Table of contents for January/February 2024 in Adirondack Explorer

STATE COMPLETES STRETCH OF THE ADIRONDACK RAIL TRAIL BY MIKE LYNCH In December, state officials celebrated the opening of a 10-mile section of the Adirondack Rail Trail between Lake Placid and Saranac Lake and expected a winter of snowmobile use. Once completed, the 34-mile trail will connect Lake Placid to Tupper Lake. The section between Saranac Lake and Lake Clear is scheduled to be completed in 2024, while the work near Tupper Lake is scheduled for 2025. State Environmental Conservation Commissioner Basil Seggos was one of several state officials, including elected representatives, and numerous recreation enthusiasts at a ceremony at a trail junction in North Elba. He said he expects the trail to become a prime Adirondacks destination. “It’s a really a quality job that's going to be rideable with…

Depth reporting appreciated Even for someone who will never suit up to explore the underwater depths, this article (“The underwater world of the mountains” September/October) was a real wonder and a timely reminder of the great things we can see through the eyes of others willing to share their experiences. Thank you so much! Carol DoerfleinMontpelier, Vt. Change the grant eligibility picture Excellent perspective on the disconnect in grant writing that discounts the small town needs of Adirondack projects against the funder’s priorities to reach a significant population size or specialty demographic (“A question of qualifying” November/December). A suggestion to grant writers: lean in and use different metrics. Paint the picture of towns with one traffic light, hamlets with no three-story buildings, businesses with no elevators, single lane roads between…

Rewilding advocate John Davis has trekked thousands of miles to promote wildlife corridors on the East and West coasts, but there is one landscape that he says needs more attention, and it’s literally in his backyard. Located in the Champlain Valley, the Split Rock Wildway is a forested corridor that connects the 3,700-acre Split Rock Wild Forest on the shores of Lake Champlain with the 7,951-acre Jay Mountain Wilderness and the High Peaks region. The Adirondack Forest Preserve lands are more than 12 miles apart as the crow flies. Thirty years ago, Davis climbed a hemlock tree atop a knoll in the Champlain Valley and looked out to see a swath of forestlands weaving through the valley’s farmlands. “I realized it's a wildlife corridor,” said Davis, the Adirondack Council’s rewilding…

The Adirondack childcare shortage is the reflection of a nationwide problem, and there has been an infusion of state and federal funding for the industry as it emerges from the pandemic. In 2021, the New York State Office of Children and Family Services awarded $900 million in Child Care Stabilization grants to 15,000 providers; a second round of childcare stabilization funding, about $208 million, went to 12,578 providers in 2022. Payments were sizable. During the first round of funding, centers received $50,000 to $100,000 depending on their license capacity. Another state program, intended to help with retention, provided $2,000 to $3,000 bonuses for childcare employees. If not for the Child Care Stabilization grants, “more programs would have closed,” Jamie Basiliere, executive director of the Child Care Coordinating Council of the…

Before the 1999 founding of John Brown Lives—an Upstate New York education and human rights group—few in this country, including residents of the Adirondacks, knew of the historical connection between the 19th century white abolitionist named John Brown and the Adirondacks. Even fewer were aware of Timbuctoo, a 120,000-acre Adirondack land gift in 1846 to 3,000 “respectable” Black New Yorkers from a landowner named Gerrit Smith. Ostensibly, his admirable mission was to make Black men eligible to vote. Under state law then, Black men were required to own property worth a minimum of $250 to exercise that right. Saratoga Springs writer Amy Godine joins a number of recent authors who have written about and focused on this important page in our nation’s history. But, her new book, “The Black Woods:…

Little does the sun know the moon has designs on it, creeping across the sky day by day, night by night, month by month, incrementally, circling and edging toward the afternoon not so far off, on April 8, 2024, when our planet’s dry, dusty, all-natural, free-range satellite will slide right over the solar disk, blotting it out completely. In my neck of the woods in the Adirondacks, just over the McKenzie Range from Lake Placid, the moon will make night of day for a few minutes. Most of us humans, informed by astronomers what is about to come, will watch not with fear, as the populace did in H. Rider Haggard’s epic 19th century novel “King Solomon’s Mines,” but with astonishment and wonder. But how will wild things react, especially…

