Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2018 i Adirondack Explorer

A state court handed down another decision in March in the fifteen-year battle over the status of the Old Mountain Road section of the Jackrabbit Ski Trail, declaring that the road was not legally abandoned. In its 5-0 decision, the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court overturned an administrative decision by Joseph Martens, then commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation. MORE PHOTOS Martens ruled in 2015 that the three-and-a-half-mile Old Mountain Road had been abandoned by virtue of a lack of use by motor vehicles. In doing so, Martens overturned a decision by an earlier commissioner. Martens had relied heavily on the 1987 Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan, which stated that Old Mountain Road “has been closed.” The Appellate Division judges, however, said the determination as to…

Wildlife bridges with wide expanses of natural vegetation can be found in places such as Banff Provincial Park in Canada and Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. They provide a safe way for animals to cross highways, but you won’t find any in the Adirondacks or anywhere else in the Northeast. In part, this is because these wildlife overpasses are expensive. In part, it’s because there is no guarantee that they would be effective. Out west, species such as elk follow specific migration routes. The movement patterns of animals in the East are less understood. Instead, conservationists in the region are working on ways to help animals cross beneath roads via culverts and underpasses. Wildlife advocates say animals in the Northeast generally follow streams and rivers when on the move. “Everyone…

“I think he realizes that railroad is worthless.”—Neil Woodworth, Adirondack Mountain Club Owners of a thirty-mile rail line in the central Adirondacks who sparked controversy by storing dozens of empty tank cars on the tracks say they’re losing money and want to get out. Iowa Pacific Holdings President Ed Ellis told Warren County supervisors on March 29 that he’d sell the county the tracks for $5 million or less. The county rejected the offer. He made the same offer to the state, but he said the company received no answer. READ MORE: Tankcar controversy Iowa Pacific owns the tracks running from North Creek to an old pit mine in Newcomb, while Warren County and town of Corinth own the tracks from Saratoga Springs to North Creek. An Iowa Pacific subsidiary,…

The number of hikers in the High Peaks has increased dramatically in recent years, posing a risk to fragile alpine vegetation on some of the most popular Adirondack summits. Gauging the impact of hikers trampling alpine vegetation can be difficult, but summit stewards are using photographs to document long-term changes. In some cases, photos date back to the 1960s. The findings are good and bad. Summit Steward Coordinator Kayla White said the photos show that the alpine plants made a comeback on peaks where stewards were stationed to warn hikers to walk only on rock. Other peaks, however, have seen a decline in alpine flora. “In the first ten years of the program, we saw this dramatic shift,” said Julia Goren, the education director for the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK).…

YES Steven Engelhart In March, the New York Board for Historic Preservation approved listing the Gooley Club on the State Register of Historic Places and forwarded the nomination to the National Park Service for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. This nomination, prepared by Adirondack Architectural Heritage, in cooperation with state historic-preservation staff, and Gooley Club members, was done both to recognize the historical importance of this club and to try to elevate its status so that it might be given additional consideration by the state agencies that are charged with protecting cultural resources in the Adirondack Park. Environmental Conservation Law requires that the state try to avoid acquiring new land for the Forest Preserve that contains National Register-eligible cultural resources, so that preservation and forever-wild conflicts do…

Deborah Andersen has taught generations of third-graders in Bolton Landing, including the parents of her students, most of her nieces and nephews, and her own children, Andrea and Michael. Hers is an important role in this Adirondack community. Third grade is the year you learn fractions, the first year of state testing, and, yes, the year everyone learns to play the recorder. And research shows students who are performing at grade level in third grade are most likely to remain successful throughout their schooling. “It’s one of the reasons Deb is there,” says Mike Graney, superintendent of the Bolton Central School District. “She does a great job getting kids off on a great start.” Her expectations are high, he says. “She’s been a rock on our staff long before I…

