Tabla de contenidos para July/August 2020 en Adirondack Explorer

Economic crash threatens environment spending Early this year Gov. Andrew Cuomo held what one might call an uplifting budget presentation before an audience of state workers and legislators packed in the Kitty Carlisle Theater at The Egg in Albany. READ MORE Cuomo is known for his pomp and circumstance, and during his January presentation larger-than-life slides showed sweeping vistas of New York, including the North Country, with promises to protect the environment. One of Cuomo’s highlights was a proposed 30-year, $3 billion environmental bond act and a 5-year, $33 billion plan to combat climate change. But the pomp has fizzled with the latest circumstances, as the coronavirus pandemic’s economic impact threatens much of the original budget. On closer examination, it’s clear that the $33 billion climate fund wasn’t necessarily a…

Dogs are our companions, our friends, our family members. So for many of us, it’s only natural that our dogs join us on outdoor adventures. The effort to bring them along is rewarded with happy dog “grins,” a furry body curled next to our sleeping bags in the wilderness, and sometimes a soft head laid in our laps. But even dog lovers may find themselves frustrated, annoyed, or even enraged by dogs they encounter on the trail. There’s the dog that sneaks up behind you on a mountain summit and steals your sandwich. The dog that rushes up to greet you and gets mud all over your pants. The dog that lunges at your child, growling, as you pass on a narrow trail. The dog that chases wildlife or, worse,…

READ MORE  Two years ago a dozen or so Adirondack homeowners prepared to sue the state of New York for polluting their drinking water. They had evidence that road salt dumped by the New York State Department of Transportation was flowing into their wells, making their water unsafe to drink and reducing their property values. Their lawsuit never got off the ground. In New York, residents who want to take the state to court often have just 90 days to file a lawsuit. At least some of the afflicted homeowners had learned of their problems years earlier. They had suffered too long. Even for homeowners with still undrinkable water, New York’s strict time limits make it nearly impossible to challenge the state in court, the Adirondack Explorer has found. Such…

In some ways the Cranberry Lake 50 is a perfect trail for a pandemic. The trail is often wide, following old logging roads, so if you do meet a hiker (a rare occurrence) it’s easy to keep a safe distance. The terrain is rolling, sometimes even flat, and many streams cross the trail. It’s possible to camp almost anywhere to avoid lean-tos and developed campsites. But this beautiful trail wasn’t designed to hide fugitives and hermits. Tom and I often hike the 50-mile loop at the end of April, when we have school vacation and before the blackflies. We hike for three days with friends, hoping they’ll find the same peace we do as we walk past remote ponds, stride above the rest of the world on a long esker,…

The coronavirus pandemic has bludgeoned businesses in the Adirondacks and across the globe, and one of the latest worries for them is having enough people to work as the economy reopens. Rural retreats such as the Adirondacks often rely on international workers to fill a seasonal gap in staffing. So far, their presence in the usual numbers this summer is in doubt. While the unemployment rate climbs in New York, many of the wages for positions needed at hotels and restaurants can’t compete with the $600 per week of unemployment benefits the federal government provides, at least through July 31. Certain jobs could also carry greater risk of catching COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Those factors could make hiring locals a challenge, too. The Regional Office of Sustainable…

On a gloriously sunny day we headed north out of Elizabethtown, raring to go birding, only to find ourselves going 5 mph behind an enormous yellow tractor. As I frowned at the slowness of our progress I noticed a great blue heron with a stick in its mouth flying by at eye level about 25 yards away. The bird landed in a nest 6 feet or so from two other nests, both of them occupied, and we realized immediately that we had unwittingly found a great blue heron colony—I felt like thanking the profoundly slow tractor driver. Great blue herons nest in colonies, some of them with hundreds of nests, but they tend to locate them in inaccessible places, like swamps and islands, and they build their nests at least…

IT WAS A CANINE CONVENTION atop Coney Mountain. Chili, our rambunctious mutt (best guess a shepherd-border collie mix), strained at his leash, eager to cross the rocky plateau and greet a golden retriever named Kiefer. Manny, our aged Gordon setter, ignored another mutt circling the summit. Manny’s heavy panting and paw-dragging hinted that maybe this hill climb—despite its sweeping views of Tupper Lake and surrounding mountains—should be his last. And then there was Cleo, a fluffy white hulk of Great Pyrenees, sprawled out and smiling at them all. She and Kiefer, both Canadians who summer in the Adirondacks, had come to Coney because of two words, hyphenated: off-leash. “It’s the highlight of our summer,” said John Bell of Mississauga, Ontario, who hiked with Kiefer. “Definitely: Dog-friendly hikes, we look for.”…

MORE PHOTOS Predicting the 2020 Adirondack Park tourism season’s crucial cash infusion is like trying to read a crystal ball. It's a murky crystal ball, at that. The variables include the success of a state-mandated, four-phase reopening of the economy. If that goes well, there’s still the question of whether visitors will actually travel and stay in the park. The numbers in the tourism hub of Essex County—home to Lake Placid—show why many are worried. Based on occupancy tax collections, 70% of business income flows there during the half of the year from May through October, according to the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism (ROOST). Around the park, the early-season indicators have been grim. “When the pandemic hit, not one email, not one phone call,” said Julie Meeks, who manages…

