Sommaire pour January/February 2022 de Adirondack Explorer

Shutting the door to a “second chance” in Moriah BY TIM ROWLAND After Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the Moriah Shock Incarceration Facility would be closing March 10, her office received a bundle of 50 letters in protest. They weren’t from employees in fear of losing their jobs, nor from business leaders concerned about the local economy. The inmates themselves, who believe the small but effective prison is giving them their best chance of survival, wrote to Albany. If unusual for a typical prison, it is not surprising for Moriah Shock, where inmates stock food pantry shelves and cut hiking trails, and where corrections officers say beleaguered Adirondack residents have been known to cheer inmate work details arriving to help clean up after a devastating flood. In return, officers say,…

John DeVivo has had it with hikers. Their cars clog up the roads and parking lots of Franconia Notch State Park in New Hampshire, 600 to 800 vehicles every beautiful Saturday and Sunday. They come in flip-flops and expect to hike three mountains. They leave trash. They come out of the woods on strange parts of the highway, lost and looking for a ride. DeVivo has given some a lift “in all their after-hiking glory.” He keeps the windows down. The 53-year-old has been the general manager of the park going on 15 years. Many hikers are good stewards, but over time he has seen more unprepared people attempting some of the White Mountain National Forest’s most serious climbs, he said. More than 65% of hikers he sees do not…

Finding a safe and inclusive place to live in this world has eluded me. I couldn’t find it in rural Pennsylvania. Perhaps a “safe place” for some, I felt anything but safe growing up there. I was excluded from birthday parties, labeled undateable, teased about my hair, and called racial slurs. It was often the smaller slights that hurt the most because they were said by those closest to me, with what they considered good intentions. While I spent a lot of time playing outside as a kid, my true love of nature was cultivated in my twenties. I craved adventure and would often travel alone. The more time I spent in nature, the more I loved it. I learned quickly that many of those spaces did not love me…

I’m not a big fan of snowmobiles. A good argument can be made that riding gas-powered sleds through the Forest Preserve violates Article 14, the section of the state constitution that says state lands in the Adirondacks and Catskills “shall be forever kept as wild forest lands.” But the time to make that argument was 60 years ago when snowmobiles first appeared on the scene. Snowmobiling is now embedded in Adirondack culture and a big part of the winter economy. Since we allow snowmobiles, we must have snowmobile trails. And to build trails, we must cut trees. Yet it’s not clear how many trees may be destroyed without violating Article 14. A recent ruling by the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest tribunal, shed little light on the matter. If…

For millions of years, conifers, plants that produce seeds in cones and abound in the Adirondacks’ most picturesque places, dominated the world’s forests. Conifers are largely evergreen. The exception in the Adirondacks is the deciduous tamarack, which sheds its needles in fall and grows a new set in springtime. Conifers are gymnosperms. From the Greek, gymn means “naked” and sperm means “seed.” The seeds of gymnosperms consist of embryonic plants and not much else. By contrast, the seeds of more recently evolved flowering plants, or angiosperms, enter the world embedded in fruits. The seeds in most fruits are not naked but associated with nutritive material that helps the sprouting offspring get launched in life. In a great many environments, the tendency of flowering plants to aid their progeny gives them…

Most hikers, when they arrive at the Adirondack Loj trailhead, emerge from their cars in a flurry of activity. They are eager to lace up their boots, get their gear together, and hit the trail after a long drive into the mountains. Some of these hikers, depending on the time of year, might be interrupted by a volunteer who is equally as eager, offering advice about what to bring and how to stay safe. The words of wisdom are almost universally well received, and prevent more than a few hikers from heading down the wrong trail or going out without a map, as this reporter can attest from a recent weekend volunteering as one such “trailhead steward.” It is also an important part of a strategy called “preventative search and…

I had never hiked any of the Northville-Placid Trail’s 135 miles before the morning of Nov. 15. I had no expectations. I was coming back from two weeks of traveling, and I was excited to get back to the land I call home, upstate New York. What better way to acclimate to the world around you, than literally grounding yourself on the earth underneath? I woke up late and rushed to the trailhead. Once out of the car at the parking area at Benson, I immediately felt enamored by the wide trees around me that opened to Woods Lake. The trees looked strong and older than what I am used to in the High Peaks Region. The lake beckoned me and my hiking partner. The sun glistened on its cascading,…

