Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2021 i Adirondack Explorer

The Masten House has been sold and will be a private residence, according to an attorney for the buyer. The Newcomb mansion, previously owned by the State University of New York’s Environmental Science and Forestry College Foundation, was sold at the end of November for $1 million to a private corporation called Upper Works LLC. The listing price was $1.45 million. Records show the LLC was created on Nov. 17 and its contact is attorney Timothy Smith, based out of Lake Placid. Smith said the new owners wished to remain private. The intended use for the property, Smith added, was as a private, single-family residence. The news dashes hopes that some had for a gateway visitor center to the southern Adirondack High Peaks and marks the end of educational programming…

Hiking through the pitch-black forest, I noticed the dirt trail had disappeared and leaves covered the forest floor beneath me. Had I lost the trail? I raised my headlamp and lit up the trees around me. I was only a few feet off the path, so I got back on it and continued climbing. It was late November, and I was hiking the relatively steep 1.8-mile Ranger Trail to the 2,162-foot summit of Poke-O-Moonshine Mountain to catch a sunrise. The hike was quiet except for the occasional sound of a passing vehicle on the nearby Northway. This was notable because on other sunrise hikes I had done during the fall, sounds seemed to stand out before the light emerged. As I hiked through the dark on Baker Mountain in Saranac…

Love brought Diane Fish to the Adirondacks. Although she was raised nearby in Bennington, Vermont, and Williamstown, Massachusetts, she didn’t know about the Adirondacks until she started dating her future husband, Peter, who spent summers in the park. “I’ll never forget taking the Trailways bus through Cascade Pass and seeing it for the first time,” she says of arriving in 1981. The Fishes raised their two children in the Adirondacks and “spend every spare moment” outside skiing, hiking, paddling and biking. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, Diane Fish worked as a teacher and dean of students—in New Jersey and at Lake Placid’s National Sports Academy—and for a time taught private lessons to Tri-Lakes musicians. Then in 2001 she started as a development associate at the Adirondack Council, a…

The Adirondack Park contains the most significant tracts of wildland in the eastern United States, including more than a million acres of public forest preserve classified as wilderness, which is defined as follows by the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan: “An area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The primary function of wilderness designation is to maintain natural biological systems. The preservation of natural beauty—and the opportunities for human recreation in an unparalleled setting—are other important benefits. Here natural tranquility reigns, wildlife and wildlife habitat is undisturbed, and motorized use, except in emergencies, is not allowed. In 2016, wilderness champion Chad Dawson was appointed to the 11-member governing board of the Adirondack Park…

They’ve talked about bigfoot and quicksand, John Brown and the moon landing, national parks and national trails. In wide-ranging discussions punctuated with raucous laughter and frequent profanity, the Foot Stuff Podcast crew delves deep into wilderness issues. The podcast, created by four friends devoted to outdoor activities and the preservation of wild spaces, offers “adventure, antics and activism” in every episode. Tyler Socash, one of the hosts, said he and three friends started the podcast in 2017, after the state purchased the Boreas Ponds lands. Various parties—the state, towns, environmental organizations and individuals—were discussing how the land should be classified and used. “I was advocating for the wild land protections of the Boreas Ponds Tract, at the time New York State's newest acquisition to the New York State Forest Preserve,”…

YES By Steven Engelhart Historic buildings and sites can and do have a place in the Adirondack Forest Preserve. Sites like John Brown’s Farm, the forts at Crown Point, Great Camp Santanoni, Camp Intermission on Lake Colby where the state has an environmental education camp, and the fire towers on Hurricane and St. Regis mountains are all historic resources in the forest preserve that are used for public education and recreation. Classified as “historic” or “administrative” under the Adirondack State Land Master Plan, these resources are managed like any other forest preserve areas within their respective management units and are enjoyed by tens of thousands of people each year. The constitutionality of historic areas in the forest preserve has never been challenged and the public has come to see these…