The osprey was known as the fish hawk in John James Audubon’s time. It’s an apt moniker as 99 percent of its diet consists of live fish, procured by diving into the water—an amazing spectacle. Ospreys have a worldwide distribution, breeding across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Russia and wintering in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Females leave for wintering grounds three weeks before their mates and before their young are completely independent. In spring, both sexes return when the ice is out, typically by mid-April in the Adirondacks. Juvenile ospreys do not leave their overwintering areas until at least their second spring and may not breed until their sixth or seventh year. Migrating ospreys make overwater flights of more than six…

It’s not entirely out of the question that Adirondack history will one day associate John Davis with wildlife in the same manner that it associates Bob Marshall with mountains. Through Herculean physical exploits, the formation of advocacy groups, and incessant PR, Marshall showed that the oft-exploited wilderness was deserving of our protection and respect, both for its sake and ours. Davis, a resident of Essex in the Champlain Valley, blazes much the same trail as it pertains to animals, reptiles, birds, fish, amphibians and (most) insects. His cause célèbre is an American network of forested corridors that would restore ancestral stomping grounds to a host of creatures, most notably to top-of-the-food-chain predators whose absence has affected both the health of the wilderness and the health of mankind. One such corridor,…

Just a mile southeast of the “Welcome to Old Forge” sign on Route 28, a dense grove of sixty-foot pines towers over the two-lane road. These trees stand across from the Country Club Motel, where snowmobile trailers fill the front lot in early March. That’s business as usual: the local economy in this secluded Adirondack hamlet relies on tourists drawn by outdoor-recreation opportunities. In winter, they come for a five-hundred-mile network of snowmobile trails. Summer means boat season on the Fulton Chain of Lakes. Old Forge is surrounded by wild lands, so it’s not surprising that guests at the Country Club often encounter wildlife: white-tailed deer leave the Ha-De-Ron-Dah Wilderness, cross the Thendara Golf Club’s manicured fairways, and linger on the motel lawn. Then they stride across the road into…

Talk with experts about what a road’s “percent grade” really means, and you might wind up discussing terms like “rise over run,” square roots, and even the Pythagorean theorem. I didn’t become a writer because of my exemplary math skills. But I can tell you what an 8.3 percent grade feels like on a bicycle: lungs gasping, mouth open to suck in oxygen, eyes stinging from forehead sweat. It means urging your legs to keep pedaling, against all probability, and willing yourself to ignore the pain from below. It means moving forward, knowing there’s another five miles of the same before you reach the top. People do this for fun, apparently. It took me riding a bicycle most of the way up Whiteface Mountain before I could appreciate why. I…

When Big Tupper resort developer Michael D. Foxman turned eighty last April, he checked into what the future holds for a man of his age, size, and health. “I have a life expectancy of ten years,” he said recently. During his remaining time, Foxman predicts, the woods south of Tupper Lake will become filled with luxury homes in “the first and only resort and vacation-home community in the Adirondack Park.” Many locals in the village of 3,540 became wary over the past decade. But several interviewed now say Foxman’s Adirondack Club and Resort is clearly on its way. Still, a group of diehard skeptics doubt he can pull off the projected $500 million development. READ MORE: Past stories on ACR Both sides of the divide say they hear rumors and…

The Adirondack Park Agency is seeking to amend its regulations to allow the state to build a thirty-four-mile rail trail between Lake Placid and Tupper Lake. At its March meeting, the APA board gave preliminary approval to a change in the definition of a Travel Corridor in the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan. It will revisit the proposal after reviewing public comments. The agency is recommending the change in response to a judge’s ruling that the rail trail would violate the master plan, which guides management of the Forest Preserve. READ MORE: Previousrail-trail stories: A trail for biking, hiking, and snowmobiling is proposed for part of a 119-mile rail corridor owned by the state and stretching from Remsen to Lake Placid. In 2015, the state Department of Environmental Conservation…

In the near future, if hikers on the Northville-Placid Trail choose, they can stop in the Town of Long Lake via a new spur trail that comes out at the top of Mount Sabattis, offering a rare mountaintop view on the NPT journey that looks out over the town and lake. They can pick up mailed-ahead supplies from the post office directly below, grab a bite to eat in town, and even get a room for the night with a hot shower. The partially completed trail (the town has built its part, and the state will complete the last mile linking with the NPT this summer) marks one of the first efforts of the Adirondack Hamlets to Huts organization (AHH) as it begins to implement an Adirondack Park-wide hut-to-hut model,…

