Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2018 i Adirondack Explorer

A well-known Tupper Lake guide died in early May after a tree fell on her tent during a camping trip in the Pharaoh Lakes Wilderness. Vanessa “Lynn” Malerba was inside the tent when she was struck by the tree on the night of May 4. She died from her injuries three days later at the University of Burlington Medical Center in Vermont. She was sixty years old. Her friend and business partner, Mary Hall, said Malerba was on a backpacking trip with two clients and a guide-in-training. Hall and Malerba ran Adirondack Connections. “She was a good person and an extremely reliable guide,” Hall said. “She was very much sought after.” The party was camping on Rock Pond when a severe storm rolled through the area. It knocked down trees…

The Department of Environmental Conservation has always known the High Peaks could stand only so much use. So the trailhead parking lots along Route 73 were left intentionally small. When they filled up, the thinking went, hikers would simply go somewhere else. Instead, hikers have tended to stick to their original itinerary, and once the lots are filled, they park on the shoulders, jamming their vehicles into any opening in which they will fit. A survey conducted last fall by the Adirondack Council found that 80 percent of trailheads in the High Peaks vicinity exceeded capacity on the weekends, and all told, 2,100 cars were jostling for a thousand spaces. The Cascade Mountain trailhead had triple the number of cars that planners had intended. Adirondack Council spokesman John Sheehan predicts…

The southern gateway to the High Peaks Wilderness, including a trail up Mount Marcy, begins at the end of a narrow two-lane road through private land owned by the Open Space Institute, which has started to make it friendlier to visitors. OSI’s plans include shifting the Upper Works parking lot about three hundred yards south, next to the old MacNaughton Cottage that’s getting restored, and expanding parking beyond the existing forty-two slots. “At sixty we’ll meet our current need,” said Katie Petronis, the institute’s northern program director (who sits on the Explorer board). They hope to reach that capacity this year, she said. Even more parking may be needed in the future, according to Tate Connor, a forester with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which is negotiating a conservation…

It was a sunny Sunday in August in the southern Adirondack hamlet of Hadley, and business at the Sacandaga Outdoor Center was in full swing. A crowd of people in life vests were milling about, eating snacks, sitting on picnic tables, chatting, or texting. I was here with my girlfriend Beth to join in the fun—a rafting trip down the Sacandaga River. Only a few miles from Lake George, Saratoga Springs, and the Great Escape, the Sacandaga lures tens of thousands of clients each summer with its easy entry into the world of rafting: warm water, fun and safe waves, and a reasonable price, about $30 for several hours of fun. On this short section of whitewater, kayak, canoe, tube, and stand-up paddleboard rentals are available. But rafting is what…

At first blush, it looks like the kind of clean, high-tech businesses that most communities in and around the Adirondacks would be clamoring for. Yet towns and villages across the North Country are either imposing or considering moratoriums on cryptocurrency miners lured by low-cost electricity. The village of Lake Placid and town of North Elba and Tupper Lake all have recently imposed eighteen-month moratoriums on new cryptocurrency miners amid fears that these power-hungry miners could use up the communities’ monthly allotments of low-cost power and drive up rates for long-term residents. That’s what happened in Plattsburgh last winter, which sparked the first moratorium—the first in New York State. “They lease space, bring in the machinery, hire a couple of people to run the machinery,” said Plattsburgh Mayor Colin Read. He…

Join the Conversation: In between issues, the Adirondack Explorer is talking online at AdirondackExplorer.org Share your opinions and ideas there. Or send a letter to Adirondack Explorer Letters; c/o Tracy Ormsbee, publisher; 36 Church St.; Saranac Lake, NY 12983 A simple solution for hikers on the ‘go’ In response to articles describing the abuses trails and mountaintops in the Adirondacks and other parks are experiencing due to hikers’ needs, I would like to share how my girlfriends and I handle this issue. We carry what we call a “potty bag.” In it there are three simple things: 1. Wax-paper sandwich bags. If I am hiking longer than a day, I use a Ziploc sandwich bag that I reuse to keep the wipes moist. 2. Flushable wipes. 3. Hand sanitizer. The…

YES William C. Janeway The state should establish a Cascade Mountain trailhead at Mount Van Hoevenberg as part of a comprehensive plan to address overuse. Overuse threatens natural resources, visitor safety, and the opportunity to experience wilderness. Cascade Mountain and the Adirondacks are world-class destinations seeing record increases in use. More than thirty-four thousand hikers registered for Cascade in 2016, almost doubling the 2015 record of 17,598. The mountain’s popularity is easy to understand. It’s a family-friendly hike near Lake Placid, the easiest of the four-thousand-foot peaks, and offers great views. PREVIOUS COVERAGE The Adirondacks offer more of the same within a day’s drive of 70 million people. Park visitation grew to over 12 million in 2017. Parks and Wilderness Areas across the country are experiencing overuse. No one should…

