Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2023 i Adirondack Explorer

Walden slides into Olympic authority job BY JAMES M. ODATO In September, former Olympic luger Ashley Walden, the head of the Lake Placid 2023 FISU World University Games, became the Olympic Regional Development Authority’s chief executive officer. She beat eight other finalists, including five ORDA officers and Assemblyman Billy Jones, D-Chateaugay Lake, who says he is committed to his job as a lawmaker. Walden, 41, replaced Mike Pratt, 62. He retired after 38 years, six as CEO, at ORDA. In an interview, Walden said her worldwide sports relationships and background as a top athlete—disciplined about planning and reaching goals—prepared her for the $195,000-per-year post, although she must strengthen facilities management skills. A Lake Placid resident since 2005, she said she likes to downhill ski with her 10-year-old daughter and 4-year-old…

Adirondack Watershed Institute scientists for years have raised alarms about the wide-reaching harms of road salt pollution on Adirondack waters. The institute’s researchers connected state highway runoff to residential well contamination, documented salt’s role in changes to aquatic ecosystems and outlined the economic costs of corrosion damage to roads, bridges and vehicles. All the while, the water at Paul Smith’s College, the institute’s longtime home, has shown signs of salt pollution. The college’s water contains among the highest levels of sodium and chloride concentrations in the Adirondack Park, surpassing a threshold recommended for people living with certain heart, kidney and liver conditions. Intermittent water discoloration bedeviled the campus last year, and college officials this summer notified students that drinking water had exceeded action levels for lead in December and May,…

Last December Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation committing New York to conserving 30% of its land and water surface by the year 2030. Known as “30x30,” such an achievement would protect biodiversity, wildlife habitats and clean water and would significantly contribute to our state’s efforts to limit climate change. At the time, roughly 20% of New York’s surface was protected in some fashion: municipal, county, and state parks; state forests; conservation easements; and, most important, the 2.9 million acres of the state forest preserve, 2.6 million acres of which are in the Adirondacks, 300,000 in the Catskills. The forest preserve, rigorously guarded by the provision of the state constitution, which provides it be “forever kept as wild forest lands” and that logging and removing timber for any reason are prohibited,…

It’s a stunning view and all, but the new Buck Mountain trail in Long Lake had me at its parking lot. On Friday we were creeping along South Sabattis Road worried we might miss the standard-issue roadside pullout indicative of the typical Adirondack trailhead, when what to our wondering eyes should appear but a sprawling, modern, room-to-turn-around-without-decapitating-the-Hornbeck parking area, a gravel Shangri La capable, by the looks of it, of accommodating the entire cast of “Gone With the Wind.” Oh sure, some may miss the thrill of removing their pack from the back seat as whizzing semis threaten to send you somersaulting halfway to Utica, but to me the concept of adequate parking was so refreshing and so, so foreign, that the state may want to appoint a task force…

Several years had passed since I last put in at Madawaska Flow in the town of Santa Clara and paddled upstream on Quebec Brook. A half-hour into a trip this past September, as I wended my way up the broad channel, occasionally cutting through lily pads, watching blue jays flit from tree to tree and admiring the view of Jenkins Mountain, I wondered why I waited so long to return. I made it more than four miles before turning around in a spongy bog where the stream was barely wider than my canoe. On the way back, I marveled once more at the beauty and serenity of the surroundings. I thought it absurd that Quebec Brook is not part of the state’s Wild, Scenic and Recreational Rivers System. Modeled on…

The plan to be acquired by Fedcap is now a closed passage in Paul Smith’s College’s 77-year story. “Turned the page,” said Interim President Dan Kelting. The chapter had laid out a vision of how the school would stem years of losses by joining a bigger nonprofit, but one with no history of its own in higher education. Fedcap Group, to be the acquirer, and Paul Smith’s, to be the acquired, would consolidate operations and benefit from synergies and combined funding and enrollment opportunities. But the state Department of Education, after months of review, couldn’t abide by Fedcap’s business model, which called for control of the college’s board and budget. The proposed deal, which produced months of campus stress and hollowed out staff, collapsed in July. Now, the idea is…

Thunder rumbled as we pushed off from the Long Lake boat launch. Four of us were embarking on a three-day canoe trip from Long Lake to Floodwood Pond via the Raquette River and Upper Saranac Lake. With a variety of backcountry experience (from some to basically none) our adventure began before we dipped paddles in the water. There were pre-trip questions like “what’s a portage?” and “should we bring umbrellas?” and Cushy texted a photo of himself in front of a pile of gear and wrote: “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Similar in size, Cushy and Windy paddled one rented canoe, while Minnesota and I paddled another. Both boats were piled with camping gear and essential provisions like beer. When the rains came, we found shelter on shore. After…

