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By Phil Brown
I do a lot of backcountry skiing, and so over the years I have collected a half-dozen pairs of skis. Not as many as some skiers, but enough to make some people wonder if I’m obsessed. Maybe I am, but not about skis. I have far more ski hats. I must own nearly twenty: wool,…
By Phil Brown
State Supreme Court Justice Richard T. Aulisi is scheduled to hear arguments in a navigation-rights lawsuit at 9:30 a.m. Friday in the Fulton County Courthouse. The suit was filed after I paddled through private property owned by the Friends of Thayer Lake and the Brandreth Park Association in 2009 while journeying from Little Tupper Lake…
By Phil Brown
We took advantage of fall sunshine yesterday to climb the historic Wiessner Route on Upper Washbowl Cliff with Matt Wiech, a guide with the Eastern Mountain Sports Climbing School. Fritz Wiessner, a top climber in his day, put up the route in 1938. Like most of his routes, this one is regarded as moderate in…
By Phil Brown
State officials felt they had no choice but to kill an injured moose that had been hanging out in the Ausable River in Wilmington Notch, according to David Winchell, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Conservation. “The primary factor was its deteriorating condition,” Winchell said this morning. “It was not able to move out…
By Phil Brown
Protect the Adirondacks and the Sierra Club want to see e-mails between the Adirondack Park Agency and Governor Andrew Cuomo’s staff to determine if the governor’s office improperly influenced the APA’s approval of a massive resort in Tupper Lake. John Caffry, the attorney for the two environmental groups, said the APA acknowledges that the APA…
By Phil Brown
The state is on track to buy more than nineteen thousand acres of former Finch, Pruyn lands by the end of the year, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Karyn Richards of DEC’s Division of Lands and Forests outlined the department’s plans to the Adirondack Park Agency on Thursday afternoon. Over the next…
By Phil Brown
As I often do, I climbed Baker Mountain on my lunch hour today and was surprised by the amount of leaves that already have come down. As you can see from the photo above, the trail was covered in places. It struck me as a little early to see so many leaves on the ground.…
By Phil Brown
Conservation leaders from the Garden Club of America will be meeting in the Adirondacks over the next week and discussing a variety of issues with environmentalists, scientists, local farmers, and others. Nancy Howard, a former owner of the Wawbeek on Upper Saranac Lake, arranged the annual field trip and lined up an impressive array of…
By Phil Brown
When is summer over? When the calendar says? When the temperature drops to the low thirties overnight (as it has in Saranac Lake recently)? Or when you go to Barkeater Cliffs on a sunny weekend and find no one there? The Barkeaters are popular climbing cliffs in Keene. They’re reached by a half-hour hike from…
By Phil Brown
Protect the Adirondacks and the Sierra Club contend that the permits for the Adirondack Club and Resort in Tupper Lake have expired and the developer must begin the lengthy application process all over again. In January, the Adirondack Park Agency approved the permits with conditions. Among them, the developers were told to conduct a wildlife…