Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2016 i Adirondack Explorer

In early June, I enjoyed one of my most memorable canoe trips in the Adirondacks: I spent the morning paddling around lovely Boreas Ponds, taking in breathtaking views of the High Peaks. I had the place all to myself. This might seem surprising, given that the state had only recently purchased Boreas Ponds from the Nature Conservancy. Usually, such a magnificent acquisition to the Forest Preserve will attract curiosity seekers. Yes, it was a weekday, but my guess is that the explanation lies in the difficulty of getting there—especially with a canoe. In theory, it would be possible to drive to Boreas Ponds along a well-maintained dirt road, known as Gulf Brook Road, but that thoroughfare is barred to motor vehicles. Anyone wanting to paddle the ponds will have to…

Communities in the central Adirondacks are hoping that proposed hut-to-hut hiking networks will provide a boost to their struggling economies. In a 112-page plan released in May, the state Department of Environmental Conservation calls for the creation of hiking networks in five towns: Long Lake, Newcomb, Indian Lake, Minerva, and North Hudson. The goal is to create multi-day itineraries that allow hikers to spend each night in an inn, hotel, or other lodging facility. Hikers would be expected to trek eight to twelve miles a day. While many of the lodging facilities already exist, some would need to be built. Each trip would start and end in communities. Some hikes, labeled circuits, would start and end in the same place. “Overall, I think it’s a great concept. It’s another opportunity…

An adult bald eagle in flight, with its striking white head and tail, is a sight that almost everyone relishes. Happily, this vision is now regularly enjoyed throughout the Adirondacks and across North America, where there are over a hundred thousand eagles, half of these in Alaska and British Columbia. It was not always this way. Although bald eagles were reported as numerous in the state in the nineteenth century, they were seen as competitors with humans for fish and as threats to livestock. Bounties were offered in some states, and tens of thousands of eagles were gunned down across the country. Being our “national bird” apparently counted for little. Deforestation and reproductive impairment from pesticides (especially DDT) and heavy metals caused bald eagles to be extirpated as a successful…

Most of us associate salamanders, if we think about them at all, with springtime. This is when snowmelt fills low spots in the woods, and polka-dotted spotted salamanders looking like Dr. Seuss illustrations burst from the soil and hasten to cool pools to breed. A few of us, if we hike in the rain, encounter so-called red efts. Not red but orange, they represent the terrestrial stage of the otherwise aquatic eastern newt. Yet when mud season dries up and the temperature climbs, salamanders all but vanish. Yet they’re out there. One steamy August Wednesday two years ago, my children Ned and Tasman and I spent the morning with a distinguished herpetologist friend from New Zealand. Like the rest of us sensible people, Alison is drawn to creatures slimy and…

I was hunting near Richfield Springs years ago. I caught some movement over my right shoulder, turned to look downhill, and saw a large, multi-colored dog galloping along, looking like Secretariat powering down the stretch. It was a coyote. I’d seen aerial photos of a pack taken in the early 1970s on the Oriskany Flats and had written a couple of columns on them with the help of Pete Gaskin, one of the first biologists to detail coyote expansion into New York State. This was the first I’d encountered in the wild. It was breathtaking in its pure athleticism. I’ve only a few face-to-face encounters with them since, but I am very aware of their presence. Their tracks are obvious and their voices are distinctive. Their numbers ebb and flow…

The Adirondack Park Agency is about to begin a new chapter in its often-contentious history, following the retirement of both its longtime chairwoman, Leilani Crafts Ulrich, and its strongest environmental voice, Richard Booth. The terms of Ulrich and Booth were to expire June 30. Ulrich planned to step down at once, but Booth offered to serve beyond his term, if asked. Two other board members, Sherman Craig and Daniel Wilt, already were serving beyond their terms. In addition, one other seat has been vacant for two years. In all, then, Governor Andrew Cuomo was tasked with filling five of the eight seats held by citizen representatives. Officials from other state agencies fill three other seats. After presiding over her last meeting in June, Ulrich said new appointments were in the…

