Adirondack Explorer September - October 2015

Age: 30-something. Birthplace: Pensacola, Florida. Residence: Saranac Lake. Occupation: “Owner of Origin Coffee Company in Saranac Lake. Come check it out!” Accomplishments: “Working on raising the most beautiful child and becoming an entrepreneur. Two of the most difficult yet rewarding jobs in the world.” Favorite paddle: “Horseshoe Pond in the middle of the night.” Favorite view: “I love the view from Owl’s Head in Keene. It’s easily accessible, rarely traveled, and always makes me feel so small being towered over by some of the largest peaks in the state.” Memorable wildlife experience: “The time I fought off a mountain lion with a water filter. Kidding, kinda. That story’s too long. There also was the summer I spent doing trail work on the Continental Divide Trail in the Absaroka Range in…

In one of his last acts as the state’s environmental conservation commissioner, Joe Martens overturned a predecessor’s finding that a 3.5-mile stretch of the Jackrabbit Ski Trail was still a town road and therefore could be open to snowmobiles, ATVs, and other vehicles. Martens wrote in a July 22 decision that the road had long been abandoned and so the state had the power to close it to vehicular use. The road in question—known as the Old Mountain Road—cuts through the Sentinel Range Wilderness between Keene and North Elba. The decision vacates much of the decision of a former environmental conservation commissioner, Alexander “Pete” Grannis, who ruled in May 2009 that the road had not been legally abandoned. Grannis’s decision was a victory for Jim McCulley, president of the Lake…

Environmentalists and local officials say the recent acquisition of the Pinnacle, a seventy-three-acre parcel overlooking Lake George, will promote the town of Bolton as a hiking destination and help protect the lake’s water quality. The Lake George Land Conservancy bought the Pinnacle in July from Ernest Oberer Sr. and Ernest Oberer Jr. for $525,000 and simultaneously sold it, with a conservation easement, to Bolton for $150,000. “It’s a dual win,” said Chris Navitsky, Lake George Waterkeeper. “We kept another ridgeline property from being developed with significant environmental impacts. Plus it sets a great standard for the community’s long-term future by creating sustainable outdoor recreation.” A roughly one-mile marked trail, using an old logging road, takes people to Pinnacle’s summit with wide-open vistas of Lake George. The trail starts from Edgecomb…

Olympic gold-medalist Billy Demong, a native of Vermontville, has officially retired as a Nordic combined skier. The five-time Olympian celebrated his retirement in July at Dewey Mountain in Saranac Lake, the ski hill where he spent countless hours as a child honing his cross-county skills. Demong’s sport combines ski jumping and cross-country skiing. He made history at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver when he became the first American to win a medal in a Nordic skiing event, placing first in the ten-kilometerlargehill ski event. He also won a silver medal in a team event. Hours after winning the gold medal, Demong proposed to his wife, Katie Koczynski, at a team celebration. He and his wife now have two young children. Demong said most people point to Vancouver as the…

Maybe as you’ve hiked an Adirondack trail you’ve come across a trail crew of the Student Conservation Association and wondered about these young people doing the heavy lifting that makes your hike accessible and enjoyable: placing boulders for steps, digging water bars to keep the path from washing out, building log-and-stone cribs to hold a bridge of massive spruce stringers. Why are they doing this for five and ten days at a stretch, sometimes for twelve hours in a day? Well, it’s not for money. These are volunteers. A token stipend and some help with college bills through the AmeriCorps national service program is their compensation. That and all the camp food they can pack in and cook. But if, once you took in what they were up to, you…

The Iowa-Pacific rail company took state officials and environmental activists by surprise in July when it unveiled a plan to store hundreds of drained oil-tanker cars on its tracks near Tahawus on the edge of the High Peaks Wilderness. Ed Ellis, the president of Iowa Pacific, says revenue from storing the cars will help keep afloat its tourist train, the Saratoga & North Creek Railway, which has been losing money. Critics contend Iowa Pacific is creating a quasi-junkyard in the Adirondack Park. Ellis and other officials at Iowa Pacific did not reply to numerous phone messages and emails from the Explorer, but Ellis presented the plan to the Warren County Public Works Committee on July 28, saying the company hoped to begin moving cars to Tahawus within a few months,…