Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2017 i Adirondack Explorer

Rock-climbing guide Will Roth and two clients were rappelling near Chapel Pond this summer when a young bear started climbing toward them, scratching its claws against the slabby bedrock. When the bear got to within fifteen feet, Roth tossed a rock and struck it in the shoulder. The bear veered into the woods but soon reappeared at the top of cliff, peering down at the climbers. Roth suspects that it was one of two cubs that had frequented the same area last year with a mother bear, stealing goodies from climbers’ packs. “It had to know that people meant food,” Roth remarked. Other climbers also encountered bears in the Chapel Pond area this summer, prompting the state Department of Environmental Conservation to post warning signs. Now DEC is considering other…

The Adirondack Park lost two influential figures this summer, men who shaped the region for a quarter-century but often found themselves on different sides of issues. George Canon, the longtime supervisor of Newcomb, and John Collins, an environmental champion and former chairman of the Adirondack Park Agency, passed away in June after leaving indelible marks on the Park’s culture and politics. FROM ADIRONDACK EXPLORER ARCHIVES: AN INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE CANON “I have had a very good life,” Collins wrote in a letter to friends before his passing. “Great parents and family, great wife, great children, jobs that I liked, and a wonderful environment to live in. I have no regrets.” Collins, who was seventy-nine, grew up in Blue Mountain Lake and was educated in a one-room schoolhouse. Environmental champion Governor…

In recent years, the number of people using the Forest Preserve in the Adirondack Park, especially in the High Peaks region, has increased dramatically, resulting in more search and rescues and a greater need for public outreach and education. However, forest rangers and environmental organizations say the ranger force—a key contact with the public—is understaffed and unable to keep up with the demands of the job. The size of the force hasn’t changed significantly in several decades. Scott Van Laer, a ranger who works in the High Peaks, outlined the problem in a recent article on Adirondack Almanack, an online journal owned by the Explorer. “The number of people recreating in the outdoors is exploding, particularly in the High Peaks Wilderness,” he wrote. “This is taxing the entire forest ranger…

Every two decades, New Yorkers go to the polls to decide whether they want to rewrite the language in their state constitution. Historically, they take a pass on this opportunity—in more than a century, only three constitutional conventions have been called by the voters, the most recent in 1967. And even in that year, the same voters who called for the convention decided they didn’t like the result and rejected the changes proposed by the convention’s delegates. But if last year’s presidential elections and the rise of a self-styled populist to power were reflective of anything, it was that much of the electorate is irritated with business as usual and might be willing to take chances in the name of draining the swamp. Of all the governmental swamps in this…

You’ve heard of hiking all the forty-six High Peaks? A mere stroll. Some seek the Winter forty-six. Some do the Adirondack Hundred Highest. Some madcap hikers go even more extreme, such as climbing every Adirondack peak over three thousand feet high. Erik Schlimmer’s idea will beat them all. He wants to hike, well, everything. Schlimmer, a forty-three-year-old Troy resident, is trying to hike to every named natural feature in the Adirondacks. Every peak, stream, lake, cliff, meadow, swamp, waterfall, and any other geographic feature that cartographers have seen fit to recognize. He calls it name bagging. “I really like going to remote places,” says Schlimmer. While Schlimmer doesn’t expect to successfully visit every named feature in the Adirondacks— there must be thousands upon thousands—he plans to keep doing it until…

Few photographers have captured the Adirondacks as beautifully or as thoroughly as Carl Heilman II. He’s been out there in all seasons, in all conditions, for the past forty years. His latest book, The Adirondacks: Season by Season, is a testament to his skill with a camera and his knack for discovering places that most of us will never get to—except in his books. Although we think of Carl as primarily a landscape photographer, the book contains plenty of exquisite close-ups, such as wildflowers glistening with dew, a fawn curled up in fallen leaves, a jumble of ice shards along Lake George. Of course, there are many glorious vistas as well. The book is divided into six seasons, not the usual four. As Carl’s photos demonstrate, four seasons are not…

Weller Pond and Little Weller Pond should be a quiet-waters area off limits to motorboats, accessible only by non-motorized craft. These ponds could offer a peaceful and beautiful refuge from the heavily used and extremely popular Saranac Lakes chain. It would be easy to do. New York State owns the entire shoreline around both ponds. The state also owns the lands around the navigable channel that connects these ponds to Middle Saranac Lake. And the state has the authority to close these ponds to motorized boat traffic; it simply needs the will to do so. The decision to make the Weller Ponds motor- free could be made in the Saranac Lakes Wild Forest Area unit management plan. The state Department of Environmental Conservation released a draft UMP this summer. DEC…

