Tabla de contenidos para September/October 2021 en Adirondack Explorer

Perhaps the first niggling thing picking at the back of your head on the drive up to the southern entrance to the High Peaks in Newcomb is that the road is too good. Oh, it has its share of potholes and frost heaves, to be sure, but the thick slab of faded macadam and self-important yellow lines advising motorists when they are allowed to pass and when they are not, are out of keeping with the swamps, forests and wilderness that give the territory the feel of an Alaskan outpost. For 20 minutes of drive time, Tahawus Road keeps up appearances, long after other byways of its ilk would have gone to gravel or dirt, its yellow paint hanging on. MORE PHOTOS Then, as the miles go by, industrial specters…

My day of independence unfolded at dawn. My eyes popped open at 4:18 a.m. on the Fourth of July. It was go time. I had slept in my wheelchair in the Red Fox lean-to at John Dillon Park—a first-in-the-nation camp designed to help people with disabilities enjoy a wilderness experience. I powered up my chair, switched on its headlights, steered down the ramp from the lean-to and crept away from our campsite. My 388-pound chair crunched along a gravel path, rattled the sleeping wooden boards of a long bridge over marshland and rumbled onto a fishing dock just before 5 a.m. Mist danced over Grampus Lake, which was a study in grays. A bullfrog croaked its baritone song. The crescent moon shone in the sky. The lake, woods and clouds…

New York’s highest court recently ruled that the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) violated Article 14, Section 1, the ‘forever wild’ clause, of the New York Constitution. This ruling halted the state’s plans to build hundreds of miles of extra-wide “Class II Community Connector Snowmobile Trails.” This was a historic decision, and it will shape the management of these extraordinary public lands for decades. Class II trails were a unique threat to the Adirondack Forest Preserve. They required cutting nearly 1,000 trees per mile and were built using heavy machinery to grade a 10-to 20-foot-wide corridor. Class II trails were a new kind of trail in the forest preserve, nothing like foot trails, a point that was emphasized by the court. In the wake…

At 8:45 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2020, Charlotte Brynn eased herself into the gently lapping waters of Lake George from the dock at Snug Harbor Marina in Ticonderoga. She was wearing a one-piece competitive-style bathing suit and a bathing cap, plus goggles and a glow stick tied to her suit. There was no moon, and the water temperature was in the low 70s. In the dark, August night, accompanied by a friend in a kayak and several others on a pontoon boat, the swimmer from Stowe, Vermont, made her way to what is known as “Diane’s Rock,” a boulder a few feet from shore. Then she started swimming south. The next stop: the public dock in Lake George Village, 32 miles and an unknown number of hours away. Brynn,…

When a musicologist friend of mine from Manhattan came to the Adirondacks for a long weekend, he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and exclaimed, loudly enough for me to cringe when I heard him, “Beethoven’s Fifth!” I looked around in vain for a symphony orchestra that might have magically materialized on Hull’s Falls Road, in Keene, and then studied the face of my guest, which looked entirely baffled. “Did you hear that bird sing?” he asked, loudly, aggressively. “Of course,” I answered, “I’m a birdwatcher, and listener.” “What the (expletive deleted) bird was that?” he asked. “A song sparrow,” I noted, “you have them in Manhattan, very common.” He looked me in the eyes with a very steady, very serious stare and said, matter-of-factly, “Do you realize the first…

As we paddled up to the shoreline on Henderson Lake, we ran into two young men. One was sitting on a red canoe filtering water through a pump while the other stood nearby. The pair looked a bit worn and sweaty, as one will after hiking all day. They had just returned from Mount Adams, a nearby trail. Max Morton and Carter Rohl were on the fourth day of their nine-day camping trip on the lake. Morton had just graduated from Horseheads High School near Elmira and this was his trip to celebrate. He started planning this trip in January, poring over maps and saving money for gear and trip-related expenses. He chose Henderson because he wanted to go somewhere secluded, and he said the location had lived up to…

