Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2016 i Adirondack Explorer

The state may not own full title to the entire Remsen-Lake Placid rail corridor, a discovery that raises questions about the proposed construction of a rail trail between Lake Placid and Tupper Lake. The controversial plan to remove thirty-four miles of track was approved in February by the Adirondack Park Agency. The state Department of Environmental Conservation says the ownership of one or more stretches of track are under review, including “thousands of feet” in Saranac Lake where the rail line passes through property owned by North Country Community College. “These are routine kinds of issues that come up. I think we’re very confident that we’ll work through this,” said DEC Regional Director Robert Stegemann. The issue came to light in late September, when the state attorney general’s office asked…

As you approach through the autumn forest and stand over the simple graves blanketed in pine needles and obscured by a low canopy of ferns it’s easy to give in to the thought, these are lost souls. Two children placed in the ground nearly one hundred and twenty years ago. Two wooden crosses, side by side, stand in a small clearing in the midst of the Siamese Ponds Wilderness. It’s a walk of almost two miles down the trail that leads to John Pond to where a fading sign guides us: “To the twin graves of Peter Savarie and Eliza King of Little Canada.” Markers say that death came to fourteen-year-old Eliza and her eleven-year-old stepbrother Peter in the black diphtheria epidemic of 1897. Now they rest alone surrounded by…

Boreas Ponds is a gorgeous place to paddle, but not everyone owns a canoe and not everyone who does wants to carry it seven miles, or three miles, or even a half-mile to get there. And so in early September, I went to the ponds to check out the hiking possibilities. Under an interim access plan, I was able to drive 3.2 miles up the dirt Gulf Brook Road to a newly created parking area. From there, I rode a mountain bike 3.6 miles to the ponds. This was a big change from when I canoed Boreas Ponds in early June. Then the entire road was closed to motor vehicles and bikes. The state plans to close all of Gulf Brook Road again for winter. How much, if any, of…

A trail weaving its way through the woods to a summit takes up just a minuscule fraction of the wild lands it traverses, which may leave the impression that trails have little impact on wildlife. Research in recent years by the Wildlife Conservation Society suggests that is not the case. “You’d be surprised by the ripples left by a day hiker’s ramble through the woods,” wrote Christopher Solomon in the New York Times in 2015. “In 2008 Sarah Reed, an associate conservation scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and her colleagues found fivefold declines in detections of bobcats, coyotes and other midsize carnivores in protected areas in California that allowed quiet recreation activities like hiking, compared with protected areas that prohibited those activities.” The Wildlife Conservation Society is now working…

A few winters ago, I decided to ski alone to Allen Mountain, considered by many to be the most remote and difficult of all the Adirondack High Peaks. This eighteen-mile round trip usually takes fit hikers twelve hours or more in winter, even longer if they have to break trail. I had a better idea. I read online hiker forums, looking for reports about a large group making the summit. Knowing the snowshoers would have packed down the trail, I showed up a few days later. I cross-country-skied almost to the base of the mountain on a nice, smooth track, switched to my own snowshoes when it got steep, and reached the 4,340-foot-high summit with relatively minimal effort. My round-trip time: under nine hours. Some call this “trail vulturing.” If…

When my parents came to the Adirondacks in 1956, they believed they were moving to a place far removed—culturally and politically as well as geographically—from the cities in which they had worked as left-wing journalists. Beyond the Adirondacks lay “the big world,” as our neighbor Peggy Hamilton called it. (It was a world she was familiar with, having been the companion of Vida Mulholland and, like Vida and her more famous sister Inez, an early advocate of women’s rights.) The 175-mile-long Northway between Albany and Montreal, which Governor Nelson Rockefeller officially declared completed ten years later, brought that world much closer. For practical as well as political reasons, the last stretch to be completed was the piece that crossed the Forest Preserve between Ausable Chasm and Lake George, an accomplishment…

At the very moment we clinked our glasses in an evening toast a wild screeching erupted under the deck, a furious chase of some sort we thought until we saw only a lone crazed animal zooming around below us, skittering back and forth with dizzying speed and screaming bloody murder. I thought it must be a flying squirrel at the same moment I realized flying squirrels don’t have wings. Suddenly, the wings peeled off low and to the right as a chipmunk went left and started corkscrewing up a huge white pine while vocalizing hysterically. I took a sip of wine and wondered aloud if I had actually seen a dark-eyed junco riding on the back of a chipmunk and beating on it with its wings, and when I turned…

