Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2020 i Adirondack Explorer

Two connected railroad corridors, long mired in uncertainty, inched closer to a potentially recreational future in the past two months. In October, New York State reached an agreement with Saratoga & North Creek Railway (owned by Iowa Pacific Holdings of Chicago) seeking a “voluntary abandonment” designation of the line that runs from North Creek to the old Tahawus Mine in Newcomb. Then in November, the Warren County Public Works Committee voted 9-2 to begin the abandonment process for the 40-mile stretch of tracks the county owns from North Creek south to Hadley. Warren County also owns the land beneath the tracks. The voluntary abandonment, which has to be approved by the federal Surface Transportation Board (a process that takes about six months), frees the state, counties and municipalities involved to…

Every Wednesday morning around 6:30, a refrigerated van from the Adirondacks stops at the corner of 135th Street and Riverside Drive in Harlem, where its contents—a week’s supply of fresh food from Essex Farm for 40-50 households in Manhattan and Brooklyn—are transferred into two more vans, one headed for each borough. The Adirondack vehicle, having traveled down the Northway and Thruway through the night, returns to The Hub on the Hill in Essex, a nonprofit local foods promoter that recently added delivery to the list of services it offers local farmers to help them get products to market.  MORE PHOTOS Essex County’s farming revival of the last decade or so, which primarily fed regional markets at first, is increasingly supported by sales in urban markets elsewhere in the state—often in…

The Adirondacks offer several woodsy windows into the Gilded Age, with opulent summer “great camps” whose urban owners are long gone and whose private halls are now open in one fashion or another. These days every New Yorker owns one of these camps in the prettiest of settings, and on three winter weekends each year anyone capable of propelling themselves on a 10-mile round trip can point their skis or snowshoes toward it and count on getting warm above the shore of Newcomb Lake. Camp Santanoni, the one-time mountain retreat of an Albany banker and a compound that extended a rustic-chic welcome to the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, is better known in summer, when visitors can ride bikes, horses or a horse-drawn wagon on the old dirt road to…

If it’s a more basic skating experience you’re seeking in the Adirondacks, you don’t have to look far to find appropriate ice. Many Adirondack communities around the park offer great opportunities for those with traditional skates, on rinks or outdoor ponds. There are venues in Inlet, Long Lake and other places around the park. Below is a list of some. Keep in mind, skating availability is weather-dependent for some. Fern Park Recreation Area (Inlet) Offers a free indoor ice-skating rink which is open seven days a week, weather permitting. A warming room is available with a window looking into the rink so parents can keep an eye on their children. Hockey in evenings. 9 Loomis Road, Inlet. (315) 357-5501. Online: inletny.com/inlet/skating-sledding Gurney Lane Recreation Area (Queensbury) Open every day including…

YES Peter Bauer Yes, build the Hudson River bike trail from North Creek to Saratoga Springs. Build it, and they will come. They did not come for the ill-fated commuter trains, snow train, tourist trains or rail service that was going to haul millions of tons of aggregate from the Tahawus Mine in Newcomb. A groundswell of support is emerging for the transition of the dormant 55-mile-long Saratoga and North Creek Railway to the new Hudson River bike trail. PREVIOUS COVERAGE A new public trail from Saratoga Springs to North Creek would connect dozens of small communities such as Corinth, Lake Luzerne, Hadley, Stony Creek, Thurman, Athol, The Glen, Warrensburg, and Riparius among other hamlets and businesses along the rail line. Such a trail would be very popular and heavily…

The most thrilling otter sighting of my life came one winter morning as my daughter, Tasman, and I were setting off for a dentist’s appointment in Burlington. We were passing a pond near Paul Smiths when I glimpsed something big and dark moving a hundred feet out on snow-covered ice. Time was tight, but this was a mystery I couldn’t pass up, and I pulled over. The animated thing was an otter. As Tasman hopped out to join me, we saw the animal slip through a hole and plunge into the pond’s frigid depths. About two minutes later, the otter was back with a fish in its mouth. I had an idea. The next time the animal dove, we’d sprint onto the ice and freeze like statues. When the sleek…

The best time to have been an Adirondack tourist was perhaps in the latter part of the 19th century, when hotels were going up, wholesale swaths of forest had yet to be mowed down and anyone with a canoe and a Wallace guidebook was basically free to wander wherever mood and muscle would allow. With the turn of the 20th century came mechanized logging, and the industry’s captains began buying up great tracts of forestland that for the next hundred years would be taken out of public view. The history was not lost on Neil Woodworth years ago, as he dipped his paddle in waters that had been closed to the public since the days of the Lombard steam-powered log tractor. It was a seminal moment in the 30 years…

