Innehållsförteckning för March/April 2016 från Adirondack Explorer

Age: 43. Birthplace: Troy, birthplace of the Forty-Sixers! (Of which I’m NOT.) Residence: Keene. Occupation: “Department manager (books, climbing gear, packs) at The Mountaineer in Keene Valley.” Accomplishments: “Being the father to my daughter Zarela.” Favorite ice climb: “Pharaoh Mountain, it’s THE classic moderate ice climb in the Park! Remote, big, and just great! A must-do full-day adventure! Ski in, climb up, ski out, have fun!!” Favorite view: “From the first pitch of Roaring Brook Falls in St. Huberts, when the sun is blasting on you, with the awesome view into the heart of the High Peaks and the Great Range. I also like the view from the summit of Hopkins for the same reasons.” Why I live in the Adirondacks: “Where else can you get the kid off to…

The Adirondack Park Agency voted 9-1 in February to approve a controversial proposal to split a state-owned rail corridor into a rail segment and a trail segment, but the debate over the best use of the corridor is not over. The proposal calls for removing thirty-four miles of track between Lake Placid and Tupper Lake and fixing up forty-five miles of largely unused track between Tupper Lake and Big Moose. Will rail trail destroy a piece of history? Page 37 If implemented, Adirondack Scenic Railroad will have to discontinue a seasonal tourist train that runs ten miles between Saranac Lake and Lake Placid. A newer business, Rail Explorers USA, which offers rail-bike excursions, will be forced to relocate from Saranac Lake. Adirondack Recreational Trail Advocates (ARTA) had pushed for a…

The month of December was the warmest on record in the Adirondacks, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In Saranac Lake, the average temperature for the month was thirty-four degrees, which was fifteen degrees above normal. The temperatures were so high this winter that Saranac Lake was unable to finish its ice palace by the first day of the annual Winter Carnival. For several days before the carnival, the structure was covered with a blue tarp to protect it from rain. In Wilmington, a World Cup freestyle skiing event was canceled because Whiteface Mountain didn’t have enough snow for the event. National Weather Service meteorologist Brooke Taber attributed this winter’s warm weather in the Adirondacks to a shift in the polar jet stream and to climate change. Although…

The four main environmental groups in the Adirondack Park differ over a proposal to allow mountain bikes in two Primitive Areas in the Essex Chain Lakes Complex. The Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) and the Adirondack Council favor an amendment to the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan that would allow bikers to use former all-season roads in the Essex Chain Lakes and Pine Lake Primitive Areas, but Protect the Adirondacks and Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve oppose the measure. All four groups oppose an alternative amendment to the master plan that would open roads to bikes in Primitive Areas across the Adirondack Park—forty tracts, in all, totaling forty thousand acres—lest it weaken the state’s commitment to protect natural resources in these areas. The groups were among hundreds of…

Forest entomologist Mark Whitmore first noticed balsam woolly adelgid on an Adirondack tree in the 1980s while on a trip to the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake. Whitmore, who works for Cornell University, kept tabs on the invasive species in the following decades, but he didn’t see much of an impact on the adelgid’s host trees, balsam firs. In recent years, though, he found dead stands of balsams in Indian Lake and Lake Placid. “Now I’m sort of alarmed because dead trees are showing up,” he said. The balsam woolly adelgid is a tiny insect that is believed to have entered the Northeast from Europe around 1900 via infested nursery trees. Since then it has spread to the southern and western United States. It can be transported by the…

There’s a fish, a deep-water fish, that avoids sunlight, prowling some but not all Adirondack lakes and rivers. You recognize it, if you haul one up, as a creature shaped much like the common yellow perch. But it’s larger and proportionately longer, and it either lacks the dark vertical bands that make a yellow perch easy to recognize or wears these bands faintly. Instead of dark bands, this fish has blotches, lots of them, all over its scaly body. Yet these clues don’t nail down the identification. To know for certain a fish is a walleye, you have to look for a white patch in the lower outer portion of the tail and a dark spot at the bottom rear of the forward dorsal fin. The perch has the dark…