No cloud without a silver lining. Or, in this case, no clouds means a carpet of white. Last winter’s record warmth and lack of snow left cross-country skiers seriously depressed. There’s probably no sport more vulnerable to the planet’s quick warming; one EPA report after another has warned that winter as we know it will vanish from these latitudes over the course of the century. But that future is going to come slower in North Creek than most places: the town’s Ski Bowl suddenly looks set to become one of the East’s premier Nordic race venues. It’s not cross-country like you’ve ever seen it before. But once you’ve seen it you can’t stop watching. “We’ve been making some snow down at the Bowl for cross country skiing for a few…

It’s no stretch to say that Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau did more than any other individual to put Saranac Lake on the map. He was the driving force behind the transformation of an Adirondack lakeside hamlet of loggers and hunters into one of the world’s foremost health-care and research centers. He accomplished this through overpowering force of will and unrelenting optimism while suffering from debilitating tuberculosis for the last four decades of his life and simultaneously enduring a chain of personal tragedies. Trudeau’s remarkable life is chronicled in a new book by Saranac Lake historian Mary Hotaling. A Rare Romance in Medicine is a clumsy title, vaguely suggesting a steamy B-grade novel set in a big-city hospital; the phrase is attributed to an earlier regional historian who was a Trudeau…

Over the objections of environmentalists, the Adirondack Park Agency’s board voted in October to solicit public comments on just four options for classifying the Boreas Ponds Tract. The critics contend none of the options sufficiently protects Boreas Ponds and the adjacent lands from motorized and mechanized incursions. Peter Bauer, executive director of Protect the Adirondacks, accused the agency of severely limiting the options for the future of the 20,758-acre tract, which the state bought from the Nature Conservancy in April. “These are really just variations of the same plan,” he told the board. With a spectacular view of the High Peaks, Boreas Ponds is perhaps the most-prized parcel acquired by the state in a blockbuster deal with the conservancy’s Adirondack chapter. Over several years, the state purchased sixty-five thousand acres…

Half a decade after the Adirondack Park Agency gave the green light to the Adirondack Club and Resort in Tupper Lake—and nearly two years after the project survived a final legal challenge from environmentalists—the massive project shows no signs of moving forward soon. Work has yet to begin on any of the resort’s infrastructure. For example, the site of a commercial marina on Tupper Lake that developers once said would be constructed last spring remains a vacant lot. Meanwhile, essential permit applications still haven’t been filed with state and federal regulators. The principal investors in Preserve Associates, Tupper Lake developer Tom Lawson and Pennsylvania attorney Michael Foxman, acknowledge that they are mired in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and unpaid taxes. The Adirondack Daily Enterprise, a Saranac Lake…

A rose is a rose is a rose, Gertrude Stein said. Defining a tree is not so simple. That question—what is a tree?—has emerged as a central issue in a long-running dispute over the construction of “community-connector” snowmobile trails in the Forest Preserve. These trails, which link hamlets, are nine feet wide (twelve feet on curves) and graded to make them smooth. Peter Bauer, executive director of Protect the Adirondacks, contends they resemble roads more than trails. Since 2013, Protect has been pressing a lawsuit contending that community connectors violate Article 14 of the state constitution. Article 14 states that the Forest Preserve “shall be forever kept as wild forest lands.” Just as important for Protect’s argument, it also declares that timber on the Preserve shall not be “sold, removed…

The growing number of hikers in the High Peaks in recent years has heightened concern for the fragile alpine vegetation found on many of the summits. If the number continues to increase, summit stewards charged with educating hikers may find themselves overwhelmed, said Julia Goren, the Adirondack Mountain Club’s education director. “I don’t think we’ve lost ground yet,” said Goren, who heads the summit-steward program. “But I do think it’s not hyperbolic that we’re kind of at a tipping point where there’s not much more we can take before there’s going to be some kind of loss. One summit steward can’t talk to six hundred people in a day and make sure that people are respecting every patch of alpine vegetation.” To prevent a loss of flora, Goren said there…