Birthplace: Minerva Residence: Minerva Occupation: District manager, Essex County Soil and Water Conservation District, and volunteer ski patroller. Favorite hike or other Adirondack adventure: I’m bad at favorites! The High Peaks, nearby fire towers, and some great ponds and blueberry patches. Favorite view: There are endless great views, but some that are special to me are in Irishtown. I love the morning sunshine on fresh snow on the face of Moxham. What to know about Adirondack soil and water: I think we all know that our lands and waters are our greatest resource and we should continue to be good stewards. Advice for Adirondack gardeners/farmers: I learn more from them than they do from me. But our office does have resources available to them, and resources we can connect them…

Adirondack lake advocates want stronger state protections against aquatic invaders after boats carrying damaging species delivered some close calls in 2020. Some even question whether New York’s regulators are doing enough to enforce laws already on the books. Contractors and lake associations, who run boat inspection stations, say most boaters are happy to get their vessels checked, cleaned, drained and dried to prevent species transport. After all, the intention of the law, and the voluntary program supporting it, is to keep lakes and ponds clear of invasive plants and creatures that could ruin the natural ecosystem and mar activities such as boating and swimming. Still, hundreds of boaters refuse inspections and cleanings, and stewards lack authority to force them. Aquatic invaders can range from tiny mollusks to fish to weeds,…

State Route 28 will take you to North Creek and, if you’re not careful, right by it. When driving northwest from the Northway, slow down after the Ski Bowl and look for the right onto 28N. At the four corners, turn left onto Main Street. Slow down even more. In fact, pull over and park. If you go by North Creek’s mosaic at more than a walking pace, you will miss the story of a community. The mosaic is a work of art in glass, stone, shells and tile. It covers a 220-foot-long retaining wall, 4 feet high at the south end and 11 feet at the north end. The afternoon sun makes it shine, and passing cars reflect the colors in their windows. For artist and teacher Kate Hartley,…

Hydro plants are green energy In regard to your article about dams on the Saranac River (November/December): The protection/conservation population constantly encourages the use of renewable energy sources. Yet you as a group constantly gripe about solar or wind farms—and heaven forbid someone wants to have a hydro plant. Hey children, look out past the end of your nose … you can't have it both ways! Robert Grimm Amsterdam Ranger shortage temporary; the forest preserve is forever “Should the state pursue buying the Whitney Park estate?” was the subject of the “It’s Debatable” column (November/December). The debate was unusual in that two leading voices for Adirondack conservation, ranger Scott van Laer and wilderness advocate Peter Bauer, took opposing sides. At stake are the remaining 36,000 acres of Whitney lands now…

I don’t need to heap up superlatives for the views from Hurricane Mountain. Breathtaking, spectacular, magnificent, etc. You’ve heard them all before. And you’ve seen the photos. Hell, you’ve probably been there. With the views, of course, come crowds. On a summer weekend, good luck finding a parking place near the trailheads on Route 9N and at Crow Clearing. Even in winter, these trails are usually packed down. Nevertheless, it is possible to summit Hurricane and not see a soul. You just need to follow these simple rules: 1. Take the little-traveled trail from the east. 2. Pick a weekday in February. 3. Make sure the conditions suck. I can vouch for this recipe, having tried it last winter with Adirondack Explorer photographer Mike Lynch and my neighbor Tim Peartree.…

If there’s a tree in the Adirondacks I love more than any other, it’s Tsuga canadensis, known to most of us as eastern hemlock, or simply hemlock. Hemlocks are grand—perhaps the biggest trees in the region by volume—and stand in our woods like shaggy sentient giants from Tolkien. What’s more, for me they represent the spring from which much of the good in my present life flows. In a hemlock grove on my 34th birthday, I met a woman who awoke in me a passion for children and family life I never knew I possessed. Hemlocks came first. Then followed marriage, 18 acres along the Saranac, and children. Hemlocks loom more poignantly than ever in my thinking these days as the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive insect that wreaks havoc…

Chad Dawson wanted more deliberation. The wilderness expert who taught resource management classes at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry resigned from the Adirondack Park Agency board in December. He announced his decision at the end of a meeting in which he objected to two projects that advanced without the scrutiny he favored. It’s a position he has staked out since Gov. Andrew Cuomo appointed him as an out-of-park board member from Onondaga County in 2016. For instance, in early 2018 he was the lone member to vote against splitting the Boreas Ponds Tract between wilderness and wild forest designations. His reasoning: The agency hadn’t vetted an all-wilderness option first. Dawson told the Adirondack Explorer that he hopes his resignation will force others to…