North Country Public Radio is like a river, working its way through the geography of the Adirondack North Country. We adjust to a changing and sometimes erratic environment, but we’re always there with a reliable flow of news, information, stories, and music of our communities, our country, and the world. As we celebrate our fiftieth anniversary, I’d like to share some of the highlights of our history and my observations as station manager for the past thirty-five years. WSLU-FM signed on the air as a little college-based station at St. Lawrence University in Canton, a half-hour’s drive outside the Blue Line. We broadcast classical music and newscasts for a few hours each day. In 1971, WSLU became a charter-year member of NPR and expanded to a nineteen-hour broadcast day; in…

A call came in: “Hi you don’t know me and it’s not important who I am but I saw a couple of Sandhill cranes in Tupper Lake today and my neighbor said I should definitely call you and tell you about them because you’re a serious bird guy and I’m not but I used to live by the Platte River in Nebraska and Sandhills were like mosquitoes in the Everglades in Summer so I can recognize Sandhills big time.” A half-hour or so afterward, I checked my email and read an extremely excited report of a Sandhill crane in Tupper Lake. Sandhill cranes had never bred in the Adirondacks until about five years ago, when by the end of the summer people started reporting two adults with two young, and…

When is it OK to leave a trace behind? I found one answer along the shores of Lake Arnold on a hike to Cliff and Redfield with a potentially life-threatening situation that rattled both my hiking partner (Doug Miller of Saranac Lake) and me. We departed from Adirondak Loj for the trek to Lake Arnold, one of the highest bodies of water in the Adirondacks (at almost 3,800 feet) and our chosen basecamp for a two-night expedition to conquer the two trail-less peaks. The hike to Marcy Dam was easy enough. We noted the campsites were full. From Marcy Dam, the trail steepens in degrees and turns into a bouldery wash that’s something of a grind. When we arrived at Lake Arnold, there appeared to be two other parties: an…

In March, the state announced that it had nominated to the National Register of Historic Places the dozen or so Gooley Club buildings on the Essex Chain Lakes—buildings that the state says must be removed next year. Adirondack Architectural Heritage (AARCH) wants the state to preserve the buildings, which are on the Forest Preserve, but environmental groups contend that they should be razed or relocated. The management plan for the Essex Chain calls for the buildings to be gone by the end of September 2019. The plan rejected as too expensive an option to use the buildings as a forest-ranger outpost. Lori Severino, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, said the management plan remains in effect despite the nomination to the federal register. “DEC will continue to…

Last year marked the first time in ten years that the number of lakes in the Adirondack Park where aquatic invasive species were found did not increase. “This is very exciting. It means our prevention efforts are working,” said Erin Vennie-Vollrath of the Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program, one of eight Partnerships for Regional Invasive Species Management in the state. The Adirondack Watershed Institute (AWI) reports that lake stewards inspected 97,412 boats at boat launches throughout the Park last year and discovered 3,849 specimens of invasive species, including Eurasian milfoil, curly-leaf pondweed, zebra mussels, and spiny waterfleas. Nearly 2,800 boats were decontaminated (typically, hosed with hot water). Yet Eric Holmlund, director of the institute’s watershed steward program, worries about the exotic plants and animals that perhaps didn’t get caught. Holmlund…

Constantinos “Danny” Filippidis left a trail of questions after skiing off Whiteface Mountain and ending up in Sacramento, California, in February. Many remain unanswered, even as the forty-nine-year-old captain in the Toronto Fire Department prepares to return to work. “It’s a head-scratcher,” said New York State Police Major John H. Tibbitts Jr. He said detectives have interviewed Filippidis several times, and he has been cooperative, granting access to his cell phone, bank accounts, and doctors’ reports. Nothing unusual has surfaced in the records, Tibbitts said, and Filippidis’s story about not remembering what happened to him from February 7 to February 13 has been consistent. The narrative goes this way: he and friends and colleagues from Canada, on an annual ski trip to Whiteface, were ending a multi-day stay. Some had…