In the northeastern corner of the Adirondack Park, white and yellow houses are turning gray, green metal roofs are turning brown and white gutters and fence posts are turning spotted black. It’s as if a five-o’clock shadow is growing over Grover Hills, a neigh-borhood in the hamlet of Mineville. This sticky substance is new, some lifelong residents say. They point to about a half-mile northwest where rows of 14,000-square-foot, barn-red buildings hold thousands of barrels of aging whiskey. It is where WhistlePig Whiskey has stored products distilled in Vermont since approximately 2017. State regulators have tested the moldy stuff and have concluded, in some cases, it is whiskey fungus, or Baudoinia compniacensis. Scientists first documented the soot-like sheen in the 1870s, outside the spirit warehouses of Cognac, France. More recently…

Somewhere on a road in northeast Minnesota a snowplow named Clearopathtra makes life easier for impatient drivers. “Name-a-Snowplow'' competitions in states across the country remind residents about the importance of winter road crews and the risks of overusing salt. After New York and Pennsylvania, states in the Upper Midwest are among the country’s largest users of road salt each winter. For more than two decades, aquatic chloride standards in those states have pushed regulators, policymakers and elected officials to track and optimize salt use, spread best practices, bolster public understanding and expand water monitoring. The Adirondack Road Salt Reduction Task Force, in its report last year, drew on lessons from other states, as well as within New York, to outline ways for New York to improve state, local and private…

The Adirondack Park has long been a destination and home for snowmobilers looking for extended rides along powdered trails. And now the Adirondack Rail Trail connecting Lake Placid to Tupper Lake will add another 34 miles to that, once fully completed. Snowmobilers in the Adirondacks will likely become more visible. Yet some conservationists say that the offroad vehicles’ environmental impact casts a shadow on snowmobile recreation. Research shows that natural ecosystems are vulnerable to exhaust and noise pollution from the sleds, which can disrupt the Adirondack wilderness. Snowmobiles are restricted to certain parts of the park and prohibited from wilderness, canoe and primitive areas. An alternative came on the market in 2015 by then-recent college graduates in Montreal who founded Taiga, an electric snowmobile maker. The company, named after the…

Growing up in rural Ontario, Canada, Alison Wilcox’s sole camp summer experience was non-traditional: a two-week Air Cadet boot camp where she drilled, marched double-time and operated planes. “I had read about camp, and it was always a dream to be able to go to one,” Wilcox recalled. When she learned of a job opening at a day camp, Wilcox jumped at the opportunity. It was the summer after her first year at university, and she served as director, supervising a team of counselors. The experience was formative. It set Wilcox on her future career path and opened her eyes to the life-changing magic of summer camp. “It was amazing to see how much the kids got out of it,” Wilcox, 48, said. Last August, Wilcox became just the second-ever…

I wanted to climb Kane Mountain (2,180 feet) near Caroga Lake, but it was a haul to get there from my house on Chateaugay Lake. The two lakes are 200 miles apart, about as distant as you can get from north to south and still be within the Blue Line. Sometimes the sheer vastness of the Adirondack Park limits my willingness to explore its backcountry bounty. “You Kane do it,” quipped my husband, Jack, who hankered for an outing. “But it’s almost four hours of driving each way for a hike that might take an hour and a half,” I sighed, but that little mountain had persuasive pull. I had only hiked it once, a dozen years ago while writing my book, “Hiking the Adirondacks.” I loved the hike for…

I love my friend, John, a former co-worker who is 30 years my senior. At face value, we seem worlds apart. Nonetheless, we get each other. He is full of stories, good humor and an eagerness to be outside. In retirement, he focuses on hiking mountains. His goal is all 46 High Peaks, but busy schedules often throw wrenches in our hiking plans. John and I serve as organizers corralling co-workers, friends and family to enjoy time in the Adirondacks. This year we planned an overnight trip to the summit of Mount Marcy, but John was hospitalized with pneumonia, and we rescheduled to Oct. 28. Still recovering, he opted to meet me for a hike on Buck Mountain from the Pilot Knob trailhead. We were originally a group of six,…

Winter birding in the Adirondacks is different each year, unlike the more predictable spring breeding season. Tree seed crops vary year to year in all regions. If birds to our north lack their normal food sources, they will shift to an area that does offer them, bringing a changing mix of winter irruptive species. It can be quite a puzzle to figure out, but one thing is certain: bird movements in winter are all about food. This winter, one such irruptive species is the pine siskin. They departed the Canadian boreal forest in huge numbers during the fall due to poor cone crops. Pine siskins have been observed as far south as Georgia and flocks are all over the Adirondacks. Flock sizes can be small, or number in the hundreds…

