrations. Pure water is a poor conductor of electricity, but road salt, or sodium chloride, increases conductivity. Based on the conductivity reading (285 microsiemens per centimeter), Kelting calculates that the water contains 80 milligrams of chloride per liter. This means the stream contains roughly 160 times more chloride than a similarsize stream a few miles away. Why the difference? The stream near Mountain Pond, north of Paul Smith’s College, is downstream from Route 30, a state highway that is heavily salted in the winter. The other stream, which Kelting…

ONCE ABUNDANT in the Adirondacks, the spruce grouse has struggled for much of the past century, but now scientists are trying to bolster the dwindling population by importing birds from out of state. The state Department of Environmental Conservation released three spruce grouse last year and thirty this year, according to Angelena Ross, a biologist with the department. The three birds released last year were adult females from Ontario. Only one survived the winter, and it was killed by a hawk in the spring. In August, DEC released twelve adults and eighteen juveniles captured in Maine at three sites in the Adirondacks— two on private land, one in the Forest Preserve— near Tupper Lake and Paul Smiths. Ross said the birds are monitored daily through radio telemetry. “Unfortunately, we lost…

HIKING UP HOPKINS Mountain on a cool, misty, late-September day, Bethany Garretson moved with the ease of someone who spends a lot of time in the woods. A twenty-eight-year-old Paul Smith’s College grad, Garretson is an avid hiker, a licensed wilderness guide, and a firm believer in the environmental movement. “I want to be the female Bill McKibben,” remarked Garretson, who teaches in the environmental science department at Paul Smith’s. Garretson had recently completed her goal of climbing at least one mountain a day for a hundred straight days. The journey started on May 31 on Sawteeth Mountain (a High Peak visible from Hopkins’ summit) and finished on September 7 on little Baker Mountain in Saranac Lake. In between, she hiked twenty-two different High Peaks (some more than once) and…

HIS FEET are like great pads,” the naturalist John Burroughs (1837-1921) wrote of the snowshoe hare, “and his track in the snow has little of the sharp, articulated expression of ... animals that climb or dig. ... There is nothing bold or vicious or vulpine in it, and his timid, harmless character is published at every leap.” Aside from exhibiting an unfortunate gender bias in his pronouns, Burroughs gives a good feeling for the signature traces left by snowshoe hares during the cold months. White stuff begins to pile up on the Adirondack landscape after Halloween, and our hares keep hopping. November yields to December. Brown gives way to white in the coats of our lanky, rabbit-like lagomorphs. All but invisible at this stage, they continue to go about their…

letters@adirondackexplorer.org Baldface Mountain a great find Thanks for your story about Baldface Mountain [Return to Debar Pond, July/August 2014”]. Ted Mack and I bushwhacked it last week and enjoyed lunch with a view. As you said in your article the woods were pretty open until the dog-hair spruce toward the summit. We did get a bit turned around on the way down, coming out at the south end of the pond initially. There is a huge old metal culvert, partially flattened, in the inlet at that end of the pond, and I was wondering what use it might have been put to. Any thoughts? We also had a nice paddle on the pond prior to the climb and were treated to quite a display by several loons, apparently a territorial…

THIS SUMMER, state troopers and forest rangers rescued an eighty-four-year-old man who got lost in the Black River Wild Forest in the western Adirondacks. During the five-day search, they used all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) on the Chub Pond and Gull Lake trails. Fortunately, the search was a success, and a life was saved. The ATVs, however, damaged the trails, leaving them with extensive rutting. We don’t question the rangers’ use of ATVs in such an emergency. But if this kind of damage to natural resources can be inflicted by professionals charged with the “care and custody of the Forest Preserve,” imagine what can happen when recreational riders take their machines onto the Forest Preserve to have a good time and let the mud fly. Actually, we don’t have to imagine. The…

Cathy Dove became president of Paul Smith’s College on September 1, succeeding John Mills, who retired after ten years as president. Prior to coming to Paul Smith’s, she had been vice president of Cornell Tech since 2012, leading Cornell University’s project to build a 2.1-million-square-foot campus for applied sciences on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Dove had held leadership roles at Cornell since 1989, including associate dean of its College of Engineering and, before that, associate dean at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. She is Paul Smith’s tenth president and the first woman to hold that office. Earlier this year, the college announced budget cuts, including a 12 percent reduction in jobs, due to financial problems caused by enrollment shortfalls. What attracted you to Paul Smith’s?…