Following a disappointing winter for skiing, I came into May looking forward to the next season of outdoor enjoyment. But spring turned out as contrary as winter, with the first days of warming sun followed by spells of bone-chilling cold. So on the mid-May morning when Larry Master and I meet to hike Snow Mountain in Keene Valley it’s a relief to hit the trail with sun shining and the temperature near fifty degrees. The area woke yesterday to a coating of snow on the ground and buffeting winds. Today, though, holds the promise of a vernal forest stirring to life with budding wildflowers and the sound of birds returned to the Adirondacks. Snow Mountain rises in the lap of the High Peaks but short of the four-thousand-foot-plus summits that…

“We cannot understand why DEC is determined to destroy vital transportation infastructure.” —Bill Branson, railway president After years of acrimonious public debate, the state has made its final decision regarding the future of the state-owned rail corridor that stretches 119 miles from Remsen, north of Utica, through Old Forge to Lake Placid. Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in mid-May that the state will remove thirty-four miles of tracks between Lake Placid and Tupper Lake to create a recreational trail for biking, walking, and snowmobiling, among other uses. At the same time, the state plans to rehabilitate forty-five miles of largely unused track between Tupper Lake and Big Moose. First proposed in June 2015, the corridor plan is viewed as a compromise between advocates of a longer rail trail and the supporters…

Dix Mountain is a slide climber’s playground. In all, it boasts a dozen slides worthy of climbing. The problem is choosing one. R.L. and Karen Stolz, the owners of Alpine Adventures in Keene, recommend Index Finger, one of the longest of the Finger Slides on the north face. Last fall, my girlfriend Carol and I got up early in the morning to hike the five and a half miles to the base of the slide, where we met up with the Stolzes and their crazy dog, Terra. The Stolzes were shooting photos for a book they’re calling Classic Adirondack Climbs, which remains a work in progress. We left the hiking trail and started up the slide about 10:40 a.m., stopping often to admire the ever-widening vista. “This is still a…

Of the various proposals for classifying the Boreas Ponds Tract, one has captured my attention. The BeWildNY alliance of environmental organizations is calling for what is essentially an all-wilderness classification that encompasses not only Boreas Ponds, but a long stretch of the Boreas River as well. I really want to support this idea. The “expanded motor-free Adirondack High Peaks Wilderness” they envision would be a “national jewel,” according to their website. But buried within this bushel of wilderness advocacy is one terribly rotten apple: BeWildNY wants to retain a six-mile-long access road within their proposed motorless area to facilitate paddling access. Such a proposal might not surprise me if it came from a state agency pinched by the competing interests of multiple constituencies. But considering that BeWildNY is co-led by…

As we bounced down the dirt road, my car’s tires flinging rocks against the undercarriage, my friend Tim Peartree opined that we just might have the Essex Chain Lakes to ourselves. How many other people would subject their cars to such torture? Quite a few, it turns out. There were eleven other vehicles in the Deer Pond parking area when we arrived on a Saturday morning in mid-May. Granted, some of them were pickups, and probably all had higher clearance than my Honda Fit. As far as we could tell from the register, all of the visitors were paddlers, and some of them had come to fish. Apparently, we were the only mountain bikers, but Forest Ranger Benjamin Baldwin told us that he has seen quite a few bicyclists here.…

On a snowy winter night in Lake George, in 2010, Cindy Eggleston’s motion-detecting light came on in her back yard. She looked out her kitchen window and saw a big cat. A really big cat. Her husband, a retired conservation officer, guessed that it must have been a bobcat. No, she said, “it had a long tail.” So he went out to look around. In the snow he found huge tracks and, eventually, a hair sample. DNA analysis subsequently showed that these hairs came from a cougar, an animal whose last proven presence in the Adirondacks had occurred over a century before. The life and death of this wandering cougar, along with a history of this splendid animal in North America and a discussion of its current status, are the…