Christine Campeau, school programs manager at the Adirondack Experience for the past twenty-one years, has a simple formula for attracting young people to Adirondack history: “If you’re enthusiastic, the kids will be interested.” Then they must be interested. An hour spent with Campeau at Tahawus in Newcomb in late May produces a lively string of stories of Adirondack history and lore mixed with a true admiration for the place. She launches into tales of the construction of the Adirondack Iron Works blast furnace and the span of mining in the area from 1826 to 1980s; of David Henderson’s accidental shooting death on Calamity Pond; of Theodore Roosevelt’s famed ride from the hunting camp as President William McKinley lay dying; of the living Adirondack residents with ties to the mines who…

Adding to the beauty of the region this time of year are the “peepers,” dozens of varieties of wildflowers living in the Adirondack forests. “Spring flora” was the theme for this issue’s Views of the Park Photo contest. These five photographers each will receive a free one-year subscription to the Adirondack Explorer. The Readers’ Choice was determined by the number of “likes” on Facebook. Congratulations to Danielle Rootes. Our next Views of the Park theme is “Adirondack Waterfalls” Post your photos of falling water big and small to Instagram and Facebook with the #adkexplorerpix hashtag. AdirondackExplorer @adirondackexplorer…

Lake sturgeon once swam in American waters much like Buffalo roamed the plains, in numbers so great it seemed unlikely a dent could ever be made in the population. Today, however, sturgeon fisheries are down from their historic numbers by as much as 99 percent, and efforts are underway nationally and in New York and Vermont to stabilize and resuscitate the population of the much-admired fish. In the North Country, sturgeon are found in the northern rivers draining into the St. Lawrence basin—including the Grass, Raquette, and Oswegatchie—and in Lake Champlain, where some theorize that sightings of the spiny fish led to rumors of a sea monster known as Champ. In mid-May, the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the federal government for protection of the sturgeon under the Endangered Species…

Lake Clear resident Mary McLean and her family stopped using her home’s water for drinking and cooking years ago because it tasted salty. They’ve also seen corrosion to their appliances and plumbing, including the faucet on the kitchen sink. “The last two inches of it snapped off one day,” said McLean, a Paul Smith’s College employee. “We’ve gone through a lot of faucets.” McLean said high levels of road salt in her water caused the corrosion. A test by Paul Smith’s College’s Adirondack Watershed Institute last year showed the water contained 201 parts per million of sodium and 466 ppm of chloride. A test in 2012 came back with similar results. Sodium and chloride are the two main components in road salt. The McLean well was one of 358 Adirondack…

The Wright Peak Ski Trail is one of the top backcountry-skiing trails in the Adirondacks, but skiers often complain that it dumps them out onto a narrow and often-rocky hiking trail that leads to Algonquin Peak. The state Department of Environmental Conservation proposes to fix the problem by rerouting the bottom of the ski trail so that it terminates at the Whales Tail Ski Trail. MORE FROMRON KONOWITZ It is one of several skiing proposals in a draft amendment to the High Peaks Wilderness unit management plan (UMP). Ron Konowitz, founder of the Adirondack Powder Ski Association, said he was ecstatic over the Wright Peak proposal. He hopes the trail will be “once again what it was back in the 1930s.” Constructed in 1938, the Wright Peak Ski Trail was…

The Hudson River begins its long journey to New York City at Henderson Lake, deep in the Adirondacks but, ironically, near an industrial landscape. Despite its proximity to roads and an old mine in Tahawus, this stretch of water is a delightful paddle. The state’s purchase of the 6,200-acre Mac-Intyre East Tract in 2015 made the upper Hudson and its wilder tributary, the Opalescent, more accessible to paddlers. And now the state is proposing to make access even easier. The state Department of Environmental Conservation is proposing to establish three put-ins and take-outs on the Upper Upper Hudson. All three sites are on the east side of County 25, which leads to the Upper Works trailhead in Tahawus. The northernmost put-in would be on the southwest shore of Sanford Lake,…

I can relate to Indiana Jones, the swashbuckling Hollywood character played by Harrison Ford who readily retrieves precious artifacts from heavily booby-trapped enclaves in remote places around the globe. He climbs mountains, rafts rivers, races through rainforests, and wriggles through caves, unless there are snakes. Actually, I just do the climbing mountains and avoiding snakes part, which is why the Tongue Mountain Range, a peninsula that juts into Lake George from its western shore, was low on my list of places to hike in the Adirondacks. Tongue Mountain is one of the few places in the Adirondacks where timber rattlesnakes live. The only poisonous snake in the Adirondacks, the timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus), also called a canebrake rattlesnake or a banded rattlesnake, was the creature on the first flag of…