A Connecticut multimillionaire who uses a seaplane to reach his remote waterfront property in Tupper Lake is seeking to seize control of the insolvent Adirondack Club and Resort project. In one of the biggest foreclosure actions in the history of the Adirondacks, Stanley Hutton Rumbough moved to capture the project site, which borders his 25-acre lakeside compound. If successful, he would wrest a giant undeveloped landscape from the development team that has failed to build the massive project even after gaining Adirondack Park Agency approval. The legal maneuver could result in propelling the dormant development forward, perhaps even clarifying the future of the shuttered Big Tupper Ski Area that has been planned as a feature of the resort. Some Adirondack conservationists hope it will also result in a change of…

Diana Niland is an experienced outdoorswoman. She has hiked the 2,189-mile Appalachian Trail, the 483-mile Colorado Trail, the 210-mile John Muir Trail, and climbed all the peaks with summits over 4,000 feet in elevation that make up the Northeast 111. Even so, she couldn’t meet the demands of through-hiking the Northville-Placid Trail in an Adirondack winter. “I have a respectable hiking resume, and this is the first thing I’ve set out to do and was simply not successful,” she said. The 138-mile trail, often called the NP Trail, runs from Northville to Lake Placid, through some of the most remote sections of the Adirondacks. In summer, hikers may be beset by black flies, mosquitoes and deer flies, and find themselves wading through mud or steams. But in winter, the trail…

When students in Elizabethtown, Lewis and Westport started school this year, new signs welcomed them to the newly formed Boquet Valley Central School District. In December 2018, voters in the eastern Adirondack communities chose to address a common park problem—stagnating student enrollments—by combining their resources. After a yearlong study and a straw poll indicated support, they approved the merging of the Westport Central and Elizabethtown-Lewis Central school districts. Then people involved with each district came together and moved quickly on making decisions and preparing for this academic year. The to-do list was extensive, including a new district name, school colors, governance, busing and tax equalization—and myriad smaller choices. “You name it, we had to decide it,” said Superintendent Joshua Meyer. But the transition team got it done. “We were able…

Recent foreclosure action on the Adirondack Club and Resort project in Tupper Lake could bring some movement to the long-stalled development—and with it the possibility of new thinking about the scope and design of the subdivision. This could be the most positive advancement so far in this more than decade-long saga. Crossroads ADK LLC, which owns the mortgage, sued in December to foreclose on developers Preserve Associates for 15 months of nonpayment. With this, Crossroads principal Stanley Hutton Rumbough, with deep ties to the Adirondacks, hopes to save the project, including the Big Tupper Ski Area. He has invested significantly in the project already, including improvements to the ski area and an access road. And if he takes over ownership of the project, and also re-evaluates the number of units—700…

The 2019 legislative session was a great one for New York’s environment. As the chairs of the Environmental Conservation Committees in both houses, we were pleased to talk with Adirondack residents and visitors about the session in late September when we came to the park to discuss next year’s agenda. The Adirondacks aren’t just New York’s largest park, they are a national treasure and a shining example of long-term conservation that serves as a model for the world. This year, the Legislature passed and the governor signed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which will guide the state to a cleaner and greener future. It will set a national example for how to handle the challenges of a rapidly changing climate and help to propel us to a global…

Having paid rapt attention to the weather reports during the final week of October, Greg Beckler knew a storm was coming. But for once he wasn’t worried about flooding—even though his stock in trade is a riverbed. Owner of Natural Stone Bridge & Caves in Pottersville, Beckler was well aware of what Trout Brook was capable of, because it had wiped out stairs, walkways and railings before. “Irene (in 2011) shut us down for several days,” he said. This time, however, he removed everything that was removable, and stowed it away high and dry on the riverbank. “Usually when the rains are really heavy I get nervous,” Beckler said. “This time I wasn’t, because everything was buttoned up and good to go.” The weather could do its worst. And did…

TRAILBLAZER: HILARY MOYNIHAN One hundred yards from the 221-year-old farmhouse Hilary Moynihan is renovating in Saratoga Springs is a structure common in the Adirondacks, but less so outside this Victorian city known for horse racing and mineral baths: the humble lean-to. It was built for Moynihan by friends she has made through her work as volunteer coordinator of the Adirondack Mountain Club’s Adopt a Lean-to program. She asked people she has come to know through the Adirondack Lean2Rescue and friends John Willis and Wayne McCormick to help her build one and they said, “How quickly can we build it for you?” “That’s the type of guys they are,” Moynihan says. “I was just floored. Such wonderful people that I know.” The story of the lean-to in her backyard starts with…

