Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2017 i Adirondack Explorer

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has denied a request to put the Bicknell’s thrush, a rare songbird that breeds in the Adirondacks, on the federal list of endangered species. In a petition to the agency, the Center for Biodiversity argued that threats to the bird, including climate change and deforestation, warranted endangered status. But the Fish and Wildlife Service concluded in early October that the Bicknell’s was not in danger of extinction for the foreseeable future. In its decision, the agency reached a similar conclusion regarding twenty-four other species. Mollie Matteson, a senior scientist at the center, called the decision “disappointing, but not surprising,” given antipathy toward the Endangered Species Act exhibited by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress. “It’s pretty much war against the Endangered Species Act…

Officials remain puzzled by the behavior of a New Jersey man who died after hiking up Wallface Mountain in the High Peaks Wilderness in September. Alex Stevens, who was twenty-eight, died of bronchial pneumonia while on a solo hiking trip. After a nine-day search, his body was found near Wallface Ponds, not far from a makeshift campsite he had established. Wallface Mountain looms high above Indian Pass. Its seven-hundred-foot cliff attracts many rock climbers, but few hikers visit the wooded summit. There is a trail to Wallface Ponds, but it stops well short of the 3,700-foot summit. Forest Ranger Captain John Streiff said police examined Stevens’s computer for clues as to why he went up Wallface Mountain, but they came up empty. “We will not know why he chose Wallface.…

Environmentalists, scientists, and public officials in the Lake George region are stepping up efforts to reduce road-salt contamination in the lake’s watershed. Eric Siy, executive director of the Fund for Lake George, said at a conference in October that thirty years of research has shown that the lake is getting more salty. “It’s an issue that has gone unaddressed for literally decades, and now is the time [to address it],” Siy said. “With the science we now have in hand, we can solve the problem.” The Fund for Lake George was one of many organizations and municipalities in the Lake George area that participated in the third annual salt summit in Ticonderoga in early October. It was sponsored by ADK Action and other groups. Every winter, thirteen tons of road…

In the 1980s, local opposition to the Adirondack Park Agency, with all its land-use regulations, was running high. So the reaction was predictable when in 1989 conservationists and the United Nations anointed about ten million acres in northeastern New York and western Vermont as the Champlain-Adirondack Biosphere Reserve. No one necessarily knew what that meant, but many people didn’t like it. Opponents seemed to think it was a precursor to blue-helmeted UN troops invading and seizing the land by force. Resistance was so strong that few promoters of the biosphere had the stomach for any further agitation of the private-property-rights movement. Though the committees tasked with implementation of the biosphere withered away, the designation remained in effect, and today, thirty years later, an effort is afoot to rekindle enthusiasm for…

Giant Mountain stands watch at the southern entrance to my hometown, which extends north along the East Branch of the Ausable River to where Sentinel Mountain’s lonely ridge splits the sky. I grew up in Keene, cradled by the Adirondack High Peaks, but my parents did not. So I’d ask them, Why did you decide to live here? Space, said Mom, a childhood veteran of suburbia. I get to ski every day, came Dad’s reply, and take a leak off the porch whenever I please. I’d giggle and go back to my spelling words. But as I got older, the charm faded. I wanted out. Beyond the brick walls of the building where I went to school from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Beyond the steep mountains that hemmed our remote…

There is an American myth, often repeated around Thanksgiving, that Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be our national emblem rather than the bald eagle. This is false, but in a letter in 1784 to his daughter, he wrote: “He [the bald eagle] is a bird of bad moral character. … The turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. … He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.” Turkeys are indeed a native species, originally restricted to the eastern and southwestern United States, Mexico, and extreme southern Ontario. They were…

The parent company of Saratoga and North Creek Railway, which operates a tourist train, has begun storing empty tanker cars on tracks running through the forever-wild Forest Preserve, angering environmental activists. Iowa Pacific Holdings had announced in September that it planned to store a hundred or so tank cars on its tracks between North Creek and Tahawus. Green groups and officials in Essex and Warren counties came out against the idea, but tank cars started arriving in mid-October. WATCH: Video of trainsarriving for storage Peter Bauer, executive director of Protect the Adirondacks, called on the state Department of Environmental Conservation and Adirondack Park Agency to force the company to remove the railcars. “Is Governor Andrew Cuomo really going to allow the Adirondack Park and the Forest Preserve to be trashed?”…

Mud is alluring, far too tempting for my boys to resist. I took my sons on a hike to Blue Ledges in late August. Thanks to regular rains and a downpour the day before, the bony trail was muddy most of the way and downright swampy in places. Instead of picking the driest route, like I did, my boys slopped through the wettest sections with glee. I was not the fun mom. I imagined sore, wet feet and lots of complaining, so I nagged them about letting the water come over the tops of their boots. They ignored me. I picked Blue Ledges to do with my five- and seven-year-old sons, Rushton and Devlin, because it isn’t a tough or long hike and there’s a dramatic payoff at the end:…

