Table of contents for May/June 2016 in Adirondack Explorer

The Adirondack Park is already experiencing the impacts of climate change. Lakes and ponds are covered with ice for fewer days than they were a century ago; spring is starting earlier in the lower elevations; and storms are becoming more intense and frequent. Scientists predict that in the future the Park will be a much different place. Wildlife species that can’t adapt to the warmer weather are expected to move northward or to higher elevations. Buildings that remain in floodplains are expected to be more vulnerable to flooding. Climate Matters This article is the final in a six-part series examining the impacts of climate change in the Adirondack Park. Plant communities, especially those on high summits and boreal lowlands, could change significantly or even disappear. Caused largely by burning fossil…

Hua Davis amazed her friends with her hiking feats. She climbed all forty-six High Peaks during the frigid winter of 2014-2015, knocked off the thirty-five Catskill peaks above 3,500 feet this past winter, and blazed through the Saranac Lake 6 in less than twenty-four hours to become an Ultra 6er last August. “Even the most experienced among us were in awe of some of her accomplishments,” said Brian Horst, a friend and Appalachian Trail through-hiker. Despite her experience, the sixty-one-year-old hiker froze to death in early March near the summit of MacNaughton Mountain, a remote mountain in the High Peaks Wilderness. Forest rangers and family members say Davis had not properly prepared and became hypothermic during the arduous hike. She was wearing fleece pants and sneakers. On her upper body…

In 1791, Thomas Jefferson described Lake George as “the most beautiful water I ever saw.” Today, scientists are using gee-whiz technology to make it the smartest lake on the planet. Mike Kelly is especially impressed by the pinpoint-accurate model of the way water circulates throughout Lake George, viewed on a giant screen at a data-visualization lab inside Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Darrin Fresh Water Institute in Bolton Landing. The lab is the nerve center of the Jefferson Project, a multimillion-dollar initiative by RPI and IBM that is using sophisticated technology to reveal physical, chemical, and biological secrets of the lake and determine how humans are affecting its ecological health. Launched in 2013, the Jefferson Project is critical for economic as well as environmental reasons: Lake George’s tourism industry supports thousands of…

With this issue, Explorer writer Mike Lynch completes a yearlong series on the impact of climate change on the Adirondacks—its wildlife and ecosystems as well as its human communities. One of the lessons we can draw from his work is that when we study climate change in a particular region like the Adirondacks we find great complexity. The intricate interaction of species and ecosystems requires extensive research to understand and is affected by numerous factors. One inquiry leads to another; historical data can be in short supply; and particularly when it comes to forecasting the future there is no single model that will tell the whole story. Don’t misunderstand. The questions aren’t about whether global climate change is real. About that the science is well established. As Paul Smith’s College…

What is the purpose of the Forest Preserve? What does the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan (SLMP) actually say about what is permissible in Primitive Areas? If you don’t like what’s in the SLMP, what is the appropriate way to change it? Most important, who gets to decide all these things? These are the thorny issues at stake in a dispute between a distinguished member of the Adirondack Park Agency and the office of the governor of the State of New York. On March 11, the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) discussed and voted on amending the SLMP to permit the use of bicycles and state vehicles on old logging roads in the Essex Chain Lakes Primitive Area. Every member of the Park Agency except one voted to amend the…

Alone on the Wall by Alex Honnold with David Roberts W.W. Norton & Company, LTD. 2015 Hardcover, 256 pages, $16.04 For many folks, the mere notion of climbing a sheer cliff, rising vertically for hundreds—or perhaps thousands—of feet, is the stuff of nightmares. Doing so without a rope, or at breakneck speed, fully understanding that your first mistake will almost certainly be your last, is simply beyond comprehension. Welcome to Alex Honnold’s world. Written from the perspective of the world’s consummate adventure athlete, Honnold’s new book, Alone on the Wall, walks the reader through a series of first-person accounts of his most mind-boggling accomplishments. In April 2008 he stunned the climbing world by soloing the 1,200-foot-tall Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park without a rope. His ascent of this iconic…

