Once I had the pleasure of meeting Al Breisch, then New York State DEC’s de facto Herpetologist-in-Chief, at a lecture he gave for the Wild Center before it had even been built. Breisch impressed me. He was precise and as armed with accurate … [Read more...] about The Snake and the Salamander: Reptiles and Amphibians from Maine to Virginia
Big, Wild, and Connected: Scouting an Eastern Wildway from the Everglades to Quebec
The mission of John Davis is not entirely dissimilar to that of the biblical Noah. Davis is out to protect a broad platform of species in an unconventional way that faces both long odds and more than a few arched eyebrows. The central idea is … [Read more...] about Big, Wild, and Connected: Scouting an Eastern Wildway from the Everglades to Quebec
Western Trails
With this year’s publication of Western Trails, the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) completed the most recent overhaul of its Forest Preserve Series of hiking guidebooks—and the club is already hard at work on the next edition of the series. ADK’s … [Read more...] about Western Trails
Bogs and Fens
Bogs and fens are wetlands. At least they are if you can call a wet place with nothing but peat, or sphagnum moss, underfoot “land.” Such features, not quite land and not quite water, dot the Adirondack landscape. Whenever and wherever we hike, we … [Read more...] about Bogs and Fens
John Apperson’s Lake George
In the pantheon of Adirondack conservation greats, the name of John Apperson Jr. (1878-1963) is not as well-known as it deserves to be. His great-niece, independent scholar and historian Ellen Apperson Brown, has taken a major stride toward … [Read more...] about John Apperson’s Lake George
Escape from Dannemora
In the summer of 2015, while driving my beat-up Toyota truck through the back roads of northern Clinton and Franklin counties documenting the Great Dannemora Prison Break, I kept thinking that I had been swallowed whole by a tabloid news story, or … [Read more...] about Escape from Dannemora
