Tabla de contenidos para March/April 2021 en Adirondack Explorer

The U.S. Army at Fort Drum won’t conduct training sessions on Adirondack Forest Preserve lands, according to members of an ad hoc committee in talks with the Army. The Army is revising its environmental study of possible training areas in the Adirondack region, including other potential lands within the park (January/February Adirondack Explorer). Beside the forest preserve, the Army will avoid sensitive wildlife areas and community hubs, and will decrease the amount of training from what was originally proposed, according to committee members. The Army had proposed up to six air and ground training exercises per year for the 10th Mountain Divisions’ Aviation Brigade and Sustainment Brigade. Each training could last up to 14 days, with a maximum of seven days cleanup. In a January news release, Fort Drum officials…

During a stretch of unusually warm weather and calm water last fall, a pair of algal blooms appeared on famously pristine Lake George. The blooms were the first documented harmful “algae” or cyanobacteria outbreaks on the lake, and they’ve raised urgent questions about whether state officials are doing enough to keep pollution out of the lake. In theory, Lake George should be among the most protected in the country. To describe Lake George is to invite cliché. Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying it was, “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw.” Today’s devotees call the summer vacation spot “the Queen of American Lakes.” PAST COVERAGE But ancient compliments and modern nicknames didn’t stop the algal blooms from smearing the lake’s surface last fall, and it’s not clear…

Stalled trail crews are awaiting guidance from an impending court ruling to determine what constitutes a constitutionally protected tree in the Adirondack Forest Preserve. The lawsuit in question has caused deep divisions among environmental nonprofits, and left questions for the future of trail work. Protect the Adirondacks, a nonprofit conservation group, sued the state Department of Environmental Conservation and the Adirondack Park Agency back in 2013 over the construction of snowmobile trails on the state’s forest preserve. They’re called Class 2 community connector trails, and are 9 feet wide with some 12-foot-wide curves and slopes. Protect has argued that the amount of tree cutting involved in clearing for the first 25 miles—hundreds in various sizes per mile—violated the “forever wild” clause in the state constitution. That clause ensures that the…

For six years, Patrick-André Poisson and his family would cross the U.S. border and rent a house in the Adirondacks near Whiteface Mountain for the ski season. Now, like many Canadians who routinely enjoyed the Adirondack outdoors before the coronavirus pandemic, they’re missing their mountains. North Country businesses and municipalities in turn are missing their money—though not as badly as some had feared. Poisson, a former competitive racer who lives in Montreal, had three children participating in alpine ski-racing programs at Whiteface through the New York Ski Educational Foundation (NYSEF), and he served as a volunteer coach. A vice president and portfolio manager at RBC Financial Group, Poisson would travel to the Lake Placid area with his family on weekends. Over those six years, they fell in love with Whiteface,…

I remember my conversation in 2007 with Phil Brown, the former editor of Adirondack Explorer, as if it were yesterday. I sought an off-the-beaten-path hike that could include in the first edition of my book, “Hiking the Adirondacks,” and it was Phil’s forte to find places in the park that were undiscovered yet interesting to explore. “Nun-da-ga-o, for sure,” he said. “Who-sa, what-sa?” I asked. I had never heard of Nun-da-ga-o, though I had spent 30 years hiking in the Adirondack Mountains, mostly in the High Peaks. I assumed it was in a lesser-visited, lower-elevation part of the park. “It’s in Keene,” replied Phil. “You get there from Crow Clearing.” I knew the trailhead. Crow Clearing is the start of the northern approach to Hurricane Mountain and the eastern approach…

Winter started slowly. On Christmas Day, we had hardly any snow on the ground, forcing Carol and me to ditch our plan to ski in the woods in the morning before returning home to make breakfast and open presents. We spent the holiday indoors. Two days later, we got a few inches of fluff. Though not sufficient for backcountry touring, it was just enough to ski on Bigelow Road, which, for us, was a new experience. We liked it enough that we added it to our list of places to ski in early winter or whenever snow is sparse. Located a bit north of Bloomingdale, Bigelow Road is a dirt lane with a checkered past. It once ran from Oregon Plains Road to Franklin County Route 55. The bridge over…