Yes There are lots of ways to learn about and understand history. We read about history in books, in magazines, and from original sources. We see history through the photographs of Matthew Brady or Seneca Ray Stoddard, paintings by Benjamin West, or old maps. We hear the recollections of those who experienced war, depression, and other events great and small. But the most tangible access that we have to history is through our daily contact with historic buildings and places. When I walk across Keeseville’s Stone Arch Bridge, I am inspired by the work of Solomon Townsend and his men who created this span with nothing but their ingenuity and the rock they quarried from the banks of the Ausable River. When I sit in the Beth Joseph Synagogue in…

Jeff Dickinson’s history of running the whitewater of the Hudson River is weighty with research: it has 111 pages of footnotes and bibliography. Those follow his 237-page narrative that launches with descriptions of the landscape and Colonial explorers, flows on through decades of log drivers and adventurers, then crests with the commercial rafting that began in the 1980s and brought tourists to the Adirondacks in the once-spare shoulder season of melting snow. Rafting has since matured into a spring and summer enterprise that extends even into autumn. Dickinson, a whitewater guide himself, interviewed many people for his book. The evolving business of recreational whitewater rafting comprises the entire second half of the volume and contains its most gripping chapter. It’s about one Sunday in the early days when the water…

Survival manuals often contain instructions for constructing elaborate shelters out of snow, such as igloos, quinzee huts, and snow caves. In an emergency, however, you may not have the time or expertise to build such a shelter. Two simple winter shelters are the snow trench and the tree well. Snow Trench For the first, dig a trench about three feet deep. Make it just long enough and wide enough to accommodate your body. Line the bottom with evergreen branches to insulate you from the ground. Many books suggest excavating snow blocks with a shovel or snow saw and leaning them against each other to form a peaked roof over the trench. If this isn’t feasible, you can create a flat roof by placing sticks and ever-green branches across the trench…

The Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation lived up to its name this winter when it facilitated the rescue of five common loons in a single week. Two loons became trapped when the lakes they were on froze: Loon Lake near Chestertown and Big Moose Lake. Since loons need open water to take off, they were unable to fly away. They were released on Lake Champlain. A third loon had become entangled in fishing line in the fall in a pond near Paul Smiths, but rescuers were not able to get close to the bird until the pond iced over. It was taken to the Tufts Wildlife Clinic in Massachusetts and later released in the Atlantic Ocean. A juvenile loon was found on a road near Canton in St. Lawrence County,…

A few years ago, Paul Smith’s College scientist Curt Stager came across a rare find that he says helps tell the story of climate change in the Adirondacks: the journal of Bob Simon, a retired engineer and longtime resident of Cranberry Lake. Simon, who died in 1991, kept a meticulous journal with entries for temperature, wind direction, barometric pressure, water level, ice cover, when loons arrived, and when thunderstorms occurred. He made entries twice a day, morning and night, for the last thirty-two years of his life. Stager received the journal from someone who found it in Simon’s former home, years after the man died. Stager was particularly interested in the entries on thunderstorms because they are not recorded by automated weather stations. Thunderstorms are a form of extreme weather…

Forest Ranger Scott van Laer had just returned from a rescue in the High Peaks Wilderness when he got another call late in the day: an ice climber had taken a very long fall on the north side of Pitchoff Mountain. Van Laer pulled over in his pickup truck to talk via cell phone to the climber’s partners. There was loud screaming in the background. “We knew it was serious, it wasn’t a sprained ankle,” he said. “We knew we had to get there as soon as possible.” In fact, the climber had broken his right femur and his sternum, fractured his skull, and punctured his kneecap. It was 4:30 p.m. on January 23. With little daylight remaining, van Laer turned around the truck—still loaded with snowmobiles and rescue gear—and…

Two of the Adirondack Park’s major environmental groups are suing the state over the management plan for the Essex Chain Lakes region—a large tract of forest, ponds, and streams that the state acquired from the Nature Conservancy as part of the blockbuster Finch, Pruyn deal. Protect the Adirondacks and Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Albany contending that the management plan violates the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan, the state Wild, Scenic, and Recreational Rivers System Act, and state snowmobile-trail policy. Named as defendants are the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which drafted the management plan, and the Adirondack Park Agency, which approved it. The state is expected to reply to the suit in March. Meantime, both agencies are refusing…