I first climbed Snowy Mountain in 2008 while doing the field work for my guidebook Hiking the Adirondacks. Originally named “Squaw Bonnet,” Snowy Mountain (3,898 feet), near Indian Lake, is the tallest peak south of the High Peaks region. It’s actually higher than two of the forty-six High Peaks: Nye Mountain (3,895 feet) and Couchsachraga Peak (3,820 feet). What’s more, Snowy Mountain has a fire tower on its summit, guaranteeing a 360-degree view on a clear day. It sounded perfect for my book, so I asked around. A number of my hiking buddies backed up my intuition about Snowy Mountain and urged me to hike it. The internet banter about the peak confirmed their enthusiasm, so I invited Jack, my sweetheart at the time, to climb it with me. However,…

When Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the state’s purchase of Boreas Ponds and the surrounding land for the Forest Preserve it was an occasion for lofty rhetoric. “Once in a rare while,” he said, “. . . you get a chance to do something that makes a difference forever. Forever. That literally leaves our children a place that is a better place than we inherited.” As stirring as those words were, they will sound empty if the state doesn’t rise to the occasion and commit to using these lands in a way that truly preserves their natural wonder for the next generations. Cuomo also said, “By acquiring this remarkable tract, we are helping to conserve the region’s natural beauty while also creating new economic opportunities for communities in the Park.” This…

Why is diversity important? There’s no easy way to answer that question. Like the word diversity itself, the question elicits different responses depending on who you’re talking to. Since its creation in August 2014, the Adirondack Diversity Advisory Council (ADAC) has wrestled with how to best communicate the many reasons diversity matters to our region. It was the first question posed to us during a March 2016 panel discussion about diversity, part of Kate Glenn’s Nature & Culture course at Paul Smith’s College. Pete Nelson, Martha Swan, and I had just finished up a brief presentation about ADAC and its work to date. Pete and Martha, who both have deep and broad experience working on issues involving diversity and social justice, responded to the question eloquently, as only they can.…

Largely restricted to North America, snow geese are the most abundant geese in the world. One population, the greater snow goose, breeds in the eastern Canadian Arctic and Greenland and winters in the mid-Atlantic states. This population exploded fivefold to over a million birds in less than twenty years in the 1980s and 1990s, perhaps due to the geese increasingly feeding in grain fields. This explosion in abundance was more than their Arctic breeding grounds, wetland staging areas, and coastal wintering habitats could sustain, resulting in significant habitat degradation. Regulatory actions, such as increased bag limits, taken by wildlife authorities have led to a more sustainable population of approximately eight hundred thousand birds. For many years migrating snow geese in our region concentrated in the fall on the Vermont side…

Scotts Cobble outside Lake Placid was among the lost ski areas of New York State, but it’s been found again. Josh Wilson, executive director of the Barkeater Trails Alliance (BETA), was wandering the wooded slopes of Scotts Cobble scouting possible routes for mountain biking a few years ago when a lightbulb went on in his head: we could ski here. That bright idea should become a reality this winter, allowing backcountry skiers to access Scotts Cobble from the Jackrabbit Ski Trail where it passes through Craig Wood Golf Course. The hill and the golf course are owned by the town of North Elba. BETA and the town began clearing trails for biking and skiing this summer. They received a Smart Growth grant for the project from the state Department of…

The Adirondack Park Agency will be classifying, in addition to Boreas Ponds, thirty-two parcels scattered around the Park, totaling more than thirty thousand acres. Most of the decisions appear routine, involving small pieces of land whose classification is all but predetermined by the adjacent Forest Preserve. Two exceptions are MacIntyre West and MacIntyre East, a pair of large tracts near Tahawus. Like Boreas Ponds, they were acquired from the Nature Conservancy in the Finch, Pruyn deal. Environmental groups want all of MacIntyre West and most of MacIntyre East added to the High Peaks Wilderness. Local towns, however, want both tracts classified as Wild Forest, arguing that former logging roads on the properties could be used for snowmobiling and mountain biking. In this case, the APA staff’s recommendations mirror the environmentalists’…