While hiking along the flat, narrow trail that runs through a dense, impenetrable stand of spruce near the summit of Marcy, we froze as five newly fledged birds popped into view six feet away, at eye level. They looked like mice that had grown feathers instead of fur and beaks instead of noses, and they clearly had no idea how to react to a pair of gigantic humans. Then a bird popped out of the spruce wall fifteen feet farther along on the trail, displayed his brilliant red crown patch, and chattered menacingly. “Ruby-crowned kinglets!” I announced. “How the [expletive deleted] do you know that!” Pat exclaimed. Then she saw the excited adult male and laughed, saying, as I had thought, that the young birds looked like mice. The ruby-crowned…

Even today, about a year after the fire, it’s a mystery why anyone would want to burn down the 1812 Homestead Farm and Museum in Willsboro. The historical foundation, used as an educational site for decades, was a place for North Country schoolchildren and summer-camp attendees to learn about history. Here, visitors could spend a day practicing how to make candles and shingles, take care of domestic animals, watch a blacksmith at work, and otherwise learn what life in the Adirondacks was like in the old days. The 125-acre property consisted of a barn and a farmer’s house built around 1812, and a century-old one-room schoolhouse rescued from down the road. There was also a sugar shack, an outdoor oven, a blacksmith forge, and other historical sites of interest. Schools…

While collecting blacklegged ticks at Wickham Marsh near Lake Champlain, Lee Ann Sporn and her son took a break and placed on the ground a white cloth they had been using to collect the poppyseed- size bugs. Within minutes, ten or so blacklegged ticks were crawling on the cloth. If Sporn had been sitting down, they might have got on her. The lesson: people who spend time in the Park should be aware of the tick danger. “We will have to change our behavior, we really will, especially in June,” Sporn said. Since 2014, Sporn has traveled throughout the Adirondack Park collecting blacklegged ticks (also known as deer ticks) as part of a joint project with the state Department of Health (DOH) and other organizations to determine the extent of…

Kathy Gilroy stands over an improvised work station in the family cabin on Eagle Island. Soft bath towels drape a wooden table to cushion a brown wooden frame holding nine panes of glass. The table’s edge holds a tub of glazing compound, paint scrapers, glass cleaner in a spray bottle, terry-cloth rags, a measuring tape, and a handheld heater that looks like a small hairdryer. She carefully sculpts glazing compound to join the straight edge of a single pane to the wooden grid. The eleven buildings on Eagle Island sat unoccupied from 2008 to 2015, and the neglect took a toll. “There was no putty or points holding the panes in place,” says Gilroy. “They were there out of habit.” If all goes to plan, Gilroy’s work will restore another…

Horse and buggy plunge off cliff! Husband shoots wife and self! Couple tumbles over precipice, stung by passion! Lurid is the lore of Coot Hill, and all these troubling exploits were told to me before I first hiked there a few years ago; the place has a captivating human backstory and is a natural history hot spot too. It’s also an intriguing and easy hike to a knockout of a view. Coot Hill is a lower summit of Bulwagga Mountain, the long uplifted plateau overlooking Lake Champlain’s bay of the same name just south of Port Henry. The summit lookout perches a thousand feet above the valley, commanding a vista up and down the lake and over to the Green Mountains. An Irish settler named the hill for one he’d…

One of the forest rangers’ searches this summer ended on a tragic note: a fiftyyear- old hiker from the Rochester area accidentally drowned in the East Branch of the Ausable River after a strenuous trek in the Great Range in late July. Although what happened in the final moments of Ralph “Skip” Baker’s life will likely never be known, Essex County Coroner Frank Whitelaw said Baker may have suffered a medical episode that caused him to drown. READ PREVIOUS STORIES “We did identify some medical issues during the autopsy, and those could have been the cause of his disorientation and not feeling well,” Whitelaw said. “And that could have precipitated him ending up in the water. He could have staggered into or stumbled into the water while walking by the…

When Spencer Morrissey summited Peaked Mountain in the central Adirondacks in late June, it marked a major milestone in his hiking career. He had hiked his thousandth Adirondack peak, likely becoming the first person to achieve that feat. “It was kind of a sigh of relief,” Morrissey said. “It was kind of surreal, because I didn’t ever really think I’d get to this point.” Morrissey chose Peaked Mountain near North Creek because it has a trail to the summit, which would make it easier for people to join him. Eleven people did. A Long Lake native, Morrissey now lives in Cranberry Lake and works as a dispatcher for the state Department of Environmental Conservation. He is also a licensed hiking guide and freelance writer. READ A REVIEW OF SPENCER MORRISSEY'S…