This winter showed us, once again, that the snow in the Adirondacks is unreliable. A backcountry skier needs to have a backup plan. Mine is to go west. To Tug Hill. Located a bit west of the Adirondack Park, Tug Hill is known for its huge snowfalls, thanks largely to storms blowing from the Great Lakes. In an average winter, Tug Hill receives more than two hundred inches of snow. Unfortunately, Tug Hill lacks our mountains, so you won’t find the dramatic scenery you enjoy on a ski tour to Avalanche Lake, say, or the summit of Mount Marcy. But there is at least one ski trip that is a must-do if you’re in the region: the five-mile loop around the rim of Whetstone Gulf. I thought of Whetstone Gulf…

Much of this winter may have been a wash for backcountry skiers, but if they have their way, the Adirondack Park will have more backcountry ski routes in the future—routes that will not need as much snow as hiking trails to be skiable. More than a hundred people commented on an Adirondack Park Agency proposal to establish three types of ski trails: Nordic trails, backcountry trails (those with substantial hills), and skin tracks. The last are trails that would be used to reach slides and other skiable terrain. Commenters were almost unanimously in favor of the proposal, which would give land managers wider latitude to develop ski routes throughout the Park. “There’s overwhelming support in what we’re trying to do,” said Ron Konowitz, the president of the Adirondack Powder Skier…

The Adirondack Park is a vast area, and proper stewardship of its sensitive and interconnected regions—from High Peaks to wild rivers to boreal wetlands—requires us to think and act on a landscape scale. If regulators approach important Park management questions on a piecemeal, case-by-case basis, they abandon the broad perspective and bedrock principles that should govern their actions. Instead, they favor opportunism and convenience. Sadly, shortsighted maneuvering by state officials has too often taken the place of big-picture wisdom in recent years. As a result the legal protections created to preserve the Park for future generations have been weakened. The Adirondack Park Agency and the state Department of Environmental Conservation have answered questions about fundamental principles with ad-hoc work-arounds and localized tinkering. From preserving mountaintop fire towers to routing snowmobile…

The Old Mountain Road has been a historic travel corridor between Lake Placid and Keene for over two hundred years. In 1810, the New York State Legislature specifically dedicated the road for public use, and it originally served as a military turnpike during the War of 1812. John Brown’s body was carried over this road in 1859 to its final resting place in North Elba. In some ways the road has served as reminder of times past and a tribute to free men and free thought. This public roadway has been used and enjoyed by residents of the towns of North Elba and Keene and the many guests and visitors to the area for two centuries. Although not used in its entirety in recent years for automobile or truck traffic,…

The Adirondacks are home to thirteen species of nesting ducks. Four of these species nest in cavities: wood duck, hooded and common mergansers, and common goldeneye (the last is a rare breeder here). These ducks don’t make their own tree cavities but rely on those made by woodpeckers, and the distribution of these woodpeckers appears to have strongly influenced the distribution of a number of cavity-nesting ducks. For example, wood ducks prefer nest cavities excavated by pileated woodpeckers, and the ranges of these two species largely overlap. Cavities protect eggs from extreme weather and from predation (e.g., from raccoons), and as a result cavity nesters can invest more time and energy into laying more eggs. In fact, ducks that nest on the ground may have evolved to do so because…

This January morning in Wanakena couldn’t be more different from the day two years ago when a violent turn of nature broke the historic heart of a community. Today, a bracing wind moves over the dry, cold snow that covers the homes, walkways, and riverbed of this former mill town. The Oswegatchie River flashes in the sunlight as it moves swiftly over and around anchored ice, well below its banks. You can see the power that is latent in this stream, but as we stand beside it the conversation is of construction, not destruction. How unlike January 14, 2014. On that day, following a series of thaws and freezes, the rain fell and the river rose and the ice of the Oswegatchie broke loose upstream of Wanakena, hurtling into a…

