Sommaire pour May/June 2024 de Adirondack Explorer

New York taxpayers paid tens of millions of dollars for the Lake Placid 2023 FISU World University Games and well more than anticipated. The organizer of last year’s event spent almost $1,000 for every ticket sold, a new report showed. COVID-19, housing shortages and employee recruitment added to complications of hosting the 12-day event in January 2023. In all, the organizing group spent $57.3 million, sold 57,645 tickets (many deeply discounted) and took in modest sponsor dollars. The Lake Placid 2023 FISU World University Games organization “faced enormous challenges finding staff, let alone engaging qualified, Games-experienced workforce,” the group stated in a 268-page report to the International University Sports Federation. The report, completed more than a year after the Games, offers a look at what went well or could have…

The Northeast Wilderness Trust announced its intention to create the Moriah Wilderness Preserve, a 1,775-acre puzzle-piece that fits with other private- and state-protected lands in the Adirondack foothills that rise from the Champlain Valley. To call these lands—which include the Hammond Pond Wild Forest and the Eddy Foundation’s Parch Pond tract—“underused” is to consider them from a purely human perspective. For wildlife, the paucity of human activity is an obvious selling point, and among the goals of the preserve is to establish four-legged connectivity from the Green Mountains of Vermont, across a narrow, oft-frozen neck of Lake Champlain to the High Peaks. There are no plans for hiking trails on the preserve, but it’s open to the public and has plenty of opportunity for exploration. Janelle Jones, NEWT’s New York…

One of North America’s most rapidly declining songbirds, the rusty blackbird, has lost 85% to 99% of its population in the past five decades. This ongoing, mysterious disappearance flew under the radar for years, perhaps due to this dark species blending in with other large, mixed blackbird flocks in winter. Eventually, Christmas Bird Count data revealed a steep decline. The little-known blackbird has become a focus of research, but they’re tough to monitor. Males are glossy-black with a blue-green sheen in breeding plumage (dark brown with rusty edging in winter, thus their name). Females are a brown to rusty color with a pale eyebrow. Both types have light-yellow eyes. The male’s song resembles rusty hinges creaking. Their call note is a hard “chek” sound. Breeding ranges run from Alaska, east…

Depending on where you are in the Adirondacks, you can toss the household stuff you think is recyclable into one bin and put it out by the curb, or you may need to carefully separate the bottles, cans, paper, etc. and cart them off to a collection center. In either case, everything then proceeds to … where exactly? Various entities play a part in that throwaway afterlife: municipalities, private corporations, nonprofits, the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), followed by a slew of “end markets”—glass factories, paper mills, grinders, assorted melting pots, all ending in new products on shelves—or, if things go wrong, the dump. End markets (and prices they pay for recycled materials) are constantly changing. When China abruptly stopped accepting waste from the U.S. and Europe in 2018,…

Humble little Jones Hill, an 1,880-foot bump in the town of Schroon, doesn’t draw much attention—just yet. A mountain in hiking limbo, with trails sketched in from two separate directions, neither of them complete, it fell victim to the state’s ill-fated plans for snowmobile connector trails that were ruled overly intrusive on the wilderness in May of 2021 by the courts. The state’s response was to halt most all trail building and the project languished. But Jones Hill is to be part of the North Country Scenic Trail (NCST), a 4,600-mile odyssey from North Dakota to Vermont, loosely bisecting the Adirondack Park. Seven miles of it will traverse Jones Hill, from the Big Pond Trailhead on Hoffman Road west of Schroon Lake to the Dirgylot trailhead on Route 9 between…

State fisheries managers are developing a new approach to manage the special lake-dwelling brook trout that populate hundreds of Adirondack water bodies and are in some peril. The emerging strategy will continue to shift focus to maintaining and establishing naturally-reproducing fish populations, while also providing anglers a mix of fishing opportunities. A new management plan, which officials said will be released for public comment this year, may also be followed by new brook trout regulations, including expanded prohibitions on the use of baitfish in most brook trout waters. Steve Hurst, chief of the bureau of fisheries at the Department of Environmental Conservation, during a presentation in Warrensburg in April emphasized the rarity of New York’s ponded brook trout populations. Maine is the only other state in the region that sustains…