In this year’s state budget, New York lawmakers axed two Cuomo administration property-tax proposals affecting the Adirondack Park, one to cap certain municipal tax receipts and another to offer more landowners a tax break for protecting forests. At the same time, the $168 billion budget approved by the legislature on March 31 continues grants and bonding under the $2.5 billion Clean Water Infrastructure Act to finance repairs and upgrades of drinking-water and sewer systems, including watershed protections. This is the second year of the six-year initiative aimed at addressing sewage and pollution problems caused by aging infrastructure, said Jessica Ottney Mahar, the Nature Conservancy’s New York policy director. “They’re cropping up almost everywhere in the state from New York City to the Adirondacks,” she said. The budget for the fiscal…

Even before New York State bought the Boreas Ponds Tract in 2016, people started arguing about how close to the ponds the public should be allowed to drive. That question was still on people’s minds at a public meeting in Newcomb this April. The state Department of Environmental Conservation hosted the meeting in the local school to gather ideas on how to manage the Boreas Ponds Tract and the rest of the High Peaks Wilderness. DEC hasn’t updated its management plan for the High Peaks since 1999. Since then, the Wilderness Area has grown by more than eighty-four thousand acres. It now encompasses 272,000 acres, making it the fourth-largest designated Wilderness Area east of the Mississippi River. Earlier this year, the Adirondack Park Agency added 11,400 acres of the Boreas…

No place in the state or nation is more vulnerable to aquatic invasive species (AIS) than the pristine waters of the Adirondacks. New York already has the highest number of non-native forest pests in the country and is adjacent to the continent’s main gateway for the introduction and spread of aquatic invasives—the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway. As the map shows, the Adirondack Park is literally surrounded by waterways that harbor dozens of destructive species threatening the Park. Our region has been largely spared to date thanks to elevation and water chemistry. Waters flow off the Adirondack dome and out of the region. From this high ground, the Adirondack Park exists as an island in a sea of invasive species. But that sea is rising, fast. More and more…

Just the other day I was passing a boulder the size of a railroad car, one not smooth and bare as some are but scabby with lichen, when a high-pitched sound made me jump. It sounded as if the rock was leaking air. “Psssssst!” I looked around. No one there. The voice persisted. “Hey, don’t be dense, mister. This Adirondack glacial erratic I’m growing on has more than enough density to go around. Listen, it’s me, the lichen, talking.” “Don’t believe him,” said a second voice, this one an octave higher and cross. “He’s not the lichen. He’s the fungus that provides most of the body of the lichen, so he thinks he’s the whole shebang. We’ve put up with this arrogance for an eternity almost. Oh, and by the…

For this Views of the Park, we asked readers to share the place they call home in the Adirondacks—seasonally or year-round. We got only a handful of photos, with Lake Placid, Indian Lake, Thurman and North Creek represented. We asked our Facebook friends and Instagram followers to post their best shots using the hashtag #adkexplorerpix. The Readers Choice was determined by the number of “likes” on Facebook. Congratulations to Karen Kreppenneck. Our next Views of the Park theme is “Spring Flora” Post your photos of wildflowers, grasses, shrubs and other signs of spring to Instagram and Facebook with the #adkexplorerpix hashtag. AdirondackExplorer @adirondackexplorer…

A choice passage in Curt Stager’s new book Still Waters: The Secret World of Lakes puts the author and a group of his Paul Smith’s College students in a remote spot near Lake Baikal, deep in the wilds of Siberia. With his charges nearby but otherwise occupied, Stager wanders off alone and blunders into some rough-looking men. His hackles rise. “Their outfits were filthy, their faces were unshaven, and they outnumbered the adults in our party two to one,” he writes. On his guard, Stager lets himself be persuaded to join them. The only word the men utter that makes sense is “Amerikanski!” Then one of the rough characters scribbles something on a curl of birch bark and hands it to him. It’s a chemical formula, the one for ethyl…