Table of contents for September/October 2023 in Adirondack Explorer

Road work ahead after storms BY JAK KROUSE Thanks to the work of highway and emergency crews, no serious injuries resulted after Adirondack roadways, bridges and dams were damaged from extreme rainfall in July. But such events will continue and trouble will follow unless action is taken, a researcher warns. “We’re seeing catastrophic flooding and we’re going to see more road failures,” said Erik Backus, who teaches civil engineering at Clarkson University. “How to deal with that is a significant thing we need to consider going forward.” Across the Adirondacks and other parts of New York, great volumes of water blew apart culverts, fast-cutting channels stripped roads of supporting foundation and soil. Roads are built to withstand catastrophic rain events based on historical rainfall data, but that history is changing.…

Adirondack trees have a long history of providing income for forest industries. Before the formation of the Adirondack Park Agency, loggers bought and harvested expansive lots in the park, yielding huge profits for timber companies and significant taxes for the state. The practice has faded due to regulations, although tree-cutting continues on some lands. Now, wood-product companies and landowners can benefit from an emerging forest operation: carbon offset projects. The North Country offers forest-rich lands for owners willing to protect them and for companies looking to achieve a net-zero status or shrink their so-called carbon footprint. Analysis of public documents by the Adirondack Explorer found that more than 450,000 acres of land in the Adirondack Park are used for carbon offset projects. Many of them were brokered by Finite Carbon,…

My scuba diving and marriage buddy and I have logged well over 100 dives including off the shores of Florida and New England where we were lucky enough to see lots of technicolor flora and exotic, toothy critters. But diving in the Adirondacks has an allure all its own. Lake George and Blue Mountain Lake attract divers from several states and Canada and are considered among the best cold-water dives in this part of the United States, but that’s an unnecessary qualifier. Sure, it’s chilly, but these lakes aren’t exactly hot tubs at the surface. But in diving, the 7-millimeter wetsuits provide entry to a world missed by most. Contrary to what many expect, the fish are curious, even friendly. They don’t scatter. They often surround you and sometimes they…

I can write about this wilderness hike because I know I’m not going to convince you to check it out. I’m about to gush about one of my favorite Adirondack hideaways, yet I have little fear I’ll see you there. The trail is long and flat, the terminus has a marshy appearance, and I am no influencer. But I am in love with this special location anyway. Little Woodhull Lake—LWL for short—and its two existing trails have been seeking your attention for decades, alluring you with softly whispered promises of adventure and solitude as you peruse your trail maps and apps—and you, inattentive reader, have not noticed. Little Woodhull is a homely place. No sand beaches, nor towering pines; great mountains cast no shadows on horizons. Few rock perches offer…

Village move is nonsense The Adirondack Park Agency and Department of Environmental Conservation, administering many overlapping and complimentary regulations, were ideally located in Ray Brook. The agency was meant to be near its sister agency, and not anywhere else. The agency’s executive director has promoted the “transformational” concept of a village location but with a lack of transparency that limited analysis to only Saranac Lake and Ray Brook. At best, the state money involved would provide limited benefit to Saranac Lake and a great deal for contractors and construction. Not only would there be additional cost, but design would have to include potential rehabilitation of the dam as well as major improvements to the downtown Power & Light building. Why should the agency leave Ray Brook when current offices are…

Among the Adirondacks’ diverse plant species are poisonous vines and shrubs that hikers should watch for. Poison ivy, a native plant to New York, can trail along the ground or climb up trees and poles. Contact with the greenery can produce an allergic reaction that appears as a red rash. Spring and summer are the primary seasons for poison ivy interaction. The plant has three glossy leaflets, the middle being the largest. Its allergen is made up of a resin called urushiol. Urushiol can live on clothing for weeks. According to the Department of Environmental Conservation, a person usually develops a rash after the second contact with poison ivy. Russell Rider, a family medicine doctor in Long Lake, said he’s seen more poison ivy cases in recent years. Fifteen years…

It was an 80-degree Friday in June and Richard Goldmann was trying to enjoy his day off. The anesthesiologist from Poughkeepsie planned to ride the Warren County Bike Trail with his wife Jill. That was before his bike was stolen. In one last ditch effort to enjoy the outdoors, the Goldmanns drove to a dead-end street in the village of Lake George. A green-and-yellow sign tacked to the back of a stop sign pointed to their destination. They parked at a gravel pulloff, climbed stairs to a bridge over the Adirondack Northway and hiked Prospect Mountain. “The views from the top are very nice,” Richard Goldmann said, but the trail itself was “very eroded … a goner.” Jill Goldmann said it looked like someone had diverted the worst parts. Her…

In early July, Erik Danielson hunted for treasure he values more than gold in the Moose River Plains Wild Forest, about five miles from the town of Inlet. Trudging through bush, the naturalist carved a path to his latest discovery: a massive Eastern white pine he identified as the biggest of its kind, a carbon-sucking sentinel with a volume of approximately 1,450 cubic feet. The typical Eastern white pine in southern Canada and along the eastern portion of the United States has an average diameter of 32 to 36 inches, Danielson said. The tree he located and measured in July doubles that with a 62.6 inch waist. It does not exceed the height of his discovery last year—New York’s tallest white pine, a 174-foot colossus near Bolton, in a forest…

