Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2018 i Adirondack Explorer

Despite public opposition, the state Department of Environmental Conservation in December removed a cabin near the summit of Thomas Mountain overlooking Lake George. The cabin was built before DEC bought the property from the Lake George Land Conservancy in 2013. From the front porch, hikers enjoyed an impressive view of the south basin of Lake George and nearby peaks. Inside were a sofa, chair, and various items left by visitors, such as canned goods, a kerosene lantern, and toilet paper. After the Adirondack Explorer reported online in late November that DEC planned to take down the cabin, the article was shared widely on Facebook, and many people condemned the decision. One reader started a petition drive to save the cabin. DEC spokesman David Winchell said the cabin had to come…

In 1869, William H.H. Murray published Adventures in the Wilderness, in which he described the Adirondacks as a healing place where people could escape the chaos of the city. Thousands of tourists heeded his advice and flocked to the Adirondacks to immerse themselves in nature. In 1884, Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau opened a tuberculosis clinic in Saranac Lake and encouraged his patients to breathe in the mountain air. Saranac Lake became renowned as the place to take the TB cure, attracting writers, actors, athletes, and other celebrities. Many people still visit the Adirondack Park for fresh air and healthy exercise. With nearly three million acres of public land, abounding with natural beauty, wild mountains, and quiet forests and waterways, the region remains a refuge for those seeking a respite from…

In the Adirondacks, cross-country skiing is not a question of if; it’s a question of where. With more than two thousand miles of hiking trails, though, knowing where to slap on your boards can seem overwhelming—especially if you prefer your trails groomed or perhaps want a place to warm up and get something to eat in between hitting the woods and fields. We’re here to help. We’ve compiled a list of cross-country-ski centers in the Adirondack Park. Some simply offer groomed trails; others have food and lodging options, as well as equipment rental. Some require a fee; some do not. Happy skiing! 1. Lapland Lake 139 Lapland Lake Rd. Northville 518-863-4974 www.laplandlake.com Daily fees: adults, $23; silver striders (65+), youth (12-17), $20; juniors (6-11), $10; children under 6, free. Half-day…

Three years ago, the Department of Environmental Conservation dedicated a hiking trail in the memory of Andrew Goodman, a civil-rights activist from New York City who, along with two others, was slain in Mississippi while on a mission to register black voters. The trail winds up what is now named Goodman Mountain, a spot the young activist learned to appreciate when his family vacationed at Tupper Lake. It’s a special connection for Molpus Woodlands Group Chairman Dick Molpus, who was serving as Mississippi secretary of state in 1989 when, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murders, he took the pulpit at Mount Zion Church to apologize to the families of Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner—the young men who inspired the movie Mississippi Burning. Molpus was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi,…

I’d read about skiing the toll road. Listened to others tell their stories. But I never made the effort to ski to the top and back down. My brother and I would talk about it and concoct grand plans. I imagined a long, glorious run floating atop soft powder. Our discussion always ended the same way: “We really should ski the toll road someday.” Someday arrived in early December under bright blue skies and with cool temperatures. Skiing the Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway is an Adirondack tradition, especially early in the season. Happily, it’s a tradition I can now easily participate in. My wife, Tracy, and I recently became full-time North Country residents. (Tracy is the publisher of the Explorer.) I left Saranac Lake at 8 a.m. Temperatures were in…

The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) announced in September that it would construct 1.25 miles of new road on private lands between Carry Falls Reservoir and the West Branch of the St. Regis River. The new road would connect two existing, much longer forest roads. To understand what’s wrong with this idea, here is some background. In 1988, large commercial forest owners began to sell their enormous holdings in the Adirondack Park. DEC entered a new era of acquiring conservation easements and public recreational rights. The first large easement acquisition occurred in the part of Park in question. There was a disagreement over who would maintain the miles of industrial haul roads—nearly twenty miles. As a result, the public has been blocked from this easement ever since. Only leaseholders…

We no sooner started leading a Roads Scholar bird walk at Great Camp Sagamore than Pat and I heard a couple of red crossbills calling at the very moment we spotted them landing on the top of a fifty-foot black spruce in front of us. I hurriedly set up my spotting scope and, mirabile dictu, immediately got on the crossbills. Pat shot over for a quick look, and a Roads Scholar participant got a look a few seconds later, moments before the crossbills flew off, calling as they headed directly into the sun. “You mean they actually have crossed bills, like this?” the Roads Scholar asked, putting her thumb and index finger together like a bird’s bill and then crossing them. “Yes,” I responded, “although about half of them cross…