I knew we were going to have no problems fording West Stony Creek the moment I saw it from the summit. The waterway snaked its way through the valley below us, hemmed in on both sides by gentle hills that were still green with the lushness of summer. It was a wide stream, but not deep; even from this lofty distance I could tell that its surface was as much rock as it was water. “You can see where we’re going to be camping tonight,” I said to my two companions, Justin and Mike. Mike seemed to be particularly interested in learning how to read this landscape, because of the three of us he was the only one who had never been to this part of the Adirondacks before. “Oh…

Located behind the bustling Main Street in Lake Placid, Mirror Lake is one of the most well-known water bodies in the Adirondack Park. It also has a high concentration of road salt (sodium chloride), a fact that is drawing increased attention from local conservationists and elected officials. In 2014, researchers with Adirondack Lake Assessment Program (ALAP) found that the average concentrations of sodium and chloride were, respectively, 22 milligrams and 39 milligrams per liter of water—substantially higher than the concentrations found in Adirondack lakes that lie away from roads. Water with high concentrations of road salt can be toxic to many forms of aquatic life, including fish, macroinvertebrates, insects, and amphibians. It poses a risk to health, growth, and reproduction. In some cases, it leads to lower levels of dissolved…

Topo maps can have information gaps Thanks for the brief article about topo-map reading [Outdoor skills, January/February 2016], which is rapidly becoming a lost art in these days of GPS smart phones. A couple of things to add: Indeed, in theory you could encounter a forty-foot cliff that is not on the map. In practice, I encounter much higher cliffs (eighty to a hundred feet) that are not on the map. Night travelers should be especially alert to this. In addition to the contour intervals, map users should be aware that the maps are based on aerial “spot” data, and not all areas are field checked. So if a cliff is “between the spots,” it may not be represented on the map. Also, the general advice that “V’s indicate valleys…

Last year, an Adirondack milestone was reached when the Department of Environmental Conservation issued a formal plan outlining a route for the North Country National Scenic Trail, stretching across the Adirondack Park from Crown Point to Forestport. When completed, this segment will be part of a 4,600-mile hiking trail extending from the Adirondacks to North Dakota. The presence of the NCNST in the Adirondacks has been a long time coming. The trail was commissioned by Congress in 1980 with passage of the National Trails System Act, which outlined a general corridor for the route while leaving the details to be worked out by others. No authority was granted to carve out a right of way for the trail and create a linear park in the manner of the Appalachian Trail.…

“We have been called everything from Coney Island to tacky, honky-tonk.” With more than forty-four years in the office, Lake George Mayor Bob Blais ranks as the second-longest- tenured mayor in the state and in the top ten nationwide. He began his work in Lake George with the police department in 1956 and also served as village trustee before becoming mayor. He owned an amusement arcade in the village, which he sold four years ago. Located at the southern tip of the lake, the Village of Lake George has a year-round population of 995 and a highly seasonal tourist industry that fills the streets, shops, and attractions in the summer and diminishes drastically in the cold months. With its neighbors in the Lake George Basin, the village has been working…

In 1967, Science published an article destined to be one of the most controversial and most frequently cited ever to appear in that distinguished journal: “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” The author, Lynn White Jr., was a medieval historian, a professor at UCLA. He argued that the devastating and unsustainable exploitation of nature that began with the Industrial Revolution had its intellectual roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially in the creation story in the book of Genesis. White saw the patriarchal, exploitative, frequently abusive treatment of the natural world that underlay Western civilization to flow logically from God’s instruction to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of…

I want to be the best-selling author in the Adirondacks.” Larry Gooley likes to think big. He grew up in the border town of Champlain and speaks with the North Country twang I associate with that area. He started Bloated Toe Enterprises ten years ago with his wife, Jill Jones, as a way to publish his own books and to make a living. He has succeeded at both. Jones also grew up in the North Country, in Whitehall, and both Jones and Gooley worked for years at Wyeth Laboratories in Rouses Point. Gooley, now sixty-two, was previously married and raised three kids. When Pfizer bought Wyeth Labs and started cutting jobs, Jones asked Gooley what he’d do for work if he could do anything. His answer was immediate: “Write books.”…