The only independent, nonprofit news organization solely dedicated to reporting on the Adirondack Park.
Desperate Steps is a collection of twenty narratives of backcountry accidents and misadventures in the Northeast. The incidents are about evenly divided among Maine, New Hampshire, and the Adirondacks with one incident in Vermont and two in the Catskills. Most of the incidents occurred within the past fifteen years, but the book includes a 1963 incident on Mount Katahdin where both the…
Carol and Phil enjoy a wild ride and hike and swim on trip to Lows Ridge. We almost forgot about the rock climb. By PHIL BROWN 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…
Greetings, dear readers, and thank you for joining us for this exciting moment in the history of the Adirondack Explorer. Since you are reading this, I know you have opened the cover of the new-look Explorer and ventured this far into a publication that we have redesigned in the hope of serving you even better. As you read, you will find that we…
Split Rock Mountain, the locale of an ancient boundary between nations, is the exotic and mysterious Far East of the Adirondacks. It’s home to rattlesnakes, bobcats, eagles, and peregrine falcons and the scene of a marital murder, a mining tragedy, and Revolutionary War intrigue. You’ll find here disappearing ponds, Lake Champlain’s sheerest shoreline, panoramic vistas, and a wonderfully varied network of trails.
By Tom Woodman 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…
The flow of history Book review by Michael Virtanen Jeff Dickinson’s history of running the whitewater of the Hudson River is weighty with research: it has 111 pages of footnotes and bibliography. Those follow his 237-page narrative that launches with descriptions of the landscape and Colonial explorers, flows on through decades of log drivers and…
The article about snowshoeing to Mount Adams [“Snowy adventures,” January/February 2016] brought back memories of my tenure with the state Department of Environmental Conservation during the summers of 1959 and 1960. Forest Ranger Ed Shevlin, John Dever, and I worked on the trail to Adams, clearing, brush cutting, and building ladders up and over the…
The Explorer has been one of our favorite publications for a long time. One thing we’ve always appreciated was its sensible approach to controversial issues. With that in mind, I wrote the editor and asked why the Explorer was doing a very one-sided series on the possible impact of anthropogenic global warming hypothesis (AGW). He…
Regarding the navigation-rights case over the Mud Pond Waterway in the Adirondacks, I see that the people suing Explorer Editor Phil Brown for trespass are relying on an argument that the contested waterway is not used for commercial purposes and so shouldn’t be considered open to the public. I would think that if an outfitter…
I am sure my feelings are not the only ones in regard to the articles in the January/February issue concerning diversity and the pope’s views on supposed “climate change.” Having loved the Adirondack Park since my first visit in 1947, catching my first dry-fly brook trout in the West Branch of the Ausable River the…