Every Tuesday and Thursday around 11 a.m., a small group gathers for tea at the Keene Valley Library. They sit at a long, well-worn wooden table and drink from an assortment of mugs. On one July morning, someone brought a birthday cake and carrots with dip. An aging husky wandered and sniffed for crumbs. Karen Glass, the library’s longtime director, grabbed the kettle and poured a cup for a newcomer. Teatime began about a decade ago, as a gathering for library staff. But it quickly evolved, and any visitors are welcomed to join the cozy meetup in the library’s wood-paneled front room, which has the look and feel of a camp lodge. “People who don’t have a chance to socialize or meet anybody, they can come to the library,” said…

I have this deep feeling that something is wrong with me. Not physically wrong, not like a hypochondriac. I believe that my character and my inner psyche are conditioned to work against my best interests. I hardly trust myself. I have found a potent prescription for this internal ailment is in the Adirondacks: nature. I am grateful for the day I become a 46er, but more important to me is the time I spend alone in the woods. That time in solitude is when I can best connect with myself in the present moment. The Japanese have coined this practice as shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. Practitioners devote their senses to the natural experience to connect to the now and return to an ancestral relationship with the land. A symbiotic and…

The Lincoln’s sparrow, a small, secretive bird with a lovely voice, is one of two boreal bird species in the Adirondacks, the other being the palm warbler, that nest primarily in bogs. On a trip to Quebec in 1833, John James Audubon gushed about the “sweet notes” of a new species he had discovered that surpassed any American finch species’ song. Thomas Lincoln, one of his young companions on the trip, shot one of the birds, acquiring the first specimen. Before the advent of conservation, the early ornithologists carried guns, not binoculars. Audubon subsequently named the bird “Lincoln’s finch” in his honor. Its breeding grounds span from Alaska across Canada to Newfoundland, and south into western portions of the U.S. and northern regions of the upper Midwest and northeastern states…

Deadlines are a necessity to get things done. Many of us live by them in our work lives. This editorial, for instance, must be finished today, as I write this, to be included in the magazine you’re reading right now. But when the State of New York hasn’t finished work it was assigned to do a half-century ago, it makes a mockery of the whole idea of deadlines. We’re talking about the Unit Management Plans (UMPs) that manage and protect the forest preserve for a balance of recreation and conservation (see page 12). It has been five decades since the Adirondack Park Agency Act directed the Department of Environmental Conservation to create plans for each area of the forest preserve. The State Land Master Plan dictates that those UMPs be…

With a brown satchel slung over his shoulder and eyes scanning the ground, Joe Butera walked down a logging road in a remote section of the northern Adirondacks. He was looking for canid tracks and scat, like he’d seen this past winter and spring. "This is where I found three individual scats that were huge," said the 70-year-old retired electrician, as he turned around at a gate and about 75 feet before an expanse of bog opened along the road. Scats are important to him because he plans to have them tested for wolf DNA, part of his plan to provide evidence that the large canids live in the Adirondacks. A state and federally endangered species, wolves were eliminated from New York state in the 1800s after they were targeted…

While office cleaning, I found a pamphlet picked up years before: “Route 29A Hiking Guide.” Published by the state marketing folks behind the I Love NY campaign, it listed a dozen hikes accessible from an unassuming road in northern Fulton County. I had only been to this area a few times. This after hundreds of trips to the more well-known mountains of the High Peaks, central Adirondacks and Lake George region. Compared to those destinations, northern Fulton County is something of an outdoors newcomer. Author Barbara McMartin, in her 1974 guidebook “Walks and Waterways,” described the area as some of the wildest and least-known lands in the Adirondacks. At the time of that printing, there were few marked trails, and her hikes mainly followed old logging roads or snowmobile routes.…

This summer, while staying at a camp on Schroon Lake, I decided to kayak down the lower Schroon River, the lake’s outlet, to a large wetland known as Jenks Swamp. If I enjoyed the trip, I might include it in a future edition of my paddling guidebook. Heading south on the lake, I soon passed under a county highway and entered the meandering river, which was bordered by marshes and floodplain forests. Near the confluence of Trout Brook, I came to a small marina, and downriver I started to see one camp after another, most with motorboat docks. This did not bode well. In the guidebook, I steer paddlers toward wild rivers and ponds where development is non-existent or sparse and where motorboats are banned or infrequently encountered. On this…

Much of the literature on brook trout swirls around the joy some of us find in catching them. I find this peculiar. We wouldn’t celebrate the fun to be had by grabbing beavers by the tail or moose by the antlers, yet we effuse at great length about hauling in one of the most exquisitely beautiful wild animals in the Adirondacks by its lower lip. Does the fish appreciate being tricked into clamping down on an artificial fly or little flashing spinner, or on a skewered earthworm, and being toyed with, even if it is ultimately released? I have never heard a trout opine on the subject, but I can guess what it might think. Mind you, some of the finest people I have ever known are fisherfolk. My point…