Jerry Delaney Sr. thought his skidder was blowing apart. The heavy-duty transporter for felled trees was shaking. The noise was so loud that he shut it off and jumped. Then he saw it, a military jet screaming overhead, level with the treetops. Delaney, who was working a logging operation near Franklin Falls, got back on the skidder and continued his work. Another time, he was buzzed by a couple of military jets while climbing Mount Arab near Tupper Lake. The aircraft had done a tight circle around the mountain, he said, before flying back toward Fort Drum. “It’s like, damn,” Delaney said and chuckled. “I think it’s a comforting sight.” Other hikers report mistaking military aircraft for thunder. The mountainous, remote terrain of the Adirondack Park is a paradoxical proving…

Somewhere high over Lake Ontario last February the weather gods were cackling with wild abandon. They had cooked up a little lake-effect snow, which is effectively a storm system without the system, a blizzard-in-a-bottle created by frigid winds freezing the vapor rising from comparatively warm bodies of water. Lake communities such as Buffalo bear the brunt of it, but tendrils of these frozen whiteouts can reach across the Tug Hill Plateau into the west-central Adirondacks. These stinging, cloudless snows sail on icy winds that speed across frozen North Country lakes. It is weather only northern pike could love. At least, that was the hope. The unscientific but solemnly accepted rule of ice fishing, said veteran Adirondack ice fisherman and guide Matt Burnett, is that the worse the weather, the better…

In mid-September, Katie Rhodes and Bethany Garretson were coming down off Panther Mountain. The sun had just risen and there was a blanket of clouds hanging over the High Peaks. “You could just see those grand mountains poking out from them,” Rhodes said. “It was just a magical, beautiful view. It got me a little emotional, just having that standing-with-the-Gods type moment. And those are the moments that keep you going out there.” Rhodes and Garretson were on an historic trek through New York’s tallest mountains, on their way to becoming the first known women to thru-hike the High Peaks in a continuous, unsupported, documented effort, according to fastestknowntime.com, a website that collects data on time records for routes around the world. The pair did the hike in seven days,…

The first time I saw an evening grosbeak I experienced a neck-snapping déjà vu as I visualized a brilliantly yellow 1956 Ford Thunderbird with a black convertible top that a neighbor used to park immediately outside my bedroom window. When I opened my eyes in the morning I saw the Thunderbird, which gave me quite a bit of pleasure, and when I saw my first evening grosbeak my jaw dropped, I could swear, all the way down to the ground. Not simply black and yellow, the evening grosbeak has a white greater covert that looks exactly like the whitewall tires on that Thunderbird. Even though the Thunderbird didn’t have any feathers, nor the evening grosbeak any hubcaps, I never managed to dissociate the automobile and the bird. Still, I’ve managed…

It snowed hard and the wind blew strong and cold in Lake Placid on the afternoon of Jan. 22, 2004. Looking down the icy bobsled run atop Mount Van Hoevenberg, world-class skeleton racer Courtney Yamada clutched her 75-pound sled, a piece of metal on knifelike blades. She heard a verbal signal that the track was clear. She trained her eye on the traffic light. When it turned from red to green she had 30 seconds to slide onto the track and speed facefirst downhill like a flash. A half-hour earlier, David Desrocher had arrived for work on the mountain. He was three months into the job as a laborer for the Olympic Regional Development Authority, which runs the bobsled facility at Van Hoevenberg and other alpine and Nordic venues owned…

The recent spread of non-native forest pests in the Adirondacks brings new urgency to New York State’s firewood transport regulations. Designed to keep campers and others from moving tree killers to new woods, the regulations restrict hauling of untreated wood and require permits. Violators may face a $250 fine plus a $100 civil penalty and up to 15 days in jail. When Explorer reporter Gwendolyn Craig sought to learn how many people the Department of Environmental Conservation has ticketed for these offenses over the last 10 years, the department provided 46 examples. In 2020, the emerald ash borer made its first known appearance in the Adirondack Park, its larvae carving up the vascular system under the bark and threatening the species as it has done across the United States. The…