The plan for Cycle Adirondacks was to spend two nights camping under the stars in Keene Valley. But Mother Nature, it seemed, had other ideas. That’s why in the afternoon of Tuesday, August 22, 2017, about a hundred camping tents were dismantled and about a hundred inflatable mattresses dragged into Keene Central School. A storm was coming—on weather radar, it appeared as angry oranges and yellows—that promised sixty-mile-per-hour winds, lightning, and possibly even tornados. Instead of enjoying a restful night on one of the lushest lawns in Keene Valley, most of the 170 participants of Cycle Adirondacks (now known as the Ultimate Cycling Vacation) would spend it taking shelter in hallways, classrooms, and the auditorium. That night, Cycle Adirondacks co-director Doug Haney stood up in the school auditorium and apologized…

The High Peaks Wilderness Area of the Adirondack Park is no longer a wilderness. The State Land Master Plan—the seminal document that guides management of all state-owned lands in the Adirondack Park—describes the attributes that define wilderness: A wilderness area, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man— where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. A wilderness area is further defined to mean an area of state land or water having a primeval character, without significant improvement or permanent human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve, enhance and restore, where necessary, its natural conditions. It goes on to say that a Wilderness…

As part of the Great Adirondack Birding Celebration last year, we led an all-day trip across the northern Adirondacks, from Bloomingdale Bog to Heaven Hill Farm to the Magic Triangle in Essex, and we saw all manner of birds, from scarlet tanagers to rose-breasted grosbeaks to indigo buntings. But the crew seemed a little subdued. So Pat suggested that we stop at the great blue heron colony in Lewis. Boy, did that get a rise out of the group—everyone poured out of the van, and the cameras started beeping and buzzing and clacking like wild. The cool thing about the heron rookery in Lewis is that the nests, about fifteen of them, are virtually at eye level. Great blue herons tend to build a nest seventy to ninety feet up…

One of Campeau’s favorite places in the Park is the historic Tahawus Tract in the town of Newcomb, former home of the Adirondack Iron Works Company, for its social and industrial history. For years, the mining operation employed many Adirondack families, some of whom lived in the village built on the property for employees. In 2003, the Open Space Institute bought the property for $8.5 million from NL Industries, which mined titanium from the land from 1940 into the 1980s, preserving that history and protecting the headwaters of the Hudson River. Trails have been added and interpretive placards explaining the remaining structures and their history. MORE PHOTOS Visitors can see the towering remains of the furnace as well as parts of the wheelhouse machinery. “The interpretation OSI has done is…

Most readers have heard the raucous, resonant trill of the eastern gray treefrog, but I suspect most of us have never seen this beautiful amphibian. What sets this frog apart from others in our area is its ability to change color (thus its scientific name, Hyla versicolor). The adults are typically gray with darker blotches on the back, but in response to temperature, daylight, and the color of its surroundings, their coloration may change from dark to pale gray to brown or green, with the dark splotches becoming either more or less conspicuous. A fabulous bright yellow or orange on the inside of the hind legs is visible only when the frog moves, which may startle potential predators or warn of its skin’s noxious secretions. Like other tree frogs, gray…

Many hikers carry a folding pocketknife, but for serious forays into the wilderness, you should also pack a fixed-blade survival knife. A fixed-blade knife is stronger than a folding knife and can be used for many tasks, such as splitting firewood, sawing small limbs, or carving a digging stick and other tools. Sources: Rich Johnson’s Guide to Wilderness Survival; The Survival Hacker’s Handbook by Ted Alvarez. Here are some things to look for in a knife: Blade material: Stainless steel or carbon steel. Stainless steel resists rust better, but carbon is easier to sharpen. Blade length: 3 to 6 inches. Blade edge: Survival expert Rich Johnson recommends a combination blade, with a serrated section for sawing. The rest of the blade is for slicing. Back of blade (spine): Strong enough…

My earliest memory of Phil Brown was nearly twenty years ago, and we were climbing a slide somewhere in the Adirondacks. It was a new one, a mountain-sized scar carved by some now long-forgotten Nor’easter. The new views exposed by the storm were operatic—distant rock, sweeping valleys—but the gravel and mud underfoot were still unstable, slurrying and shifting past our boots. I chickened out and picked my way to the forest at the edge, but Phil was stubborn. I watched him scramble upward, pausing occasionally to write in his little notebook, before topping out near the summit. That doggedness made Phil a leader of a renaissance in writing and thinking about the Park that began in the late 1990s. “I’ve had a lot of fun,” he told me recently, after…

Almost two decades have passed since the Adirondack Park Agency approved a lengthy and complex management plan for the High Peaks Wilderness. A lot has happened in the ensuing years, most notably the acquisition of thousands of acres of state land, but the plan has remained virtually unaltered. Now that too is about to change. The state Department of Environmental Conservation has proposed dozens of new trails, parking areas, canoe launches, campsites, and other facilities in the High Peaks Wilderness—some of them controversial. The APA is expected to vote on the proposals this summer, perhaps as early as July. The original High Peaks unit management plan (UMP) was approved in 1999. The next year it was amended to allow for a new trail up Little Porter Mountain. Since then, nothing…

