Innehållsförteckning för March/April 2023 från Adirondack Explorer

Night skiing story a dream come true Thanks to the Adirondack Explorer for printing such a fun, informative article (“Night trippers” January/February). I love the way the article is so creatively written by Liza Frenette, making you feel like you’re on the trail with them. What a wonderful story of Jim Frenette Sr.’s dream to have permanent trails for all to enjoy—his ingenious night-light system—and his determination and perseverance in the face of “you can’t do it!” The article and the story give us all hope that our dreams can come true too. Ginger HannahAltamont Three times the pleasure Your January/February issue (“The Triad and More, Tupper’s Mounting Assets”) hit my trifecta with three splendid stories: Zachary Matson's illuminating interview with Paul Smith's College climate scientist Curt Stager, Lisa Ballard's…

The towns of Dannemora, Bolton, Indian Lake and Chester all own a high hazard dam rated unsound by state inspectors. Dannemora’s Chazy Lake Dam lacked annual updates to its emergency action plan (EAP) for over a decade. In reports sent to the town’s supervisor every two years between 2013 and 2021, state Department of Environmental Conservation inspectors noted the omissions. “The EAP is long overdue and needs to be expeditiously submitted,” inspectors urged in a 2019 letter. Some of the park’s municipal dam repair projects have been studied, designed and permitted, but construction remains unfunded as local governments reluctant to invest heavily in dam improvements wait for state and federal support. When the DEC in November announced nearly $565,000 in federal funding for high hazard dams, Chester Supervisor Craig Leggett…

Jessica and Adam Payne and their two children, Henry, 8, and Norah, 9, didn’t get skunked ice fishing with guide Evan Bottcher on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Taylor Pond in Clinton County. Jessica is an angling enthusiast and Norah loves fishing and eating and studying fish. While holding her first ice-caught perch of the day, Norah thanked the yellow and green squirmer and announced: “I’m going to dissect you when I get home.” Such outings are happening regularly in the Adirondacks with the increase in interest in the outdoors amid worries of a warming Earth. No strangers to fishing, the Paynes fished for blue gill and trout before relocating to Valatie in Columbia County from the Sierras. When asked what brought them East, Adam simply said “fire.”…

If you lived in the Adirondack Park in the spring of 1973, you couldn't avoid protracted discussions about the Adirondack Park Land Use and Development Plan. In every local bar and at public hearings within the Blue Line and downstate, the plan for limiting development on all private land in the park was the hot topic. Within the park, the talk was largely hostile: Adirondackers did not want planners from Albany telling them what they could do with their property. At the Indian Lake hearing, for example, Assemblyman Glenn Harris, who represented much of the central Adirondacks, arrived by helicopter and dramatically announced that he had just submitted a bill to delay any implementation of the development plan for a year (this bill passed but was vetoed by Gov. Nelson…

When his cat disappeared a few years ago, my neighbor suspected that it had been killed by a coyote. I commiserated with my neighbor and pitied his pet. What a horrible way to die. I would not have cared as much, or at all, if the coyote had killed a rabbit or a squirrel. Most people do not get upset when wild animals prey on other wild animals. That’s just nature at work. In her new book “Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility,” the philosopher Martha Nussbaum questions our indifference to carnage in the wild. Much of Nussbaum’s book deals with more familiar targets of animal-rights activists, such as factory farms, puppy mills, zoos and marine parks. In one section, though, she discusses the suffering of animals in the wild,…

An avid birder and hobby photographer, Tara Fuller regularly drives along the northwestern shoreline of Lake Champlain looking for raptors. But in early December something else caught her eye. She noticed limp snow geese washing up on shore or lying dead on the ground. Snow geese migrate through the Champlain region in the spring and fall and travel in the thousands. They can be found in farm fields or on the water, usually in the northern part of the lake. “The lake looks like it has snow on it, there’s so many of them on it,” said Curtis Latremore, owner of Pine Ridge Farm in Chazy. Over a week, Fuller saw about 30 dead snow geese, mostly in the Dunn Bay area north of Plattsburgh. The dead birds were usually…

Those familiar with Lyon Mountain’s history associate the community with a certain “m” word: mining. But the iron mines, once among the most productive in the world, shut down in the late 1960s, and with that went the rumbling D&H ore trains, the school (it was converted to a prison, but that too eventually closed), the jobs filled by one of the most ethnically diverse small-town populations in New York. Up the side of its eponymous mountain, decaying gray mine structures and gray tailings piles sprouting scraggly trees loomed like vultures over the main drag lined with lookalike company houses. The “m” word for Lyon Mountain became “moribund.” Fast forward 50 years, and there’s a new “m” word in town: maple. The place once famous for extracting iron ore from…

The wind whipped across Saratoga Lake, snuffing out John Sullivan’s cigarette. A quarter mile from shore, he hovered over a hole in the 10-inch-thick ice. Determination lined his face as he searched for the quad that had eluded his team of divers for 90 minutes. It should have been the second four-wheeler they’d salvaged that late February day, the first one having been pulled elsewhere on the lake by the crew chief now directing another diver. “Ninety percent is locating it,” Sullivan said. He pointed to a spot on the ice 30 paces away for a new hole. He and a crew leader barked directions to four men with ropes, chainsaws and augers. Sullivan, 56, whose day job is bulldozer operator, has been diving for three decades. He is one…