ANNE DIGGORY has been painting the Adirondacks since the early 1980s. In recent years, she has created landscapes that combine painting and photography. The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls has selected sixteen of these works for an exhibition called “Hybrid Visions,” which will run through January 4 (alongside a larger exhibit of earlier painters called “Picturing America”). Diggory, who lives in Saratoga Springs, studied art at Yale and Indiana University, but she says, “My real training has come from painting nature.” Some of her favorite locations for plein-air painting are Buttermilk Falls on the Raquette River, Northwest Bay Brook near Lake George, and Chapel Pond off Route 73, though she is constantly on the lookout for new spots. “It’s hard to take a hike and not think about painting,” she…

The Adirondack Cookbook features a smiling young man on the cover, a pipe in his mouth and two big strings of fish in his hands. Of course an Adirondack cookbook should contain recipes for trout, but there are also recipes in this small spiral-bound book for these mountain edibles: wild turkey, eel, squirrel, squab, snapping turtle, bear, duck, rabbit, beaver, and grouse. Fortunately authors Hallie Bond and Stephen Topper include recipes for more familiar local ingredients like potatoes, apples, maple syrup, and blueberries. Bond is a historian who worked for many years at the Adirondack Museum. Topper is a chef who has worked in several restaurants in the Adirondacks. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Adirondack Cookbook contains a good deal of history as well as recipes. Indeed, what makes…

People skiing or snowshoeing in avalanche terrain—such as an Adirondack slide—should carry beacons, probes, and shovels and enter avalanche terrain one at a time. Beacons can both emit and pick up signals. While crossing avalanche terrain, they should be set to transmit signals. If an avalanche occurs and someone is buried, others in the party should switch their beacons’ mode to receive signals (heard as beeps or tones). Avalanche Search in Four Stages 1. Signal Search After the avalanche stops, mark with a ski pole the spot where you last saw the victim. To find a signal, traverse the avalanche field from side to side, angling downhill. As you walk, move your beacon in a figure eight to broaden the antenna’s range. NOTE: If you plan to travel in avalanche…

CAROL FOX had visited OK Slip Falls three times—twice in fall, once in winter— but not on the state’s new hiking trail and never with some guy jotting down every word she said. I advised her everything would be fine if she said clever and witty things. Mainly, though, I wanted to get her impressions of the trail and the falls, one of the highest in the Adirondack Park. Of course, she could describe the 250-foot cascade from her earlier trips. “I love how you turn the corner and it’s just there,” she said on our hike in. “You’re at eye level with it.” The state bought OK Slip Falls from the Adirondack Nature Conservancy last year, but it didn’t open a trail until this past summer. The conservancy acquired…

OPPONENTS OF the proposed Adirondack Club and Resort are pinning their hopes on the state’s highest court to stop the multimillion-dollar development in Tupper Lake. Protect the Adirondacks and the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit after the Adirondack Park Agency approved the project. In July, the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court dismissed the suit, and two months later the same five judges refused the plaintiffs’ request for permission to take the case to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest tribunal. Protect and the Sierra Club—along with a private citizen who joined the suit—are now turning to the Court of Appeals itself for permission to appeal the earlier ruling. Because the Appellate Division’s decision was unanimous, the plaintiffs need authorization from one of the courts to pursue an appeal.…

MORE THAN eighteen thousand boats entered Lake George this year, but inspectors found invasive species on only 146—although it’s possible many other boats (or their trailers) were carrying unwanted aquatic plants and marine animals prior to decontamination. The species most often found were water chestnut, Eurasian watermilfoil, curly-leaf pondweed, zebra mussels, and Asian clams. All but water chestnut are already in the lake. Despite the small number of boats known to be carrying invasives, Eric Siy warns that this is not a cause for complacency. “It only takes one boat, and there are literally hundreds of invasive species, so it’s not minuscule,” said Siy, the executive director of the Fund for Lake George. “And boats carrying invasive species in their juvenile form pose the most threat. It’s what you don’t…