A few billion years ago, cyanobacteria were creators. The colorful bacteria produced much of the planet’s early oxygen. Now, they are increasingly known as something else—destroyers. PREVIOUS COVERAGE In lakes around the world and close to home, the tiny floating cells threaten public health and property values. That’s because toxic outbreaks or “blooms” of cyanobacteria, often mistaken for and even called algae, are getting worse. In Ohio, residents of Toledo couldn’t drink their water for several days in 2014, because it was drawn from a bacteria-filled Lake Erie. In New Jersey, bacteria blooms closed beaches around the state’s largest lake last summer. New York has put a dozen lakes on a cyanobacteria watch list, including several of the Finger Lakes and two Adirondack lakes. The first local lake, Lake George—assiduously…

Tiny, sap-sucking bugs strip hemlock needles and open a forest’s cooling canopy to sunlight. Exotic green beetles drill into ash trees and leave offspring that kill by carving tunnels that choke off circulation. Brightly decorated little poopers rain down excrement that’s euphemistically called “honeydew” because it attracts other insects to devastated apple trees and other hardwoods. These are the sorts of Asian forest invaders that Roman and Leslie Kucharczyk hoped they were escaping when they moved north to the Adirondacks a few years ago. Now they’re among a small but growing army of park residents learning to spot the signs so they can alert authorities to their presence and protect the North Country’s wild forests. They lost a hemlock to the woolly adelgid at their previous home in southeastern Pennsylvania,…

Dan Spada got into Nordic skating about 15 years ago while visiting Ottawa with his family during the city’s winter festival. On that trip he saw someone ice skating on the Rideau Canal using blades he didn’t recognize. So Spada approached the man and found out they were Nordic blades, which are longer than blades for hockey and figure skates and can be attached to Nordic skiing boots. At the time, they were common in Europe but Spada had never seen them before. Soon after that, Spada looked them up on the internet and ordered a pair from Sweden. “I think I was probably the first person around here who had those skates,” said Spada, a retired supervisor in the natural resources department at the state Adirondack Park Agency. Since…

Governor intent on weakening APA Thank you for the excellent if depressing article by Stephen Leon in your Nov/Dec issue, entitled “Who protects the park?” The state’s Adirondack Park Agency was created to fill that protective role through its park-wide land-use controls. In recent years, however, the agency appears to have forgotten its original purpose and lost its way. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is known to micromanage the APA and dictate many of its development decisions, has allowed most of his appointments to the APA’s 11-member governing board to lapse. When he finally did get around to making needed replacements, his slate of four choices were handed to him by the same local government officials who have worked over the years to weaken the APA. (Fortunately, these appointments were blocked…

I remember jumping up and down with jubilant excitement at having spotted a red-bellied woodpecker at Hoisington Brook, in Westport, during the Ferrisburgh Christmas Bird Count and no sooner recovering somewhat from the excitement than hearing a Carolina wren holding forth at high volume 50 yards from where we stood. The three of us stared at each other in utter disbelief, downright flabbergasted, and then the wren held forth again, louder and clearer and closer than we could have wished. We even saw it, flitting about on top of a brush pile at the edge of the field. The red-bellied woodpecker had never been recorded on the Ferrisburgh, Vermont, Christmas Bird Count, which includes a swath of New York along Lake Champlain from, roughly, Camp Dudley to Whallons Bay. We…

About a decade ago, Jim Frenette was monkeying around with the trail groomer for the cross-country trails at the Tupper Lake Golf Course. But he needed a wrench, so he drove down the road to the workshop of his nephew, John Gillis. Gillis, an avid skier and carpenter, had the right wrench. Perhaps more important: During the visit Gillis took an interest in trail grooming. Since then, he has helped spearhead a volunteer effort to expand and groom the free cross-country skiing trail system that is now known as James C. Frenette, Sr. Recreational Trails. The trail system consists of nearly five miles of groomed trails and another mile-long spur trail that connects to the currently shuttered Big Tupper Ski Area. The system is a big upgrade from where…

It has survived two evictions. It has burned to the ground. It has weathered cyclical financial crises and changing tastes in outdoor recreation. Its members have gotten lost and been shot (accidentally). It has relocated itself half a dozen times. And yet the Rap-Shaw Club continues to this day, on two neighboring islands in the Stillwater Reservoir, the oldest ongoing institution of its type in the vast western Adirondacks. The club’s name derives from a telescoping of the last names of two of its founders, John Rapalje, ironically a seller of fire suppression equipment, and Leander Shaw, funeral home and opera house owner and county coroner. The two Buffalo-area fishing buddies, during a May 1896 expedition in some of the Adirondacks’ most remote territory north of the Beaver River, hit…