Willie Janeway has been spending his weekends counting cars. On the Saturday before Labor Day, he tallied 674 cars parked along Adirondak Loj Road, strung out for miles north of the Loj’s overflowing parking lot. That same day, more than eight hundred hikers summited Cascade Mountain. Giant Mountain also was busy, with cars parked on both sides of Route 73. Janeway, the executive director of the Adirondack Council, estimates that there were more than five thousand hikers, with two thousand cars, using the popular trailheads in the High Peaks region—that is, those in Keene, North Elba, Coreys, and Newcomb. The high numbers suggest that tourism campaigns are working, but the influx of hikers has raised questions about damage to trails and natural resources and about public safety along roads lined…

For all its remote trails, wild rivers, and deep forests, the impression of the Adirondacks most people take home with them is formed by what they see through their car windows as they drive along the 1,106 miles of state highway located within the Blue Line. These highways also affect the Adirondack Park’s wildlife and ecosystems. In a major new initiative, the New York State Department of Transportation and Department of Environmental Conservation have authored a 373-page draft Generic Transportation Corridor Unit Management Plan (UMP) that, if adopted by the Adirondack Park Agency, will provide guidelines for improving highways in ways that will make life better not just for motorists but for hikers, bicyclists, boaters, animals, and fish. The generic UMP offers general guidelines for highway management in the Adirondack.…

Scientists are trying to find out what killed many of the red pines on the eastern edge of the Stephenson Range near Wilmington. Dozens of trees, perhaps hundreds, have died in recent years. They are located above two thousand feet, within a few miles of the hiking trail leading to Cooper Kiln Pond. Most of the trees are still standing. The Adirondack Explorer visited the site in late September with Zack Simek, terrestrial plant coordinator with the Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program. He said the trees may have been killed by an invasive pest, but he saw no evidence of that during the visit. “There’s probably more than one thing at play that’s causing the die-off,” Simek said. “It may have started as poor site conditions from something like drought…

The Fund for Lake George has developed a low-impact development (LID) certification that, if widely adopted, could significantly reduce one of the greatest threats to water quality—storm-water runoff—by stopping it at its source. And in a region dependent on its three thousand lakes and ponds for their recreational value—and sometimes drinking water—that seems like a program we all should get behind. Using a hundred-point scoring system across five categories—protect, build, restore, maintain, and innovation—the certification encourages development that maintains the natural landscape to mitigate runoff. It is designed for public and private development projects—new or redevelopment—and has already been endorsed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Town of Bolton, the Village of Lake George, and the Lake George Park Commission. This design approach uses what exists naturally to reduce…

When the first humans arrived in the Adirondack Mountains some twelve or thirteen thousand years ago, they all but surely found the post-glacial landscape populated by great fleshy beasts. Among them would have been two species of elephant (the woolly mammoth, Mammathus primigenius, and the American mastodon, Mammut americanum), plus the giant beaver, Castoroides ohioensis. Known from skeletal remains unearthed elsewhere, giant beavers weighed two hundred pounds or more and approximated the length and girth of small to medium-size black bears. A cousin of the modern beaver but a distinctly different species, the giant beaver has likely been extinct for ten thousand years. Or has it? While my friend Josh Clement and I were producing a mockumentary about extant Adirondack giant beavers for our video series Curiously Adirondack, I was…

Two things can be said for Adirondack architecture. It’s eclectic, to put it mildly. And there is no distinctly Adirondack style. Oh, we talk about rustic, but that’s as much a décor and an invention of modern real-estate agents, curators, and retailers. Those are some of the conclusions that can be drawn from two new books that not only discuss architecture in the Adirondacks in considerable detail, but also help you find it Neither Janet Null’s The Adirondack Architecture Guide: South-Central Region nor Richard Longstreth’s A Guide to Architecture in the Adirondacks is what you might expect of a typical architecture book: big, hefty “coffee table” things, meant to be laid out indoors so the viewer can admire stunning photos of Great Camps, log chapels nestled on conifer-covered islands, and…

A Franklin County judge has shot down the state’s plan to create a rail trail between Lake Placid and Tupper Lake, but supporters say the project is not dead. Acting State Supreme Court Justice Robert G. Main Jr. ruled in late September that state agencies violated their own regulations in approving the rail trail last year. The state’s plan calls for removing thirty-four miles of tracks and creating a trail for bicycling, walking, and snowmobiling. The plan was developed by the state Department of Environmental Conservation and Department of Transportation and approved by the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) MORE: Read an update, along with the judge's decision The Adirondack Railway Preservation Society, which had operated a tourist train on part of the line, sued all three agencies. The railroad corridor…