An out-of-this-world opportunity is coming to the Adirondacks this spring, one that could introduce thousands to the region and entice them to return if the experience is stellar. How communities and the state prepare today will decide that future. On April 8, 2024, skies will darken in the middle of the afternoon with a total solar eclipse, a rare occurrence that won’t happen again in North America for another 21 years. The sun will disappear behind the moon, temperatures will drop, nocturnal creatures will come out. And the “path of totality,” a swath of area from Mexico to Canada that will darken completely for several minutes, will pass directly over the Adirondacks. Maybe this doesn’t excite you and you plan to work right through it (it falls on a Monday).…

At the beginning of 2017, an event specialist for Hopkinsville, Ky. spoke at a conference of scientists about hosting solar eclipse chasers that summer in her small city. “I said 50,000 people were estimated,” Brooke Jung recalled recently. “People came up to me and said: ‘you need to double that estimate.’” The scientists were right. Hopkinsville, near the Tennessee border, had changed its name temporarily to “Eclipseville” because it fell in the path of total darkness, offering a full 2 minutes and 40 seconds of total solar eclipse viewing. More than 116,000 visitors came to witness the Aug. 21, 2017, happening. “You don’t choose to be in the path of totality,” said Carter Hendricks, Hopkinsville’s mayor when droves of people from 48 states and 28 countries convened in his community.…

On August 12, just days after floods washed aways roads, bridges, and dams in the central Adirondacks, Ontario writer Jamieson Findlay poured over a map spread out on a picnic table at a state campground in Newcomb. Bill Brown, a retired scientist, gave navigation advice, while Bill Barkley, Findlay’s childhood friend and hiking partner, listened intently nearby. Findlay would make a month-long trek from the Adirondack Park to Algonquin Park following the Pilgrimage for Nature Trail, which had been created to bring awareness of the wildlife corridor between the two parks. “It's going to rejuvenate me and recharge my batteries,” Findlay, 64, said after setting out on the journey. The nonprofit Algonquin to Adirondacks Collaborative (A2A) touts the area as “one of the last large-scale, intact forest and wetland linkages…

When Chelsea Nye’s 15-month-old daughter was born, her mother-in-law came to the Adirondacks to help. She stayed for seven months, watching the baby while Nye and her husband worked. When a new childcare center called Little Peaks opened in Keene, their daughter went to daycare, and the mother-in-law returned to the Midwest. For Nye and other Adirondack families, Little Peaks has been a godsend. It provides high-quality, reliable childcare at a time when daycare openings are increasingly scarce. “I’m not sure what we would have done if Little Peaks hadn’t opened,” said Nye, 30, an account manager at Burnham Benefit Advisors, while picking her daughter up from day-care shortly before Thanksgiving. “We were on every wait-list. No one had a spot.” For a region eager to attract young families to…

If it’s possible for something 2,650 feet high to get lost, that’s what happens to Bear Den Mountain, a splendid peak that must live out its existence in the shadow of the mighty ridge connecting the High Peaks of Whiteface and Esther. In baseball terms, Bear Den is the Tony Lazzeri of mountains, the .300, 100-RBI second baseman for the ’27 Yankees who toiled in relative obscurity behind the likes of Ruth and Gehrig. And until recently, the Bear Den trail was treated as something of a castaway, with poor markings and herd-path cul-de-sacs that made it difficult to follow, particularly in autumn with leaves blanketing the tread. Most of those situations have been rectified, partly due to trail work and partly due to an increasing number of hikers that…

Let’s give road salt a new identity, a new purpose of conservation, innovation and responsibility. Salt is an Environmental Protection Agency-designated pollutant that we are allowed to apply unregulated. Unnecessary and copious applications of salt (and sand) on surfaces we walk and drive on has progressively increased for decades—an epidemic that is getting worse. Slip and fall claims and vehicle accidents are framed as the primary reason for oversalting. Liability is a legitimate concern based on my experience as a contractor forced by insurance companies to settle out of court for bogus claims. But we must stop expecting roads and surfaces to be slip-free, which is unachievable. Solutions for reducing road salt use will be achieved through awareness – education and outreach campaigns – and at an operational level by…

On a sunny day in February, a friend led me to glades in a lovely forest. We climbed on skis to about 3,000 feet and made three runs through shin-deep powder, weaving among widely spaced trees. It was one of my best days in the backcountry that winter. This was in Vermont, not the Adirondacks. I had driven two hours from Saranac Lake to get there and two hours back. Of course, I love backcountry skiing in the Adirondacks, but the attitude of our state officials toward the sport is behind the times. To clarify, I’m talking about skiing down mountains, not touring on rolling terrain. We have plenty of trails for the latter. With advances in equipment, down-mountain skiing in the backcountry has grown greatly in popularity since the…