This November’s election may be an off year, but it’s an important one for New Yorkers. The ballot will include the question of whether to hold a convention to make changes to the New York State Constitution, a chance that comes along once every twenty years. New York State residents with ties to the Adirondacks should be conflicted: on the one hand, their state constitution is in desperate need of revision—punctuated by a string of corruption convictions against state leaders in recent years. The changes needed to fix this problem aren’t likely to come from lawmakers themselves through constitutional amendment. But while taking back control of our constitution seems a desirable goal, opening the potential for harm to Article 14, which includes the forever-wild clause protecting the Forest Preserve in…

On July 2, the volunteer trail stewards from the Adirondack Forty-Sixers counted 565 hikers at the Cascade trailhead. I don’t have up-to-date figures for Chapel Pond or the Roaring Brook/Giant parking lots, but if you have driven past these trails, you know there are more users than parking spaces or bathrooms. On a busy summer day, overflow parking along Route 73 makes it a dangerous gantlet. In the hamlet of Keene Valley, we regularly see blocked driveways and fire hydrants, and Adirondack Street and Johns Brook Road can be so congested that emergency vehicles can’t get through. READ MORE ON THIS The overuse led to the loss of legal access to the trail up Owls Head Mountain. The private landowners who had to deal with blocked roads and driveways, hikers…

As summer wanes and autumn waxes, color spatters the woods. Despite all the praise sugar and red maples get for the process, they don’t deserve all the credit, nor do trees in general. In fact, a good deal of the season’s most dazzling colors come to our appreciative retinas from bushes, especially the fruit-bearing shrubs known as viburnums. I learned in my salad days that viburnums belong to the honeysuckle family, the Caprifoliaceae. But that truth has gone south. Scientists who look at the chemical nature of plants as well as their physical features have convinced botanists in general that viburnums, which include nine shrubs and small trees found in the Adirondacks, belong not among the honeysuckles but with the Adoxa family, or Adoxaceae. One of the namesakes of the…

In the eastern Adirondacks, between the High Peaks and Lake Champlain, there are no less than four Bald Peaks, a result of the old North Country tradition of giving things simple, utilitarian names. This profusion of Bald Peaks mixes up even longtime Adirondackers. All four are of moderate height, between two and three thousand feet, and all have views. One is well-traveled, having a trail over its summit. One sees occasional visitation, being an easy bushwhack in a state Wilderness Area. The third is hardly ever climbed as it is situated on a Wild Forest parcel that is completely surrounded by private land. That will change, however: it is slated to get a trail to its summit as part of the planned North Country National Scenic Trail. The fourth Bald…

Adirondack camp owners and bushwhackers will love this book. And so will people interested in the meaning of extreme solitude—who can tolerate it, who can’t. I’m not talking about the sort of solitude we all appreciate when we have an afternoon or maybe even a couple of days entirely to ourselves. This book is about a man who lived alone in the Maine woods for twenty-seven years. During that time, he uttered one word to another human being, and that word was “Hi.” I’m also not talking about hermits along the lines of those we’ve read about in the Adirondacks. Noah John Rondeau, for example, experienced a solitude on the banks of Cold River that none of us will ever know, but he welcomed visitors and enjoyed entertaining them with…

Shortly after the Barkeater Trails Alliance (BETA) formed in 2009, the group submitted a proposal to the state to vastly expand the mountain-bike network in the Lake Placid, Saranac Lake, and Tupper Lake area. Eight years later, the state is poised to grant BETA’s wish. As part of the Saranac Lakes Wild Forest unit management plan (UMP), unveiled by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation in June, mountain bikers emerge with the most to gain from the ambitious pro posal: thirty-five miles of new biking trails are in the offing, including a new trail network off McKenzie Pond Road, a new trail encircling the base of Scarface Mountain, and a series of loop trails off Old Wawbeek Road in Tupper Lake. Some of the new trails, including one near the…

In the nineteenth century, the Bog River’s reputation for remoteness attracted numerous writers of the day, who invariably depicted the headwaters as dismal, lonely, and insect-infected. It also was reputed to be the final refuge of the moose in the Adirondacks. “The last moose was killed many times there,” observed Paul Jamieson in Adirondack Canoe Waters: North Flow. Nowadays you’d be lucky to find a parking spot on a summer weekend at the Bog’s lower dam, the put-in for trips to Hitchins Pond and, farther upriver, Lows Lake. And you’re much more likely to see a flotilla of colorful kayaks than a moose. You can’t blame people for wanting to paddle to Hitchins Pond or Lows Lake. They’re both beautiful waterscapes that offer wild views and the chance to see…

If you grew up hiking and now are a parent, you’re likely to want to introduce your children to the beauty and challenge of a hike in the woods. But it’s a delicate thing. If the first experience is too hard, cold, wet, or buggy, they may drag their feet about hitting the trail the next time. I started hiking with my boys, Rushton and Devlin, last summer when they were four and six. It’s been rewarding, but also frustrating. You know how grandparents enjoy seeing their grandchildren give their parents the same hard time the grandparents experienced? During my son’s whinier moments on the trail I can hear my father saying, “Leigh, there’s a Burger King at the top!” I was not usually a willing hiker or camper as…