For the third time in five months, APA Commissioner Art Lussi has received special permission from his fellow board members to modify his camp on a Lake Placid island, raising concerns of favoritism but also spotlighting the complexity in the agency’s variance process. The three variances granted to Lussi—at the board’s meetings in June, July, and October—will allow him to add three decks to a historic camp on Buck Island. Otherwise, the decks would be deemed too big under APA regulations for additions to waterfront properties. Such variances are not uncommon, and they are generally not controversial. And even some conservationists believe they require an inordinate amount of red tape. In a recent memo to the agency, the Adirondack Council urged that the variance process be simplified in the name…

Several years ago, I asked Bill McKibben, the author and climate-change activist, to ski the entire Jackrabbit Trail and write a story for the Explorer. I expected him to start in Saranac Lake and end in Keene. You’d figure twenty-four miles would be a long day even for Bill, who once wrote a book about his effort to become a competitive cross-country skier. Not so. Bill started at the Paul Smith’s College Visitor Interpretive Center, skied nine miles to Lake Clear Junction—through woods, down a logging road, and under a power line—and then followed railroad tracks to Saranac Lake. In all, he added about sixteen miles to the trip. The stretch from Paul Smiths to Lake Clear is indeed part of the Jackrabbit, but if you don’t ski on the…

In the late 1860s, Adirondack guide Bill Nye was leading a family on a hike through Avalanche Pass. When he came to Avalanche Lake, he waded into the water, carrying one of the clients, Matilda Fielding, on his back. As Seneca Ray Stoddard tells it in his 1874 book The Adirondacks Illustrated, Fielding’s husband yelled for her to keep her dress dry: “’Hitch up, Matilda! Hitch up, Matilda! Why don’t you hitch up?’” And so the two bridges that span small sections of Avalanche Lake are called the “Hitch-Up Matildas.” This summer, for the first time since the mid-1970s, the state replaced the planking and railings of the two bridges, which are anchored to a cliff. They are roughly eighty-five and sixty-five feet in length. The work was done in…

I’ve never hiked in the Adirondacks.” This is something no North Country native would want to admit, but it was true of me until this past August, when I was assigned to do a story on the Ladies’ Mile at the Ausable Club. Because of my lack of experience, I wanted to start off with something easy—and I figured a trail called Ladies’ Mile couldn’t be too difficult “The name comes from the Ladies’ Mile of New York City,” explained Tony Goodwin, executive director of the Adirondack Trail Improvement Society, which maintains trails in the vicinity of the Ausable Club. Goodwin said the Ladies’ Mile was a shopping district on Fifth Avenue that used to be lined with women’s clothing boutiques. The name appeared on a 1900 map of New…

Don’t connect turkeys and ticks I have to question the logic of the letter [in September/October issue] equating the expansion of ticks with the increase of wild turkeys and their snake predation in New York State. An article in the same edition of your magazine relates the spread of ticks to global warming and the increase of deer numbers in the state. This is a much more logical reason for tick numbers to increase and spread across the state. Warmer winters not only result in less winter kill for deer, but also for mice and ticks as well. Another argument against the conclusion that turkey predation on snakes has caused the increase in tick population is that turkey populations have experienced long-term declines. As a result, the Department of Environmental…

Storytelling—stories about Native American history as told by the people who lived it and not the abridged school textbook version—is part of Dave Kanietakeron Fadden’s makeup, his DNA. He is Mohawk. Though he’d never in his life addressed a group, Fadden went ahead and listed “storyteller” on his resume when applying for a position as an educator for the Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, NY, in 1993. He got the job, and his first talk was to a busload of sixty third-graders. “I told a horrible story,” he said. “My voice was quivering, but I remembered it, the story was there. Once I get rolling and the stories come out, it’s rewarding.” Passing on the true story of Native Americans is a family business, started by Fadden’s grandfather, Ray,…

Blacks in the Adirondacks: A History By Sally Svenson Syracuse University Press, 2017Hardcover, 376 pages, $65Softcover, $34.95 The history of the Adirondacks, as it’s usually presented, is blindingly white. Nearly all of our stories—logging, tourism, the Saranac Lake TB nexus, you name it—have familiar iterations, and they seem to involve only white people. Reading, or hearing, these often-repeated narratives, you might wonder if an African-American ever crossed the Blue Line. Sally Svenson asked herself that very question and set off on a quest through a mountain of primary materials—census and church records, every New York newspaper she could find, a few rare diaries, and a host of other obscure but essential sources—and has produced an invaluable corrective to facile and unexamined assumptions Svenson’s goal is to shed light on this…