NL Industries stopped digging for titanium ore at Tahawus in the 1980s, but the mine remains a visible presence on the edge of the High Peaks Wilderness. Hikers driving to the Upper Works trailhead pass a stretch of the Hudson River lined with rock tailings from the mine. Those who venture up nearby Mount Adams or one of several other peaks look down on a pile of loose stone that rises three hundred feet. If you fly over in a small plane, as we did with one of Lighthawk’s volunteer pilots in May, the site resembles a gray island in a sea of green forest. The tailings mound sits between two water-filled mining pits that look like blue Adirondack lakes with unusual teal coloring in the shallows. A smaller pond…

A flight over the thirty-mile rail line from the old titanium mine in Newcomb down to North Creek in late May confirmed that all the empty tanker cars that had been stored along the tracks over the winter had been removed. The Saratoga and North Creek Railway began moving other equipment out of North Creek after its tourist trains halted in early April. Local residents also saw the twenty-four remaining tanker cars moving from the tracks farther north. “They’re gone,” said Horicon Supervisor Matt Simpson, who heads the Warren County Board’s Public Works Committee. An Adirondack Explorer reporter and photographer Carl Heilman II saw no train equipment at the former titanium mine at Tahawus or along the tracks between Tahawus and North Creek during a low-level flight with LightHawk, a…

Katy Van Anden was born thirty-three years ago, the same year her parents opened Lakeview Deli in Saranac Lake. The location, across from Lake Flower’s boat launch and the site of the winter ice palace, is just about ideal for the sandwich shop she now runs. But the view this summer is not what her customers have become accustomed to. “We’re joking we’re Fenceview Deli instead of Lakeview Deli,” said Van Anden. This spring, crews hired by the state Department of Environmental Conservation cordoned off part of the area with green fencing and moved in heavy vehicles, cranes, and barges and started dredging the lake and a nearby brook to remove contaminants. They’ve turned the lakeshore into a construction zone, making it tricky for launching boats and taking scenic pictures.…

What should the time frame be for dealing with a known and controllable environmental threat to the Adirondack Park? Ten years? Twenty years? This is a frequent question on many issues here, but a particularly key one, we think, when it comes to the state’s use of road salt in the Park, which has come to the forefront again after the completion of one more study by the Adirondack Watershed Institute at Paul Smith’s College. The latest Park-wide study shows road salt, in addition to its known impact on lakes and streams in the Park, now has been found in elevated levels in the well water of Adirondack residents—more than 50 percent of those sampled that are downslope from state roadways. And Dan Kelting, executive director of the institute, warns…

If you’re one of those people who doubt the program to block aquatic invasive species from Lake George is worth the effort, not to mention the money, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes will persuade you otherwise. As journalist Dan Egan explains in his book, the cause of “the death” of the Great Lakes is not one of those forms of industrial pollution that called forth the Clean Water Act of 1972 but, rather, “noxious species from ports all over the world that are inexorably unstitching a delicate ecological web more than 10,000 years in the making.” When ships from across the Atlantic reach these shores, the ballast water drawn from the Black Sea and Caspian Sea basins is dumped into local waters, and with it, the tiny…

There are two fish in Adirondack waters, both toothy and predatory, that if they were larger and we were smaller, might pose a risk to swimming children. Both eat, at least on occasion, muskrats. Ducklings and goslings are on the menu, too, as are mice, shrews, frogs, salamanders, crayfish, and lots and lots of fish, small, medium, and large. The lesser of these monsters of the deep, and of shallows, too, is the northern pike, Esox lucius. My Adirondack grandfather, who taught me to fish for these barracuda-like creatures, called them not “pike” but “northerns.” As nicknames go, “northern” is a good one. The range of this fish sits around the upper, boreal reaches of our planet like a wreath. Northern pike occur naturally in the British Isles, Scandinavia, and…

In this challenging and beautifully written book, Daegan Miller teases out the connections linking nineteenth-century American reform movements, including abolitionism, and the American landscape. To what extent, he asks, was the reform impulse intertwined with a growing sense that modernity itself was the problem? One vision of America’s future emphasized industry, “progress,” the exploitation of the American land in the name of commerce and profit, with or without slave labor. Some radical reformers posited a different vision; they intuited that slavery’s ruthless exploitation of people, among other examples of American institutions crying out for change, was mirrored and abetted by a willingness to degrade nature. The romantic affection for nature and doubts about progress expressed by well-known thinkers and writers like Thoreau and Emerson have occupied scholars for generations. Miller…