Misunderstanding and prejudice have plagued the coyote since European colonization of North America. Predators like coyotes do not need to be “managed” as their numbers are held in check by natural factors such as food supply. Nonetheless, coyotes are the most persecuted native carnivore in the country, with more than four hundred thousand killed every year by hunters, trappers, ranchers, government agents, and others in the name of “varmint control.” In New York, as in most states, the coyote is the only “game” species you can hunt day and night much of the year with no bag limit. Yet the coyote has thrived despite all attempts to eradicate it. The coyote was not found east of the Great Plains until the 1900s. By then, unregulated hunting and trapping had all…

I first met Phil Terrie many years ago, when he invited me to his cabin on Long Lake, partway down from Long Lake village toward the outlet. At the time, he was acting as a consultant for a Mountain Lake PBS documentary on Adirondack history, so producers, cameramen, and so on were hovering around. In the midst of all that, word came that a hiker was missing. Rangers and volunteers appeared, and he began helping them get the lay of the land to the southeast in the vicinity of Kempshall Mountain and to northeast up the Cold River valley into the Sewards. “This is pretty impressive,” I thought. “Here’s a guy who can simultaneously advise a film crew on arcane aspects of Adirondack history and help orient searchers heading into…

The Arctic Circle curves through Sweden just north of Östersund, a lakeside city of fifty thousand where daylight runs short in winter. White-hot lights illuminate Östersund’s ski stadium on the evening of November 30. Tim Burke glides through warm-ups as spectators adorned with cowbells, flags, and face paint fill the grandstand’s six thousand seats. They’re here for the first twenty-kilometer individual competition of the biathlon World Cup, a sport that combines skinny Nordic skis and target shooting. Tonight’s dramatic spectacle broadcasts to five million TV viewers across Europe. Burke races 107 other skiers, each with an eight-pound rifle on his back, for five laps on a four-kilometer course. Between circuits, athletes stop at the stadium’s shooting range to fire five rounds in less than thirty seconds. They shoot prone on…

Over the summer and fall, the forest rangers traveled to California, Oregon, and Montana to fight forest fires. Their grueling work included cutting down ruined trees, humping heavy packs through the smoky air, braving the hot sun, and witnessing some of the most destructive forest fires ever seen in this country. On November 13, four female forest rangers from New York State traded their fire-resistant clothing and hard hats for full-dress uniforms and a chance to mingle with the likes of Martha Stewart, Keith Urban, and Nicole Kidman at the Glamour magazine Women of the Year awards in Brooklyn. The four rangers were asked to stand up and be recognized for their service at the start of the show. Several women from the New York City Fire Department and other…

Back in 1999, the High Peaks Wilderness unit management plan (UMP) described rock climbing as “the fastest growing activity in this wilderness and adjoining areas.” The truth of this has been borne out in the proliferation of climbing guidebooks over the past two decades. In the 1990s, Don Mellor’s Climbing in the Adirondacks described about seven hundred routes. The latest guidebook, the two-volume Adirondack Rock, describes three thousand. In addition, there are now separate guidebooks for ice climbing and bouldering. Jim Lawyer, a co-author of Adirondack Rock, held up all three of the new guidebooks at a public meeting in December on the proposed UMP for the Sentinel Range Wilderness. His point: rock climbers deserve a seat at the table when the state makes decisions that affect their sport. The…

It’s January, time for a fresh, blank sheet on which to start our new year. Plenty of us are making renewed attempts at weight loss or looking to get better organized or at least vowing to break our addiction to twenty-four-hour cable news. Here at the Explorer, we’re renewing our hopes for smart decision-making in the Adirondacks and more chances to work together to ensure that the Park that we all love so much is protected for generations to come. Here are ten hopes we have for 2018. 1. A Wilderness classification for the Boreas Ponds that doesn’t allow people to drive all the way to the ponds, but allows parking within two and a half miles of them. OK, even to get a classification decision for the lands, purchased…

News of a helicopter sightseeing tour operating out of Lake Placid spawned much discussion this past summer. Unlike a traditional scenic airplane flight high above the landscape, this business promised ridge-running flights at low altitudes above protected Wilderness Areas, as well as aerial safaris in which backcountry wildlife would be buzzed in their natural habitats—all for the thrill of a few paying customers. This was scary enough for those of us who routinely visit the Forest Preserve for our weekly dose of wildness. But then in the September/October 2017 issue of the Adirondack Explorer, John Sheehan of the Adirondack Council suggested that in the Wild Forest areas, “it may be appropriate to fly in some places at lower heights”—with the stipulation that “some sensitive areas” should be avoided “as much…