Located on a stretch of Route 86, about halfway between Wilmington and Lake Placid, sits a discolored and weather-beaten sign. It notifies motorists—via two barely visible, yellow directional arrows—of the route to F.C.I. Ray Brook and Adirondack C.F. Visitors intrigued by the sign’s cryptic initialisms would, upon parking their vehicles, discover a rusted disc bearing the emblem of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. A quick trip down Ray Brook Road would soon clarify the meanings. F.C.I. stands for Federal Correctional Institute, C.F. for Correctional Facility. Travelers unfamiliar with the legal distinctions separating the Forest Preserve from the wider Adirondack Park could be forgiven for wondering how a place “acquired for the free use of all the people of the state” and “maintained as wild forest land” for visitors’ “enjoyment” could…

During a field trip to Bloomingdale Bog that my wife and I led for Northern New York Audubon, a woman who hadn’t said a thing for an hour and a half, nor smiled, turned to me with a merciless look and demanded: “I wanna see a white-breasted nuthatch!” Soon as she spoke, I heard one, close by, holding forth for all it was worth. “Do you hear this, I said, pointing in the direction of the song?” “Yes,” she said, “what is it?” “A white-breasted nuthatch,” I explained. At the same moment I sighted the bird, 15 feet away, at eye level. The woman frowned and looked at me suspiciously, then took an unusually long time to look in the direction I indicated. Listen I directed my laser pointer at…

While casting a line into an Adirondack lake, you hear a sharp squeak breaking the solitude. You look to the trees and see a bald eagle alight and fly over the lake. You consider paddling toward the tall pine onto which this majestic raptor glides to a landing. You want to get a closer look at the white-headed wonder, maybe snap a photo. Back off, state wildlife biologists urge. Keep your distance, use binoculars, let wildlife alone. After a comeback in the years since DDT was banned in the 1970s, New York’s bald eagle population grew so that a sighting, though remarkable, is not rare. The New York Natural Heritage program listed 426 occupied bald eagle nest sites in 2017. The Breeding Bird Atlas project listed 1,203 sightings and 362…

In December 2020, the Adirondack Explorer ran a story of a happy gathering in Saranac Lake’s Riverfront Park to celebrate the signing of a law to study and reduce the use of road salt in the Adirondack Park. The measure’s sponsor, state Assemblyman Billy Jones, was there, as was Dan Stec, who had just been elected to the state Senate, along with leaders of environmental organizations and the daughter of the longtime Wilmington town supervisor for whom the law was named. Speeches were made and congratulations were shared all around.   That fine moment, we are sad to say, is as far as the work has progressed.    A full year later, Gov. Kathy Hochul did what former Gov. Andrew Cuomo failed to do—she actually appointed the task force. Still,…

On a sunny July day in 2007, Seth Jones for the first time stepped atop Mount Marcy. He took in the power of the summit and its seemingly endless views and encountered a uniformed woman. Julia Goren, an Adirondack Mountain Club summit steward, told Jones about the fragile alpine ecosystem blanketing New York’s tallest mountain and the importance of not stepping on the plants. Being a steward intrigued him. “It had never really occurred to me that that type of work was out there,” he recalled. The hiker-steward interaction has happened hundreds of thousands of times since the steward program was established in 1989, but on that day two future education directors of ADK stood together on top of New York state. Entering its centennial year, ADK, which has enabled…

Fire towers were built to provide visibility, to give lookouts a bird’s-eye view of the surrounding forest so they could pinpoint smoke and prevent bigger fires. Before towers, open summits on some mountains provided opportunities for scouts keeping an eye on enemy movements. Black Mountain’s summit, which offers a long view of the length of Lake George, has been used for both military monitoring during the French and Indian War and for fire-spotting, with the first wooden tower built in 1911 and later steel versions staffed until 1988. But when we pulled into the lot of Black Mountain early last winter, I wasn’t sure if we’d see much at all. Clouds hung low over the surrounding hills, leaving the sky gray and uninspiring. Black Mountain, in the Lake George Wild…

The $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure bill means $170 billion is slated for New York. Working with the Adirondack Association of Towns and Villages, we asked 100 municipalities what they see as the top project in their communities. (Stay tuned for a full report.) Sewer district in Brainardsville needs a $600,000 upgrade The Town of Bellmont board is bent on updating the Brainardsville Sewer District. It serves 64 residences, a church, a privately owned community center, three small businesses, a U.S. Post Office and the town hall. Cost estimates for the work exceed $600,000 and the board feels that the district taxpayers cannot afford what is needed to make these improvements. We also are under pressure from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to make repairs to this facility. The facility…