ON SEPTEMBER 21, more than four hundred thousand activists and concerned citizens took to New York City streets to pressure world leaders to take action against climate change. Organizers called it the People’s Climate March and hailed it as the largest demonstration of its kind. The event took place just ahead of a United Nations Climate Summit and coincided with thousands of rallies in over 150 countries. At least two hundred people represented the North Country, with the largest groups traveling on buses chartered by State University of Plattsburgh students and the North Country 350 Alliance, a green group with members throughout the Adirondack Park. “We really care about the place we live and what’s happening to it,” said Curt Stager, a professor at Paul Smith’s College’s School of Natural…

I had already set my sights on Gothic Arch when I saw it featured in Climbing magazine in an article on alpine rock climbs. What’s an “alpine” climb? I would say it’s a remote climb that requires you to get out of bed at 4 a.m. Gothic Arch is an eight-hundred-foot route that angles up the south face of Gothics, one of the most sublime of the High Peaks. Although the climbing is not that hard, the wild setting is spectacular. During the ascent you enjoy views of Upper Ausable Lake and the Great Range. Kevin “MudRat” MacKenzie and I set off from the Ausable Club at 5:30 a.m. It was supposed to be a sunny August day, but when we arrived at the summit of Pyramid four hours later,…

Yes NEARLY TWENTY years ago, as debate was churning over the proposed management plan for the eastern High Peaks Wilderness, I was standing in line to pay for some fishing gear at the Mountaineer in Keene Valley. I overheard another customer say he needed a saw for a camping trip in the wilderness. There was so little decent firewood around, he said, he would have to cut down some small trees to make a fire. Even before I opened my mouth, the sales clerk told him that it was illegal to cut down trees on the Forest Preserve, wilderness or not, and that green trees won’t burn anyway. The clerk showed him some camping stoves. The High Peaks are the Adirondack Park’s most popular hiking and camping destination. Without anyone…

MY EYEBALLS were doing somersaults after having relentlessly scanned the highway shoulders for deer during the hour-and-a-half ride home from the Christmas Bird Count dinner in Vermont. I exhaled an enormous sigh of relief as I turned onto Baxter Mountain Lane, the dirt road I live on, only to hit the brakes in a panic when I spotted the white tail of a deer and two enormous, diabolical yellow eyes right in front of me. The white tail vanished as a disk-shaped face with fiendish eyes and a red beak came right at me, only to veer up at the last moment and clear the top of the windshield by inches. I saw the owl’s white bib as it banked up and over the car. The following morning I noticed…

ALONG WITH multiple layers of clothing, climbing skins, and backcountry skis, David McCahill brings an unusual but essential piece of gear on his early-morning ski trips: a pair of foam earplugs. He uses them when he passes below the snow guns on Whiteface Mountain. And since he’s going uphill it can take a few minutes before he climbs beyond the noisy plume of snow flying out of the guns. Ascending the mountain under his own power provides a vigorous aerobic workout and a chance to “get a little piece of the mountain before the crowds arrive,” McCahill says. As backcountry skiing has grown in popularity and as manufacturers have designed ever-lighter gear, uphill skiers have been showing up more frequently at ski resorts across the country, and the Adirondacks are…

STANDING beneath a strikingly steep, sixhundred-foot dolomite tower in the Italian Alps, studying a recently published guidebook, we looked up at the rock, perplexed. The route couldn’t go that way! It just couldn’t! And it didn’t. This was our third, and final, time being misled by this beautifully produced, full-color collection of misinformation purporting to be a rock-climbing guidebook to the most beautiful routes in Val Gardena. We unceremoniously stuffed the handsome book into the bottom of a pack and proceeded to climb what appeared to be the most appealing line to the tiny summit. It was, in spite of the guidebook, a pretty good route. Over the course of our thirty-five-year careers as mountain guides we have collected hundreds of guidebooks, chronicling climbing areas throughout the world. Some of…

Yvona Fast’s Garden Gourmet: Fresh & Fabulous Meals from your North Country Garden, CSA or Farmers’ Market compiles recipes from eight years of the author’s North Country Kitchen column which has run in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise since 2005 Like the weekly column, the book focuses on using local North Country produce and ingredients to create food that is not only healthy and fresh but most importantly, simple to prepare. “Cooking does not have to be complicated,” states the author, “A salad of freshly picked, vine-ripe tomatoes accented with a little salt, pepper, parsely and chives is simple. Add a hard-boiled egg or some crumbled feta and you have protein. Add some hearty bread and you have a simple but complete meal.” The book emphasizes eating what is in season…