Spend a half-day with Brian DeGroat and you’ll notice he uses the word connection a lot. Not in the texting-tweeting-digital-everything sense of the word. As executive director of Camp Pok-O-MacCready and its Outdoor Education Center, he’s the leader of an ever-changing community where mobile depends on muscles, not bandwidth. What he and his colleagues are all about is connecting young people with nature and with each other. “We have a no-screens policy,” he says. “No smart phones. We want kids to be interacting with each other. Socializing and not worrying about their digital lives.” Camp Pok-O-MacCready can be found on the same Willsboro property it has occupied since it opened in 112 years ago. And it is owned by Jack Swan, a member of the family that founded the camp…

The first rule of Camp Orenda? You go home and tell everybody you know about Camp Orenda. Here’s how the conversation will go: You’ll tell them, “I went glamping!” And they’ll look at you—they’re hard-core Adirondackers, these people you’ll be talking to—and they’ll be, like, really, glamping? Glamorous camping? And you’ll be, like, really, yes. It was so pleasant, you’ll say, to snack on cheese and crackers after you made the arduous two-hundred-foot trek from your car to the campfire. And to dine on a hearty dinner cooked by the camp chef after an afternoon hike is luxury you can get used to. And to sleep on a real bed in a canvas tent with a wood-burning stove is a nice change of pace, too. But the best thing by…

Leigh Campbell wasn’t thinking about the bill when a helicopter back in April whisked his pregnant wife, Heather, from Saranac Lake to the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington. Heather’s water broke at twenty-seven weeks, and as they were rushing from their home in Ray Brook to the Adirondack Medical Center, their midwife called for a helicopter, reasoning that Heather needed a hospital with a neonatal intensive-care unit. While the trip can take two hours or more by car, the flight by a LifeNet helicopter took twenty minutes. But then came the bill: $59,999. This was followed by the news that their insurance carrier, Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, would pay only $379 since LifeNet was “out of network,” meaning it wasn’t on the list of care providers that…

Since its creation in 1971 the Adirondack Park Agency has borne the responsibility of shaping the character of the Adirondack Park. Its decisions on how to manage state Forest Preserve and regulate the use of private lands set priorities and chart a future course. Its actions provide the answers to big questions: Will we value our critical natural areas? Will we respect a legal framework that consistently applies principles of preservation across the Park? Or will we substitute political opportunism and expedience and weaken laws designed to safeguard a vulnerable region for generations to come? Too often in recent years the APA has failed to take the firm, politically courageous stands that effective stewardship demands. Some, including the commissioner who is the agency’s most forceful voice for environmental principle, say…

Periodicals like the Explorer have to schedule far ahead, so the editors couldn’t have known, when they planned their exemplary series on climate change, just how spot-on their timing would turn out to be. As the essays and reports have unrolled over the last few issues, the planet has seen one record hot month after another—2015 crushed the global heat record set in 2014, and now 2016 is in the process of crushing it again. The Paris climate conference has come and gone, and with it at least the start of some kind of concerted global action on this great crisis—but the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere paid no notice. It just kept getting hotter. And in the Adirondacks we finally got a full-on sense of what’s at stake.…

"Hi John I called ya a couple times before with bird questions you answered thanks a lot by the way but I tried to rescue this bird with a broken wing on Adirondak Loj Road figured I’d bring it to the rehab place or whatever but the closer I got to it the farther away the bird ran crying like a baby and sort of half flying and half limping and after a couple hundred yards the [expletive deleted] bird just up and flew away like it never had a problem in the first place and I was so worried about it I left my car in drive when I got out and found it in the [expletive deleted] gully stalled out and I had to call a tow truck…

On our third day of backpacking the Cranberry Lake 50 we found ourselves, more than once, looking at trail markers on trees in the middle of deep beaver ponds. It was always possible to go around, though it often meant a precarious walk on a beaver dam or a climb over and under downed trees, relics of the 1995 microburst wind storm. I didn’t mind as I admire beavers and their engineering feats and the way they have returned to a land where they were completely exterminated. Herbert Keith writes about beaver in his book Man of the Woods, a memoir and history of Wanakena published in 1972. Keith was twelve years old when he first visited Wanakena in 1907 and traveled up the beaver-less Oswegatchie River with Wilfred Morrison,…