Fishing Brook has the feel of a brook deep in the backcountry. The air is often thick with bugs and the sounds of birds. Beaver dams clog the waterway, creating meadows. Yellow wildflowers—swamp candles—light up the shorelines. Brook trout swim in the shadows. The only intrusions on the wild experience are vehicle noises from nearby State Route 28N, which connects the tiny communities of Newcomb and Long Lake, and some logging on the surrounding conservation easement. Fishing Brook and the connected County Line Flow opened to the public as part of the state’s deal with the Nature Conservancy to preserve the former Finch, Pruyn & Co. timberlands. The land around the water is mostly off-limits. Boaters aren’t allowed to go ashore on County Line Flow other than at a take-out.…

Something must be done about the tens of thousands of tons of road salt dumped on Adirondack roadways every winter and the contamination of hundreds of wells throughout the North Country (see “Salt in the Wounds,” May/June). So it’s imperative that the New York State Legislature pass a bill, introduced by Sen. Betty Little and Assemblyman Billy Jones, to create an Adirondack road salt-reduction task force, pilot plan and test program. This will be a first step in addressing a 40-year-old problem in the Adirondacks that affects surface, ground and drinking water. Such action is long overdue—we’ve known for decades about the environmental and health hazards of road salt. Here’s the problem: New York State’s overzealous use of salt, one of the heaviest in America at 50,000 pounds per mile…

To appreciate Lorraine Duvall’s book, “Finding A Woman's Place: The Story of a 1970s Feminist Collective in the Adirondacks,” it helps to understand the inequality women faced in those years. Women earned 59 cents to every dollar men made, according to a report commissioned by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Birth control pills were largely unavailable. Women weren’t allowed to serve on juries throughout the country until 1973. It wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 that women could open a credit card without their husband’s signature. In Duvall’s introduction, she mentions a TV show, “Father Knows Best,” which portrayed the society’s ideal role for a woman: a homemaker with no aspirations beyond raising children and keeping house. Duvall, now 82, was a young woman in the…

ED AND JUDY FUHR A wooden sign hangs on a back wall in the lodge at Higley Flow State Park on the Raquette River in Colton, just outside the blue line. “Fuhr Gathering Room,” it says. The lodge was added to the park in 2014, the product of fundraising, relationships with local suppliers, a helpful park supervisor and cooperation from the regional parks maintenance department. But mostly, it’s there because of Judy and Ed Fuhr, so the sign was added a few years ago with permission from the state, and the Fuhrs were surprised by the gesture from the Friends of Higley Flow State Park. The Fuhrs don’t care much about taking credit. In fact, they list all the other people who should be recognized instead: Tom French, the first…

As climate change ripples across the Adirondacks, researchers and activists are worried they don’t know what warming water is doing to fish in the region’s thousands of lakes and ponds. Now they’re looking to an old problem for a solution. In the 1980s, acid rain was crippling lakes across the Adirondacks, but nobody was sure how badly. To figure it out, the state helped launch a massive survey of the damage. The extraordinary effort, unlike any undertaken before or since, sent researchers through forests, across wetlands and up mountains to measure, sample and fish from half of the region’s lakes in just four years. Between 1984 and 1987 the state-backed Adirondack Lake Survey Corp. visited 1,469 lakes and ponds looking for patterns in the geology, chemistry and life of each…

Describing the storied historical arc of the Trudeau Institute to a reunion of alumni last summer, President and Director Atsuo Kuki used a word that usually gives scientists hives. “Magical.” Certainly there were magical elements to the Trudeau Institute’s legacy, both in terms of scientific accomplishment and Adirondack mystique, but at the time even Kuki himself didn’t know the half of it. A highly infectious virus was about to change everything. Some in the audience that day had experienced the institute’s darkest hours earlier in the decade, when federal funding was becoming scarce, top scientists were departing and the board was said to be listening to offers of relocation from other states licking their chops at the prestige the Trudeau name would bring to their research centers. But over the…

Lake Placid-based hiking and kayaking guide Anne Brewer was leading clients in the Virgin Islands when she got bad news from back home. Gov. Andrew Cuomo had basically shut down New York State due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When Brewer returned home she found herself in a different world than the one she had left. Businesses were shuttered, schools were closed and her prospects for guiding trips in the near future didn’t look good. “I’m basically done for the year,” she said in mid-May, “unless we get creative.” Getting creative meant preparing to run hiking and kayaking trips with local clients, and imposing strict health safety measures, she said. Brewer works for Adventures in Good Company, a Baltimore-based company that specializes in all-women adventures to destinations around the globe. Last…

Standing together. Learning together. ANCA stands with our black sisters and brothers in this time of nationwide grief and protest that have resulted from the murders of George Floyd and so many others. We stand with our black sisters and brothers in declaring that Black Lives Matter. We stand with our black sisters and brothers as America faces an inflection point, ready to do the hard work of making much needed change. This moment demands intentionality: intentional language, intentional strategies and intentional action to disrupt 400-plus years of racism and to dismantle the structural inequities that plague our nation. ANCA intentionally focuses on promoting systemic change in food systems, clean energy, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. But, if we could fix all other aspects of our local economies and not fix…

YES John Sheehan COVID-19 may change where people vote this year, or allow you vote by mail. Regardless of how you receive your ballot for Election Day on Nov. 3, or how you plan to cast your vote, don’t forget to turn over your ballot and vote “yes” on the Restore Mother Nature Bond Act. Our need to address climate change, secure clean water and manage crowds on the Adirondack Forest Preserve didn’t go away when the coronavirus hit. Your vote will authorize the state to spend $3 billion catching up on much-needed public works projects and environmental improvements that will bring money to local businesses and jobs to local communities. The bond act will also bring local tax relief, as taxpayers statewide will help to fund expensive municipal clean…