Let’s try to live with what we’ve got I like to think of myself as a glass half-full guy, but it’s hard to be optimistic about fixing something that is so complex, so polarizing and means so many different things to different people. To Adirondack Park Agency staff, the Land Use and Development Plan is a regulation to diligently enforce. To the groups that dedicate themselves to “protecting” the park, it is the Holy Grail of regulation and not enforced diligently enough. To the average property owner, it’s a confusing, time-consuming and costly obstacle to building a viable life. What’s worse, 50 years after enactment, there is little help available to the average property owner in understanding and navigating the plan. Can it be improved? Theoretically, yes. Realistically, it’s doubtful.…

One of my favorite nocturnal signs of spring is listening to the wild vocalizations and twittering displays of the male American woodcock in late March. It is the earliest migrant species to breed in northern New York. With seemingly countless nicknames—timberdoodle, bog sucker, night partridge, Labrador twister, big-eye, mud bat—you know they must be adored. The American woodcock is a forest-dwelling shorebird species that nests in areas where it can readily find earthworms, its primary food source. It can be found in shrubby wet areas, bogs, along roads in shrubby areas bordering the edges of forests, wet meadows and in young forests with openings. It returns to our area in late March and migrates south in October, wintering in the southeastern United States. Its appearance has been described as bizarre.…

We appreciate New York State’s investments aimed at making this part of the world a bit better and enabling more people to share in all it has to offer. That doesn’t mean, though, that we don’t question how the state is prioritizing those investments. Take, for instance, the roughly $500 million of taxpayers’ funds that the governor and state legislators have invested over the past few years in the Olympic Regional Development Authority to upgrade winter facilities at Whiteface, Lake Placid and Mount Van Hoevenberg. That’s more than the state’s entire $400 million Environmental Protection Fund. It’s 20 times the size of any recent state land purchases. It completely dwarfs investments in trail building and the Lake Placid to Tupper Lake rail trail. Included in the half-billion-dollar price tag are…

As early as 1970, safety inspectors described Rainbow Lake Dam near the hamlet of Indian Lake as dangerous and urged action to lower the water level. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1979 deemed the dam “unsafe, emergency.” By 2004, the state Department of Environmental Conservation called for it to be removed if it no longer served a purpose, highlighting its potential to cause loss of life if it failed. The dam’s owners, a tangle of companies linked to New York City developer Gary Spindler and a religious nonprofit in Brooklyn, ignored a 2013 order from the DEC commissioner requiring them to submit an emergency action plan and skipped a judicial hearing. DEC lawyers referred the case to the attorney general’s office, which prodded the owners to sign a…

Hopes of changes to forest preserve policy and management are informed by the sweater weave of three downhill backcountry ski trails and one uphill track on Jenkins Mountain. It is where a band of Adirondack Park enthusiasts joined forces and built a demonstration project, though they’re now butting heads on what it is demonstrating. The Adirondack Powder Skier Association, through its leader Ron Konowitz, hopes the mountain trails will show backcountry ski routes are possible on forest preserve. Adirondack Wilderness Advocates and Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve used Konowitz’s expertise to build the trails, but they’re not necessarily in support of his project. They view the trails purely as examples of visitor use management (VUM), a tool for making project decisions on forest preserve—state land with “forever wild”…

As we drove to the trailhead to the Siamese Ponds Wilderness, I eyed the thermometer on the dashboard. It ranged from minus 13 to minus 18, depending on whether we were climbing or descending a hill. Whatever the final temperature, it would be a chilly morning for sure. The readout finally settled on a relatively balmy minus 8 as my friend Steve Goldstein and I pulled into the parking area and joined Phil Brown, former Explorer editor. Our plan was to cross-country ski to Siamese Ponds, a popular warm-weather destination with plenty of winter skiing potential. With a forecasted high in the low teens, this was not a day for newbies. Fortunately, between the three of us, we had decades of experience staying warm in the cold. As we set…

We have a tradition in the family to cross-country ski into the Santanoni Great Camp in Newcomb every year around New Year’s Day. Santanoni is one of the Adirondack’s first Great Camps, built in 1893 by the Albany-based banker Robert Pruyn and his wife, Anna. On 13,000 acres surrounding Newcomb Lake, it offers 5,000 square feet of lakeside. It was built for a farm with large barns for cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. There were four farmhouses and a stone creamery. Some years on our annual ski we have 10 or 15 people. This year there were only five, my wife, Judy, daughter, Erin, son-in-law, Paul, and our 7-year-old granddaughter, Maggie. Maggie made her first attempt last year and went almost two miles before turning back. She vowed to go…

Casper ter Kuile, author of “The Power of Ritual,” says pilgrimages are transformative journeys “to a special place,” not defined by distance, but by change. He depicts such travel as consisting of intention, journey and return. Living in Albany since 2015 has made every trip I’ve taken on the Northway to the Adirondacks a pilgrimage of some sort. I set out with an intention and always return changed. The 10 days on the Northville-Lake Placid Trail last year was more than enough time to contemplate everything I ever thought about myself and the world around me. A day after I completed the NPT, I turned 30. I came back to Albany, with a new sense of understanding. The intricacies of those lessons planted seeds within me, stored deep in my…

Early in my evolution as a naturalist, the illogic of putting wildflowers and trees in separate field guides dawned on me. Unlikely as it may seem, this botanical epiphany led to love, marriage and children. Here’s how it happened. One evening a good many years back, a brilliant and beautiful young woman sat in the front row of a lecture hall where I was showing slides and speaking about trees. In a notebook, Debbie wrote down what for her was the chief lesson of my talk: trees are wildflowers. Lucky for me, Debbie found that cool and intriguing. Before you know it, the two of us were exploring the wild woods together and moving on from there. Yes, trees are big wildflowers, or at least, our native Adirondack maples, birches,…