Even as COVID-19 has ravaged the American economy, the pandemic has proven an economic boon for some in the Adirondack Park. Yes, many restaurants, some hotels and motels, and most arts and entertainment venues continue to struggle. But for others who could more easily pivot to different operating models or who make their living outdoors, nature seekers have delivered cash and consolation. In some ways the Adirondack Park was perfectly positioned for pandemic life. When travel restrictions began to lift, people started looking for a safe place within driving distance to try to salvage summers without camps or vacations requiring air travel. “The Adirondacks probably had the best summer of anybody,” says Mark Dorr, president of the New York State Hospitality & Tourism Association. “The winners this summer were the…

Throughout the northern U.S. backcountry, as part of a monumental idea conceived a half century ago, a trail is being born. It is visible but not really, like a skim of ice materializing on an Adirondack pond. Epic in its scope, it is referenced here and there in state land-use plans, but otherwise is seldom mentioned in print or in the ever-growing colony of online trail guides. You can hike on it without knowing it. You can see it here and there, all marked and official in some spots, and in others manifest only as a trail of ribbons through the forest, not unlike Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. When complete—and who knows when that will be—the Adirondack section of the trail will be, at 160 miles, longer than the Northville-Placid…

During the winter in Europe, a World Cup biathlon, an Olympic sport that combines Nordic skiing with rifle shooting, is the equivalent of Monday Night Football. Some 70,000 rowdy spectators show up and millions of television viewers tune in. In the United States, biathlon is barely a blip on the winter sports scene, with around 1,000 total participants sprinkled around New England, Utah, Alaska, Montana, California, Minnesota, and the Adirondacks, at Mount Van Hoevenberg, on the biathlon course created for the 1980 Winter Olympics. That might change if Paul Smith’s College’s plans for its trail system at the school’s Visitor Information Center pan out. The VIC, a nature center on the campus northwest of Saranac Lake, already maintained 40 kilometers of cross-country skiing and snowshoeing trails that looped out from…

Last fall, my wife and I took our daughter and a bibliophile friend of hers to the Birchbark Bookshop, on a winding back road near Parishville in the northern Adirondack foothills. When it came time to leave, it took us 15 minutes to find the guy, hidden among a maze of long wings, narrow aisles and seeming miles of tall, rough-hewn bookshelves. This is part of the charm of the place, a one-of-a-kind experience in an unlikely location that has acquired since its start in 1987 a dedicated regional customer base as well as in-person shoppers “from all over the world,” says the shop’s founder and owner, Timothy Strong. He launched the secondhand enterprise after his wife took a job at the nearby State University of New York at Potsdam.…

The first time I heard a loon call, I sat bolt upright in my sleeping bag and wondered how the loon had gotten into the tent. My wife sat bolt upright at the same moment, and we wondered at the incredibly loud, hauntingly beautiful call of the bird. I looked around the tent to make sure it hadn’t gotten inside, and then I slowly unzipped the door to the tent and saw the loon, perhaps 30 feet away. It was beautifully lit by the full moon. Then it yodeled again, sending chills up our spines. And then it slowly paddled away, creating a moonlit wake that rolled across our field of view—we turned our faces toward each other in the darkness, gently banging our noses together and laughing quietly at…

Let’s say you’re an ermine. All winter, dressed entirely in white except for the black last quarter of your tail, you’ve run down mice and voles and little birds and whatever else you could catch. As beautiful as you are, your methods of dispatching prey are ugly, at least to the sensibilities of most of us. You seize necks and backs of skulls, not delicately but forcefully. You bite down hard. Your teeth are sharp. With a decisive crunch, cervical vertebrae give way, and a feast of hot flesh, blood and viscera is yours. Now, let’s imagine it’s March. The supply of mice, voles, small birds and other targets of your hunger is diminishing. The Adirondack winter is long. The seeds, fruits and insects that rodents and small birds gorged…