Snow-sport events are a staple of winter tourism in the Adirondacks, drawing participants and spectators into small villages where they eat in restaurants, stay in hotels, and spend money in stores. This winter, many events had to be canceled because of frequent thaws and a dearth of snow. Among the canceled events were the Lake Placid Loppet, a cross-country-ski race, and a World Cup skiing competition in the Lake Placid region; the annual Adirondack Backcountry Ski Festival, sponsored by the Mountaineer in Keene Valley; and Dewey Mountain Days in Saranac Lake. Dangerous ice conditions led to the cancellation of ice-fishing contests around the Park. In addition, Lookout Mountain, one of three peaks at Whiteface Ski Area, never opened. And snowmobile and cross-country-skiing trails were unusable much of the season. Nordic…

When New York State purchased the Essex Chain Lakes in 2013, it promised to open the door to a variety of recreational opportunities in the 19,600-acre region. So when the Adirondack Park Agency made good on that pledge in March, agreeing to allow bicyclists on old logging roads and facilitate the construction of a snowmobile bridge over the Cedar River, it didn’t come as a surprise. But the process left several people, including one of the agency’s commissioners, with a bad taste in their mouths. APA Commissioner Richard Booth, chairman of the agency’s State Land Committee, accused Governor Andrew Cuomo and his administration of meddling with agency staff as it weighed changes to the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan. Booth said Albany “rigidly controlled” the scope of changes the…

The North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) is the only one of more than twenty species of porcupines in the Western Hemisphere that lives north of Mexico. Primarily an inhabitant of mixed and coniferous forests, it occurs from Alaska across Canada to Nova Scotia and south to West Virginia in the East and Mexico in the West. Here are some interesting facts about our porcupines (mostly from the work of Uldis Roze of Queens College). • They have upwards of thirty thousand sharp, barbed quills that easily detach and become embedded in the body of an attacker. The microscopic barbs cause the quills to ratchet and migrate within a victim’s body, potentially leading to serious complications if the quills are not promptly removed. • Like skunks, porcupines have a strong odor…

Slinky sausage-shaped carnivores that with a ferocity and tenacity out of proportion to their small size hunt mice, voles, squirrels, hares, birds, and more tend to get a bad rap. In the Adirondacks and elsewhere, when we say someone tries to weasel out of something, we mean to flatter neither the weasel nor the weaseler. The character Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It claims he “can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs.” Seems like a rotten idea. Suck the melancholy out of “Danny Boy” and “Waltzing Matilda,” and what do you have left? Weasels abound in the Adirondacks and throughout most of North America. Yet we rarely see them. The scarcity of sightings has much to do with their secretive habits. As ambush predators,…

Big win for the High Peaks I strongly support the growth of the High Peaks Wilderness in the Adirondack Park. I encourage Governor Andrew Cuomo to accept the proposal made by the Adirondack Council and other environmental groups to expand the Wilderness Area to more than 280,000 acres. As a student studying public lands, I believe that the growth and expansion of the High Peaks Wilderness area will allow New York to become among the leaders of wilderness protection and set an example for the rest of the world. I highly agree with Peter S. Paine Jr. and William H. Kissel’s guest opinion, “A bold vision for High Peaks” [January/February 2016], that a fair compromise would be to classify the great majority as Wilderness and allow a Primitive Area for…

YES By WILL DOOLITTLE If bikes are mechanized, so are canoes. And so if you’re going to ban bikes from Wilderness and Primitive Areas, why not canoes? Both bikes and canoes use simple machines to help people move themselves and things they are carrying faster. Canoeists use paddles as levers. Bikes employ at least three of the six classical simple machines—levers, a pulley, and a wheel and axle. I don’t know much about physics, and I didn’t know about the six classical simple machines until I looked them up (inclined plane, wedge, and screw are the other three). But it did strike me, while reading recently Dave Gibson’s argument on Adirondack Almanack against allowing bikes in backcountry areas of the Adirondacks, that bicycles and canoes have a lot in common.…

My hiking pal Marc Howes reads maps the way other people read books. On a vicarious trip through the western Adirondacks he came upon a curious locale, and his map morphed into mystery. “There’s this Beaver River,” he said. “Way out in the middle of nowhere. No roads to it, just a bunch of houses and an abandoned railroad line. What’s with that?” Remembering I had a cabin in Big Moose, the next stop down the tracks, he figured I’d been to Beaver River—but I hadn’t. “It’s kind of like an island,” I said, “You get there by boat. Nine miles up the Stillwater Reservoir. Or by snowmobile in winter. That’s about it. There is an old trail to it, though—the Norridgewock, if you’re interested. A long one.” “I’m in,”…