It has been over 50 years since golden eagles nested in New York. Fortunately, we can still see these magnificent raptors migrating through in early spring and fall with many overwintering downstate. Golden eagles nested in low numbers in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine during the 20th century, but are now extirpated as breeding birds from the Northeast. Most New York nest sites were in the central Adirondacks with the last confirmed successful one in Hamilton County in 1970, and the last unsuccessful nest at the same site in 1979. Declining open space from reforestation and DDT poisoning are believed to have played a role in this loss. The golden eagle is one of the largest predatory birds in the world and the largest in North America. They…

Slow-walking away from salt New York seems to be in no hurry to reduce the huge amount of road salt it dumps in the Adirondack Park. Meanwhile, the environmental damage of road salt is growing, and it remains a threat to Adirondackers’ health. There were years of talk about the problem before the Randy Preston Road Salt Reduction Act was passed, and then almost another year before the governor appointed a task force to study the issue. The task force’s first deadline to create a report came and went. Then, when a draft was finally completed, the Department of Transportation and Department of Environmental Conservation took another year to make their edits. In September, after these unexplained delays, the report that the law required was finally released. Now, as the…

Contractors will estimate how much battery storage you need. ADK Solar’s Broc Jennings said he will make a list of all household appliances and the number of hours a day they’re used to estimate electrical load. Jennings said they usually plan a battery storage system to hold two days of autonomy. Some people may want more. Ray Falk, of Suntric, said a basic rule of thumb is to anticipate at least 1 kilowatt, or 1,000 watts, of energy per individual in a household. An average house could run off of 5 kilowatts of solar and about 18 kilowatts of battery storage. “When you’re talking about central air and all the creature comforts of the flat apartment in Any Town, USA, it’s going to take a system twice that size to…

By land mass, Speculator is bigger than Buffalo. But instead of a quarter of a million people, Speculator has about 400. And the village can’t take advantage of its room for population growth. Some of its territory is state-owned, some is on the side of a mountain, some is underwater. A disconnected, inaccessible, triangular chunk of the village is off by itself near Raquette Lake somewhere, miles from the village proper, because, well, this is the Adirondacks. But there are other challenges to Speculator’s economic prospects—oddities of grant qualifications that ruin the chances of many Adirondack hamlets of getting public money to spur affordable home development. For instance, few driving through Speculator would call it prosperous. So lean is its budget that Mayor Jeannette Barrett says the village sometimes relies…

It’s not every day that a new trail is cut in the Adirondacks, old mountains explored by humans long before modern trail-building techniques provided moderate grades or stabilized soil. Large tracts that are forever wild cannot be altered in man-made ways. As any local peak bagger can attest, most ascents are direct and eroded, but we endure every heart-pounding, cobbled, foot-soaking step for the jaw-dropping views. Moxham Mountain is different. When I first heard about Moxham in the Vanderwhacker Mountain Wild Forest near Minerva—a new hike that boasts a host of views—I asked Liz Venesky, to explore it with me. Though the 2.6-mile trail opened a decade ago, it still qualifies as “new” in hiking terms. It was constructed by the state Department of Environmental Conservation with the Student Conservation…

When the editor of the Explorer sent me a photograph of myself he discovered on the wall at an Adirondack museum, I was filled with anxiety. The museum exhibit calls me the “first non-white” summit steward. I am not sure if that is true. I am the first Black steward. But I am confident there were folks of color before me. Why present me that way? I am Black. Non-white can mean a lot, but in this context, I think my blackness is most important. Sometimes that bothers people. I remember growing up in Newburgh and a white friend’s parents telling me, I was not Black, I was “Cuban, Puerto Rican” as if my race is directly associated with my heritage, also as if it were more positive to refer…

If you were an Adirondack otter, you might have mixed feelings about ice. Through spring, summer, and fall, you’d splash around your vast water park, diving and sliding and feasting on sushi. But then would come November or December ice to greatly restrict your movements. A beaver might see the change in a similar way. Suddenly the big lumbering rodent’s free movements to and from dry land and water would not be so free. The beaver has only one way in and out of its lodge: underwater. After ice forms, the beaver, an air-breathing mammal like the otter, drops out of its lodge to find itself pinned under impenetrable crystal. It could easily drown. It could starve, too, given the fact that beavers subsist to a large degree on tree…