Most people hike through rattlesnake habitat and hope they won’t see a rattlesnake. But my son, Ned, and I are not like most people. I’ve been keen on snakes of all kinds since earliest memory, and Ned, who by the age of 5 or so had discovered a knack for finding harmless, pencil-thin, red-bellied snakes at our place, enjoys reptiles, too. Ned had never seen a rattlesnake in the wild, and I had never set eyes on one in the Adirondacks. Most of the Adirondack Park is free of venomous snakes, but a few select places near Lake George and Lake Champlain hold small timber rattlers. So last May, just after the middle of the month, we waited for a warm, sunny morning following a chilly night—promising conditions for reptiles…

In 2023, the state invested a very large chunk of taxpayer money to hold a world-class winter sporting event in Lake Placid. Local leaders believed the FISU World University Games would lure tens of thousands of visitors to the region while also attracting state funding for the Adirondacks—money that would pay for significant, long-postponed upgrades to Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) sports venues, bringing them up to world-class standards to attract events. They said it would put Lake Placid back on the map in the winter sporting world years after losing some of the luster of the 1932 and 1980 Olympic games. They believed the World University Games would also spur the state to move forward with plans for a 14-county transportation system and two new workforce housing complexes for…

At least once a week, 30-year-old LJ Mills loads up a backpack with water sampling bottles, a laptop and wilderness supplies to take into the vast backcountry of the central Adirondacks. The biogeochemical research support specialist isn’t planning a leisurely few hours in the woods, but an exploratory workday with precise data collection and observation. He heads out of his ranch-style rental on the southern side of the 15,000-acre Huntington Wildlife Forest, a property owned by his employer, the State University of New York’s Environmental Science and Forestry College (SUNY-ESF) to visit several sites in the area. Mills, and others, have been checking on the forest for nearly 50 years. The Adirondack Environmental Long-Term Monitoring Program (ADK-LTM) began in the 1970s to study acid rain. Now, the information-rich project is…

The registry of Adirondack 46ers, filled with the names of Baby Boomers who got back on the trails after years away, speed-walkers who took days to complete a round of 46 peaks and even barefooted hikers, grew by 726 people last year, making 2023 another banner year for finishers. The numbers made it 10 years in a row that at least 500 people registered annually with the nonprofit hiking group, with 2014 being the first time that mark had been reached. There are now 15,506 on the list, which started in 1925. Not everyone who finishes all the High Peaks joins the group. Formed as the Forty-Sixers of Troy in 1936 by a group of hiking enthusiasts, the club now has more than 6,000 active members. People must finish the…

In the spring of 1921, Rose Schaefer’s respiratory issues pushed her to seek respite in the cool and clean air of the Adirondack Mountains. Fortunately, relocating from Schenectady up north to Warren County for nearly half the year wasn’t a problem for the Schaefer family. You could say her husband Peter and the children really took to the place. “1921 is a very important year for the Adirondacks because that’s when the Schaefer family moved into a house near North Creek,” said Dave Gibson, managing partner of Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve. “That is a very significant moment because that family has had a huge impact on the park.” Peter and Rose’s five children also made their mark on the Adirondack Park. And now the grandchildren and great-grandchildren…

There’s an old adage among anglers that the fishing gets good in the rain. One theory is that the droplets aerate the surface of the water, enticing fish to become more active. The fish cannot see predators, including humans, as clearly through the uneven interface between water and sky, and thus feel more comfortable feeding higher in the water column. What’s more, since birds tend to stay in their roosts, fish are more likely to rise to the surface to nab bugs. Or maybe the fish sense the drop in barometric pressure and feed more heavily because a storm may be brewing, and this might be the last chance for a meal for a while. Regardless, I’d rather take my chances when nothing is falling from the sky. Given that…

Day 6 on the Northville-Placid Trail, we hitched a ride from Lake Durant State Park. I stared out the window glad to be off my feet. We passed by a diner with a parking lot filled with cars. I asked the man driving about the diner. He replied, “I don’t like that guy.” We stayed at the Blue Mountain Rest across the street from the diner so we decided to eat there. But it was so busy we could not get in. At another establishment, I told a guy what the driver said. That’s Darrell’s diner, he responded, noting that the diner is doing great, Darrell is Black and people in town have mixed feelings about that. Coincidentally, I was about to participate in a panel discussion up the street,…