The Adirondack winter of 2015-2016 was one for the record books, and not in a promising way. There was no December “Snowdeo” gathering for snowmobilers in Old Forge, and scarcely a snowmobile season later. It had snowed 1.6 inches in November. During the first week of December, riders wore T-shirts, a local official recalled. That November snowfall on its own was not a record low in the village that proudly qualifies as an Adirondack snow capital. The weather station had twice charted just an inch in November, in 2001 and 2009. And neither was it a trend, exactly. The following November brought 10 times the snow; the previous one 15 times as much. Snow droughts have always visited occasionally, but that 2016 winter’s total—just 78.9 inches from Nov.1 through March…

Bob Erickson kicked and glided between the hardwoods, across a new wooden bridge and then through a tunnel of snow-plastered spruce boughs. This was the thing he had craved for several years since moving to Piseco from Wisconsin—a clear cross-country ski path through the woods near home. And now, on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, there was even fresh snow covering the icy crust that had made earlier outings treacherous. Starting at Piseco Airport’s seasonally quiet little strip and then plunging through the woods and briefly joining a section of the Northville-Placid Trail, his route would loop through about 6 miles of the Jessup River Wild Forest. Not too rugged or hilly, but plenty serene with a section along the West Canada Lake Wilderness, the trail had attracted dozens…

It was a cold January day, and I was standing in a farm store at the trailhead and looking at quiches in a fridge. This wasn’t the typical way I start an excursion, but this wasn’t your average Adirondack trip on a trail through the forest preserve. I was exploring farmlands in the Champlain Valley. DaCy Meadow Farm The trailhead is at DaCy Meadow Farm, a meat and vegetable farm in Westport owned by Dave and Cynthia Johnston, a retired superintendent for the Keene Central School District. Though farmers now, the pair are no strangers to the hiking community. They are the former owners of The Hostel in Keene Valley, a bunkhouse that has served as a basecamp for High Peaks hikers for years. Dave was inspired to start that…

Over the past year, access to decent internet has gone from a convenience that makes our lives easier and more portable to an essential need, like electricity, water and heat. We can no longer live our lives without it. Zoom, love it or hate it, has become the way we interact with co-workers, clients and collaborators during a pandemic. It’s where we go to attend public meetings of local and state government. Children attend school, in part or entirely, online. Main Street businesses that once relied on foot traffic in their shops have remained viable by moving more of their operations online, with curbside pickup to protect customers and employees from exposure to COVID-19. At the Adirondack Explorer, we’re working from our homes, sharing digital versions of our magazine pages…

YES By Peter Iwanowicz Every New Yorker, no matter the color of their skin, or how much money they have, or where they live, has the right to clean air, clean water, and an environment that is healthy. That’s about as noncontroversial as a statement gets nowadays. After all, we all share a basic need to drink water and breathe air; doing so shouldn’t make us sick or cut our lives short because they are dirty with chemicals. But today, that statement is just words. It lacks any real force. Because today, New Yorkers don’t have a right to clean air or clean water. But we’re on track to change that. While there are federal and state environmental laws already on the books that deal with things like pollution, contamination…

New York State’s plans to restore landlocked Atlantic salmon to spawning grounds in the Saranac River start with a fish ladder around Imperial Mills Dam near Plattsburgh. A fish ladder is a ramp with a series of pools flowing from one to the next. It allows fish to ascend through slots from pool to pool in a winding pattern similar to the switchbacks in a mountain road. In the case of salmon, a short cascading step in the ramp allows the fish to leap upstream and blocks the parasitic lampreys that otherwise could also head upstream to harm salmon. Salmon historically spawned in the Saranac at least as far upstream as Kent Falls, until dams arose in the late 1700s. Imperial Mills Dam blocks their passage 3.2 miles upstream from…