In the woods recently, I was asked if red squirrels hibernate. It’s an excellent question. These compact rodents, living above ground in some of the world’s coldest forests, could be forgiven for snoozing away the winters. Woodchucks and jumping mice are cousins, and they hole up and check out for months. Yet the red squirrel does just the opposite. Instead of loafing, it cranks into high gear. Why not? To a large degree, the red squirrel runs on conifer seeds. So while hard-core hibernators such as amphibians, reptiles, woodchucks, and jumping mice are settling in for the big sleep, red squirrels are powering up to seize the annual bounty of cones. Spruces, firs, pines, tamaracks, and white cedars that have spent months or years conceiving and ripening the next generation…

The Adirondack Park could, over time, become home to the largest hut-to-hut hiking network in the United States under a proposal released in December by the founders of the Adirondack Community-based Trails and Lodging System project. Although it would take decades to fully implement, the draft includes proposals for more than eight hundred miles of new trails in the Park and would require about 85 more lodging facilities. Long popular overseas, hut-to-hut hiking—where a day on the trail ends at a bunkhouse or lodge, frequently with meals and showers at the ready—is not unknown in the United States, but such networks are somewhat rare. Under the ACTLS plan, hikes could last between two and sixteen days. The hikes would include loops that begin and end in the same community, treks…

On our first morning as visiting writers at Twitchell Lake we motored down to Anne LaBastille’s land on a dock rigged up with an outboard motor. Grinning, we sat in plastic Adirondack chairs as our unusual boat moved slowly across the water into the beauty of an October day. After docking we stepped onto the wooded land where LaBastille built her first cabin, West Wind, in 1964. She chronicled her decision to live beyond roads, electricity, and neighbors in Woodswoman, published in 1976. I first read the book as a teenager and remember looking carefully at the photos of the blonde LaBastille splitting wood and backpacking with her German shepherd. Now it’s forty years later and I’m a woman who splits wood, hikes alone and puts words on paper. “I…

The Open Space Institute has acquired a 1,285-acre property that will facilitate access to Huckleberry Mountain, a crag in the southeastern Adirondacks with great views and dozens of rock-climbing routes. Katharine Petronis, OSI’s northern program manager, said the non-profit organization will sell the property to the state for inclusion in the public Forest Preserve. That could happen within three years, she said. For now, the tract remains closed to the public. Petronis said she didn’t know if OSI will open it before the transfer to the state. The acquisition is good news for rock climbers. The guidebook Adirondack Rock lists fifty-five climbing routes on Huckleberry’s cliffs, but the cliffs became hard to reach after a landowner closed the access trail, which crosses his property. As a result, climbers must begin…

The first batch arrived on October 17: twenty-eight empty tanker cars, left on a rail siding near the Boreas River. More tank cars arrived thirteen days later and still more in November and December. By year’s end, they numbered about seventy-five. Ed Ellis, president of Iowa Pacific Holdings, has said that he hopes to store up to two thousand out-of-service tank cars on the rail line, which runs thirty miles from North Creek to Tahawus in the central Adirondacks. It’s estimated that the cars would take up twenty miles of track. Environmentalists contend that Ellis is creating a linear junkyard in the middle of the Adirondack Park, and Governor Andrew Cuomo seems to agree. In mid-December, Cuomo announced that the state will take legal action to force Iowa Pacific to…

New Yorkers narrowly passed in November a constitutional amendment to establish a “land bank” for the Adirondacks and Catskills that will enable counties and municipalities to undertake highway and utility projects that impinge on the forever-wild Forest Preserve. More than 10 percent of the 3.5 million people who took part in the November elections did not cast a ballot either way. Of those that did, 52 percent favored the land bank. The proposal passed by greater margins in the twelve counties that lie wholly or partly in the Adirondack Park. The only two counties entirely within the Park are Essex and Hamilton. In Essex, it received 62 percent of the votes cast; in Hamilton, 75 percent. In contrast, a proposal to call a convention to rewrite the state’s constitution was…

New York State has never seen anything like the wildfires that decimated much of northern California this past October. Forest fires in eight counties burned 250,000 acres and nearly nine thousand buildings, destroying whole neighborhoods and killing at least forty-three people. It took nearly a month to quench the blazes. Some of New York’s finest were there to help. On October 15, twenty New Yorkers—most of them forest rangers from the Department of Environmental Conservation—headed to California as directed by Governor Andrew Cuomo. They spent two weeks fighting what became known as the Nuns and Tubbs fires and worked with the devastated communities afterward. Not only did they lend a hand during a national emergency, but they also gained experience that can be applied in their home state. Of these…