In 2012, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would purchase some of the most beautiful and most coveted lands and waters in the central Adirondacks: part of the Hudson Gorge, long stretches of the Hudson and Opalescent rivers, the Essex Chain Lakes, OK Slip Falls, the cliffs of Sugarloaf Mountain. But the deal to acquire sixty-five thousand acres of former Finch, Pruyn lands would take several years to complete, and some people say the governor saved the best for last: the Boreas Ponds. It’s no accident that Finch, Pruyn chose Boreas Ponds for a corporate retreat: the paper company’s lodge on the southern shore boasts a stupendous vista of the High Peaks. “The feeling you get floating in the middle of Second Boreas Pond surrounded by peaks like Marcy,…

A lawsuit sparked by a canoeist’s paddling through private land in 2009 may finally be nearing an end, as New York’s highest court heard arguments in March on whether the waterway in question should be open to the public. The Friends of Thayer Lake and the Brandreth Park Association sued Adirondack Explorer Editor Phil Brown following a trip that began at Little Tupper Lake and ended at Lake Lila. In between, Brown paddled a two-mile stretch of water that traverses property owned by the plaintiffs. The Mud Pond Waterway, as it’s sometimes called, comprises Mud Pond, Mud Pond’s outlet, and part of Shingle Shanty Brook. The landowners, who had posted the waterway, sued for trespass after Brown wrote about the trip for the Explorer. The state Department of Environmental Conservation…

Carol says I come up with my best trip ideas at the breakfast table. Since this was the last day of her Adirondack vacation, I felt the pressure to suggest something special. She likes to swim, I like to rock climb, and we both like to bike and hike. If I could combine all four of those activities, I might win her affection for all eternity. It’d be worth a shot, anyway. And so after we finished our cereal and tea, I spread the map on the table and pointed out the dirt road that leads to Hitchins Pond and Lows Ridge. We could bike down the road (which is closed to motor vehicles), hike up Lows Ridge to a spectacular view of the Bog River valley, and finish with…

The two-year journey of a seven-hundred-pound moose named Alice has inspired plans for a long-distance trail that would connect the Adirondacks to Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. The Algonquin to Adirondacks (A2A) Trail would combine existing hiking trails, rail trails, main roads, and back roads to create a four-hundred-mile route bridging the two parks. While conceived as a hiking path, options for bicycles and even paddlers are also under consideration. The organization behind it, Algonquin to Adirondacks Collaborative, wants the proposed A2A Trail to combine existing paths and roads to create a sort of North American version of Spain’s famous Camino de Santiago route. The A2A would take travelers through both wilderness and developed communities, while promoting the idea of a wildlife corridor—a wider swath of protected land for animals to…

Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into the Nest By Julie Zickefoose Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016 Hardcover, 352 pages, $28 Admirers of artist and author Julie Zickefoose’s rapidly growing body of work have come to expect her to raise the bar each time she takes on a new project. Her last book, The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds (2012) combined art and autobiography in a way that charmed readers, including me, and including Oprah Winfrey, who featured the title as a Book of the Week. Zickefoose’s new book, Baby Birds: An Artist Looks into the Nest, serves up watercolors, sketches, stories, and unvarnished solid information, all about wild birds and their babies. The timing is spot on. ’Tis the season for singing, sky dancing, mating, nest building, egg laying,…

For nine years an epic conservation story has been unfolding that involved high finance, high risk, and intriguing politics at both the state and local levels. Although the last chapter has yet to be written, the story’s end is near. The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) recently completed the largest addition to the Forest Preserve in a century by acquiring the fifth and last installment of the fabled Finch, Pruyn lands from the Nature Conservancy (TNC). Although each acquisition included land of spectacular beauty and ecological diversity, the Boreas Ponds Tract is arguably the crown jewel of Finch Pruyn’s Adirondack holdings. TNC held the best for last. As a newly appointed DEC commissioner, I was with Governor Andrew Cuomo on August 5, 2012 when he announced that the state…