Chip Moeser hiked fifteen miles from Lake Placid in early July to spend the night at Duck Hole deep in the High Peaks Wilderness. He was looking for quiet, but in the late afternoon, a helicopter started descending from overhead. “It was coming in like it was going to land,” Moeser said, adding that it got as close as ten feet to the ground before taking off. At first, he had assumed it was a state helicopter. In fact, it was owned by Go Aviation, which this summer started flying helicopter tours out of Lake Placid and Lake Clear. “It’s pretty upsetting,” Moeser told the Explorer. “It’s a lot of work to hike to places like that, and you do it to get away from things like that.” When he…

In 2009, Mark “Willie” Wilcox bought an old farmhouse just about in the middle of nowhere, outside the hamlet of Essex. It was built in the early 1800s and hadn’t been lived in for forty years. Wilcox fell in love with the house and the historical details that it bore in its quiet decay: four Rumford fireplaces, a beehive bake oven, wide floorboards, original wavy window glass. Wilcox and a dedicated contractor spent half a year fixing it up, and he moved in, albeit part time. The Orren Reynolds Homestead, as he calls it, was not a typical home restoration. Today, there’s no electricity. No heat, except for a wood stove. No insulation. No running water, except for a propane-warmed shower that uses water pumped from a two-hundred-year-old dug well…

Who says the Adirondack High Peaks have the best views in the Park? We asked you to submit your low-peak views for our latest Views of the Park photo contest, and once again, you didn’t disappoint. Setting our sights lower, below four thousand feet, produced some pretty spectacular scenery from all over the Park—Long Lake, Blue Mountain, Warrensburg, Lake Champlain. In fact, we got a couple of new ideas for hikes PAST WINNERS: MY DOG LOVES THE ADIRONDACKS ADIRONDACK PADDLES Hikers responsible for these five photos will each receive a free one-year subscription to the Adirondack Explorer. The Reader’s Choice was determined by the number of “likes” on Facebook. Congratulations to Brendan Wiltse for his photo of Silver Lake Mountain. SPEAKING OF SHORT HIKES:CHECK OUT OUR GUIDES Our next Views…

YES Every twenty years, the state constitution gives New Yorkers the right to vote to hold a constitutional convention. It’s the voters’ opportunity to amend the constitution if they’re not satisfied with state government. This Election Day in November provides that opportunity, but already those tied to the Albany establishment are campaigning vigorously against it. They don’t want the public getting in their way. I’m leading one of the grassroots organizations that support the convention, and polls show that most New Yorkers are not satisfied with what they see in Albany. First on our list of problems in Albany is corruption. Too many statewide officials, legislative leaders from both parties, and other members of the state legislature have been convicted of fraud and other crimes. On its own, the legislature…

Work on climate change is hard. And emotional, says Jen Kretser, director of programs for the Wild Center and project director for the Youth Climate Program run through the science museum. It’s devastating, for example, to watch a community in Sri Lanka affected by “crazy flooding” when they themselves produce no carbon emissions at all, she said. But then she has a day like this one: Kretser had two different projects connected to the Youth Climate Program coming together simultaneously, demonstrating the hope that can come from seeing youth intent on making the world a better place succeed. She was in Albany with three student climate leaders presenting to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the New York State Office of Climate Change about how they…

There are six living species of bears in the world, and three of these occur in North America: brown bears, polar bears, and our American black bear. But the taxonomy has evolved over the years. When C. Hart Merriam, author of Mammals of the Adirondacks, wrote his monumental review of brown bears in North America in 1918, he recognized ninety separate species! Today scientists recognize but one species of brown bear (Ursus arctos) and a few subspecies, the latter reflecting geographic differences in size and other characteristics. Throughout human history, bears have been both revered and feared, and myths abound. How dangerous are the 750,000 black bears inhabiting North America? Although there were two fatal attacks this summer in Alaska, over the past 150 years in North America, there have…

Once I had the pleasure of meeting Al Breisch, then New York State DEC’s de facto Herpetologist-in-Chief, at a lecture he gave for the Wild Center before it had even been built. Breisch impressed me. He was precise and as armed with accurate information about “herps” (a catch-all nickname for reptiles and amphibians) as a porcupine is charged with quills. Yet Breisch, then director of DEC’s Amphibian and Reptile Atlas Project, did not strike me that day as someone inclined to write a warm, accessible, popular book about anything. It was plain he was a man of science, speaking the language of specialists. LISTEN: ED KANZE'S "ALL THINGS NATURAL" PODCASTS I’m delighted to report that I had Breisch all wrong. He has produced a book about reptiles and amphibians that…