When many of the High Peaks’ trails were cut more than a century ago, the work was done by guides and hired hands. Keene Valley’s Orson “Old Mountain” Phelps created the first trail up Mount Marcy in 1861; Verplanck Colvin’s survey workers cut routes up Algonquin and Dix in the late 1800s; and Henry Van Hoevenberg developed a trail system for the Adirondack Lodge (as it was then spelled). The early trails opened up the High Peaks to more people and laid the groundwork for today’s trail system, but some of the original trails continue to cause maintenance problems. “When trails were originally cut about a hundred years ago, there wasn’t anything called trail design,” said Adirondack Mountain Club Trails Coordinator Andrew Hamlin. “It was basically just a way to…

To really understand this story, you have to bear in mind two distinctive things about North Creek. One, it butts up against the mountains much tighter than most Adirondack communities. Start on the path that runs beside Town Hall (within sight of the Hudson), and within minutes you’re climbing steeply up Gore Mountain, entering one of the largest wilderness complexes in the Park. Two—and this negates the first advantage— North Creek is one of the few Adirondack hamlets bypassed by a state highway. Instead of following the main street, the state cut Route 28 between the town and the mountain, in much the same way that highway builders cut off many of our finest cities from their river or ocean fronts. (Think Albany or Boston). The result: the Adirondack town…

A small convoy of pickup trucks and our low-slung Prius followed a pair of wheel ruts through dense woods to a location whose exact coordinates I cannot divulge. Let’s say the place was miles deep in the dark, shaggy, spruce, fir, and tamarack woods north of Tupper Lake. My kids, Ned, then twelve, and Tasman, eleven, and I had no clear idea where we were going. Fortunately, the team of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation biologists, SUNY Potsdam Professor Glenn Johnson, and assorted field hands we were accompanying had worked out the logistics. The occasion was momentous. We were on hand to witness the release of wild Canadian spruce grouse into the Adirondack woods. With the blessing of Canadian wildlife authorities, the birds had been captured in a…

An unbearable loss Thank you for publishing the article about the boating death of eight-year-old Charlotte McCue on Lake George in late July. This was a personal tragedy for our family as her parents and grandparents, the McCue and Knarr families, have been our family’s friends for many, many years. We are still heartsick over Charlotte’s senseless death. At Charlotte’s memorial service on the shore of Lake George I was struck by the number of boats and personal watercraft operating on the lake during the service. I don’t know how there aren’t many more accidents. People may say that this was just an unfortunate accident after a long-standing yearly party attended by young people. But the people in the speeding motorboat who struck the Knarr boat, flew over it, and…

YES By PETE NELSON If I were a member of the Adirondack Forty-Sixers I would call for the organization to rename, repurpose, or disband, because the accomplishment they enshrine—climbing all of the High Peaks—is contributing to the overuse that is harming the High Peaks Wilderness. My call has nothing to do with the quality or mission of the club. Indeed, the Forty-Sixers should be lauded for all they have done for the Adirondacks. But the requirement to climb the forty-six peaks has outlived its specialness and its own storied history, even as its power to drive peak-bagging has increased to the point where the very mission statement by which they operate is compromised. I need to disclose that I am not a Forty-Sixer. I’m not the club-joining type, but in…

“There are almost as many reasons to be outdoors as there are people.” Jack Drury, of Saranac Lake, is project director of Adirondack Community-Based Trails and Lodging System, an organization that with state funding is developing plans to create and market a network of trails linking communities and lodges. Most of the network would use existing trails; lodgings could be a mix of existing commercial facilities; newly built lodges; and possibly temporary tent platforms in the state Forest Preserve. Drury and his colleague Joe Dadey say that if the project becomes feasible, they could create a nonprofit business to market and manage the “hut-to-hut” network. Drury has long been active in outdoor recreation and education. He headed the Wilderness Recreation Leadership Program at North Country Community College, where he worked…

Edward Wilson probably knows more about ants than any single person ever has—and perhaps ever will. But the study of ants, which he has been pursuing since he was a child in Alabama during the Great Depression, is only the beginning of this polymath’s prodigious appetite for understanding how our natural world works and what our place in that world is and should be. As his command of myrmecology (ant science) grew increasingly encyclopedic, his wonder at the complexities of ant society led him to breakthrough insights about broader ecological themes, especially concerning the importance of biodiversity. (It also led him into some controversial publications on sociobiology, a field he pioneered. In particular, many philosophers found Wilson’s work to be deterministic, offering a coldly mechanical view of such matters as…