The work chant echoed from the hillside and across Lake Colden as a line of men leaned on a rope strung through a treetop pulley. “Oy! … Oy! … Oy! … Oy!” It was the sound of an enthusiastic band of volunteers—outdoorspeople who joke that they toil weekends in the woods because they’re “dumber’n a bag of hammers”—pulling the iconic Adirondack lean-to into the future. That’s something that the crew from Lean-2Rescue does both literally (pulling the Beaver Point Lean-to log-by-log to restore it in a state-approved new location away from the water) and figuratively (salvaging historic structures that would otherwise rot and return to the forest). It’s a grueling job that some of them say they would never do for pay, but would go out of their way to…

When a new leader takes over, an organization has an opportunity to step back and assess how it is doing—in particular, to figure out whether it is operating effectively and fulfilling its mission. That moment is now for the Adirondack Park Agency, with the arrival of its new boss, Gov. Kathy Hochul. She has a chance now, in the early days of her administration, to renew the APA’s focus and give it direction that respects its historic charter. It’s change that is badly needed. The person in the governor’s chair directly influences the APA by appointing its board and the board’s chair. It’s the governor who determines the resources that the agency will have to do its job. The governor can try to manipulate the board’s work or can be…

YES I am not surprised at the resistance. Apparently, it is OK to have a liquor store in a community without much thought, but not a legalized marijuana store. Alcohol is proven to be extremely harmful on socioeconomic, family, community and health fronts. Recent studies have linked even moderate alcohol consumption to many forms of cancer. I am reminded of the old joke about getting five guys together. With alcohol you have a bar fight, with pot, they start a garage band. We are OK with people driving up to Stewart’s, buying a couple of sixpacks and climbing back into their car, but not the sale of legalized pot. I hear claims that pot is a gateway drug. This is totally unproven. Kids watching their parents and older siblings getting…

When Jason Thurston stays at his favorite Adirondack campground, he can participate in activities that are out of reach for him in other outdoor spaces. He can travel down trails to scenic overlooks or a backcountry lake. He can sleep in a leanto at night and cook over an open fire. He particularly loves to watch the sunset from an observation deck overlooking the lake. “To wake up and hear the loons and the birds is just so peaceful,” he said. For Thurston, camping is no easy task: He’s a quadriplegic who uses a power wheelchair to get around. But thanks to the accessible facilities at International Paper-John Dillon Park in Long Lake, he can spend days in the wild and watch night fall beside a campfire. The fully accessible…

I already owned a road bike and a mountain bike. Did I really need a gravel bike? Was the latest cycling trend just a lot of industry hype? After initial hesitation, I decided to get one, and since then I’ve ridden it a few hundred miles on dirt roads, logging roads, easy single-track trails and, when necessary, pavement. I was having so much fun that I sensed my girlfriend Carol was envious. For her birthday, I surprised her with her own gravel bike. That weekend we took the bikes out for a ride I had scoped out a few weeks earlier. We started near Cranberry Lake and rode more than 18 miles to Horseshoe Lake, following logging roads, an old railroad bed and a dead-end dirt road. We were on…

Goldenrods epitomize open, sunny Adirondack places in late summer and early fall. A low, green, invasive weed called common ragweed blooms in late summer, too, and it fills the air with light, fine, airborne pollen that is the chief cause of itchy eyes and runny noses this time of year. Not a year goes by that someone doesn’t tell me goldenrod provokes their allergies. Does it? Watch a goldenrod patch even on the most windy day and you won’t see pollen taking flight. That’s because goldenrods produce relatively small quantities of the stuff, and the grains are large and sticky, beautifully suited for transportation by insects. And insects love goldenrods, which serve up a bounty of nectar and pollen. Watch a gathering of the flowers, and the diversity of flies,…

Some Adirondackers on the east side of the park this summer reported seeing more timber rattlesnakes than in past years. Chris DePinto, a landscaper who lives north of Split Rock Mountain near Lake Champlain, told Adirondack Explorer correspondent Tim Rowland that there had been 11 sightings on his short residential road by the start of July. That’s more than he’s used to encountering. Champlain Area Trails Stewardship Coordinator Bill Amadon said he sees them in lakeside rock formations, but not much farther west. The rattlers appear mostly black, and they rattle a warning when approached. New York protects them as a threatened species. They likely once lived in most hilly parts of the state except for higher elevations in the Adirondacks, Catskills and Tug Hill. In the Adirondacks, they are…