“We love the Adirondacks, we enjoy the people, and we love working here.”—Dick Molpus You may not have heard of the Molpus Woodlands Group. It’s a timber company based in Mississippi, and most of its holdings are in the South and the West. But Molpus happens to be the biggest landowner in the Adirondack Park—if just barely. The company, which started buying lands in New York State in 2007, says it owns 240,000 acres, primarily in the northwest sector of the Park. Lyme Timber, based in New Hampshire, owns 239,000 acres here. “We love the Adirondacks, we enjoy the people, and we enjoy working there,” said outgoing President Dick Molpus, who believes the forests here can provide a steady source of investment income for his clients. With the American population…

John Davis was camping in the Five Ponds Wilderness in early October when he heard a large animal crashing through the woods. “My headlamp was not strong enough to see the animal, but I’m pretty sure it was a moose,” Davis recalled, adding that he saw fresh moose tracks in the mud the next day. At the time, Davis was on a two-week trip on the U.S. side of the proposed Algonquin-to-Adirondacks Trail that would start in Newcomb and end in Algonquin Park. If it was indeed a moose Davis heard, that would be apropos: the idea for the A2A Trail was inspired by Alice the Moose, a seven-hundred-pound cow that journeyed from the Adirondacks to Algonquin Park in the late 1990s. Davis started his trek at the Adirondack Interpretive…

The power of the woods Thank you for publishing “Her First Walk in the Park” in the November/December issue. I work in an inner-city high school and felt that reading Autumn’s experience would be valuable for our students. I gave a copy to one of the teachers. He sent it to his daughter, age twenty-two, who has had difficulty becoming an adult. She immediately took a two-hour walk in the woods and decided to stick with her unsatisfactory current employment. Her thinking during the walk changed the thoughts about her own uncomfortable situation to thoughts of how she could help the stressed family she was with. Autumn’s writing is excellent. What she wrote has already helped youngsters searching for themselves, who respond to their peer group better than advice from…

YES Peter Bauer Iowa Pacific Holdings, headed by Ed Ellis, has failed in its efforts to revive the rail line that runs thirty miles from North Creek to the old Tahawus mine in Newcomb. He is now using the line to store out-of-service oil-tanker rail cars. He says he can fill the line with two thousand to three thousand old oil tankers. There are lots of problems with this plan. The short-term risk to the Adirondack Park is that Ellis will create a thirty-mile-long junkyard snaking along the banks of the Hudson, Boreas, and Opalescent rivers and through miles of remote Forest Preserve lands. The long-term risk is that these oil tankers will never leave. Ellis’s business could go bankrupt or the rail line could fall apart as it is…

Somewhere around the age of five, growing up in Westchester County, Wendy Hall noticed that whenever the developers came in and clear-cut an area for construction, the animals would disappear. What was once a beautiful, wooded area quickly became developed after the addition of a train station, a story she has watched repeat itself many times. “I would say man’s greatest assault to the ecosystem is his lack of patience,” Hall says. That began what has become a lifelong passion for rehabilitating animals and educating the public. “We all have a responsibility to the planet,” Hall says. “This is what I have chosen to be my responsibility to the health of the planet. I love the work I do and the people I do it with.” Today Wendy and her…

“We probably have the largest database of Adirondack water quality around.”—Jed Dukett, ALCS A scientific organization that helped document the impact of acid rain in the Adirondacks may shut down soon due to a lack of funding. The nonprofit Adirondack Lakes Survey Corporation (ALCS), created by the state in the 1980s, once provided data that helped persuade lawmakers to pass state and federal regulations limiting emissions from coal-fired power plants. READ MORE: Data collectedby Adirondack LakesSurvey Corporation In the decades since, the survey has continued to collect data on water quality for about fifty lakes. It also takes soil and stream samples and analyzes the chemistry of clouds on Whiteface Mountain. The organization employed eight scientists, who worked out of the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s offices in Ray Brook.…

The Cuomo administration says it will begin construction this winter of a gateway to the Adirondack Park based at the shuttered Frontier Town theme park in North Hudson, located just off Exit 29 of the Northway. State officials say the goal of the $13 million project is to create a base for accessing public lands comparable to the Adirondak Loj complex outside Lake Placid. Mountain biking, horseback riding, hiking, southern gateway to the High Peaks—it’s all right here,” said Karyn Richards, the Forest Preserve coordinator for the Department of Environmental Conservation, at a December meeting in North Hudson. As envisioned, the 260-acre property, which borders the Schroon River, will serve as a hub for public lands to the east and west of the Northway (I-87), eventually connecting to Boreas Ponds…