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If I may add some historical notes to your recent articles on commercial rafting. Pat Cunningham’s involvement with rafting on the Hudson goes back to the 1950s with trips organized by the Northwoods Club in Minerva. It is hard to say, though, if these were commercial trips or that he was the first commercial outfitter in New…
Back in the 1930s as the United States was struggling through the Great Depression, rural parts of the country were at an even greater disadvantage. Many areas had little hope of creating jobs, and homes lacked the basic comforts that urban areas offered, because they had no electric service. As part of the New Deal,…
Every twenty years the state constitution provides the state legislature with an opportunity to ask the voters, statewide, whether they want to have a constitutional convention to try to fix the problems of state government. Once in session, however, these conventions can get out of control and have unintended consequences. The last convention was held…
I’m a mountain-bike rider and a rail fan. So I see both sides on whether the Adirondack Scenic Railroad remains or gets pulled in favor of a recreation trail. I just want to point out that I know of no rail trail in New York, or indeed anywhere, which was created by destroying an existing…
Nearly two decades ago my wife and I biked the thirty-two-mile Elroy-Sparta State Trail in Wisconsin, the country’s first rail trail. Our experience suggests what we can achieve here by converting the ninety-mileAdirondack rail corridor into a year-round recreation trail. The tourism benefits of the Adirondack Rail Trail connecting the Tri-Lakes, and extending south to…
I was more than a little surprised to read in the Explorer that, despite the vast majority of comments (80 percent) opposing the Department of Environmental Conservation’s expansion of hunting and trapping in its Bobcat “Management” Plan (because, God forbid, they simply couldn’t manage without us) the agency went ahead and did what it wanted…
I would like to respond to your recent article [“DEC adopts bobcat plan,” January/February 2013] concerning the hunting and trapping of bobcats. In my seventy years of traveling many back roads in the state I’ve only seen six of the animals in the wild. The most recent was on the Taconic State Parkway in the…
Few institutions are as important to the quality of small-town life as the local school. The public school does far more than prepare the next generation for success—as essential as that mission is. It can be the social center of a community, a major employer, and an economic driver—a key factor in whether families choose…
In his review of John Laundre’s book Phantoms of the Prairie [November/December 2012] Philip Terrie writes that, “In the grand scheme of things there’s nothing that makes a polar bear more significant than a garter snake, a Bengal tiger more worthy of our attention than a chickadee.” But over the last few decades a large body of…
The nuisance-bear article “A joy or a danger?” by Shaun Kittle [November/December 2012] does a good job of highlighting both the problem and the sadness of nuisance-bear situations. This is one issue where everyone agrees the problem with nuisance bears is when people feed bears. With this in mind I was unhappy to not have…