Public gets first peek at Follensby Pond through guided tours

The Nature Conservancy develops educational access and research programs at storied lake 

By Zachary Matson

Sitting over 100 feet of water in a pontoon boat on Follensby Pond on Monday morning, Jeff Webber of The Nature Conservancy’s Adirondack Chapter switched on his fish finder and noted the presence of a healthy gathering of lake trout below.

“I’ve got it set up to only show the larger fish,” he said. “The trout love this section of the lake.”

Follensby Pond and its 102-foot-deep bathtub-shaped lakebed, coupled with a history of conservation-minded ownership, houses a rare population of wild lake trout facing no angling pressure. 

The uniqueness of the fishery, as well as the property’s storied cultural history, are the main reasons TNC decided to limit public access to the 970-acre lake and sign a conservation easement with the state to establish a scientific research preserve on about half of the overall property’s more than 14,000 acres. It’s also why the public has been so interested in seeing the property opened to access.

Hopes among some that the property would be opened more widely have waned as TNC has kept it off limits since purchasing the property in 2008.

The nonprofit, though, has said it remains committed to facilitating access to the property for the general public through curated educational tours. It is also working with Indigenous communities, religious leaders and others with a connection to the property’s history to facilitate access and expand the public narrative about Follensby.    

“People are interested in Follensby for so many different reasons,” said Peg Olsen, executive director of the national conservation group’s Adirondack chapter.

Limited public access

The Nature Conservancy has started to open the gates to more visitors this summer, but the organization is going slow as it continues to fine-tune the details of how public tours will look in the future.

Partnering with the Wild Center, TNC hosted its first public tour at Follensby Pond earlier this month. Olsen said it was one of the fastest Wild Center tours to fill up. The organizations hosted a group of 16 visitors, ages 13 to 80, to explore the property on foot and by boat. Dividing into paddlers, boaters and walkers, visitors learned about the property’s fishery and ecology as well as its history. Some of the tours will include a visit to the rock identified as the most likely site of the famed Philosophers’ Camp, where in 1858 a group of intellectuals from Boston camped and explored connections between nature and art and the importance of wilderness.    

The tour ended at a long, sandy beach near the lake’s outlet, where visitors shared in a moment of gratitude. 

“Hearing from a 13-year-old, ‘I understand why you can’t open this to the public, there are so many things to protect and cherish,’ is so special to me,” Olsen said.

The conservancy is planning two more public tours this year, in September and October, and planning another slate of tours next year. 

Restoring the land and its story

The organization has also been hosting others at the property with a connection to its history. Unitarian Universalist ministers from Schenectady were scheduled to visit this month, and a partnership with the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry is exploring Follensby’s Indigenous legacy. 

TNC leaders, while acknowledging the Indigenous history is “not our story to tell,” hope to showcase a more complete story of the property’s history, including how Native peoples inhabited the region.  

“We are trying to understand the deep history,” Olsen said. “We used to talk about the Philosophers’ Camp in the 1850s, but there’s a lot more to it.”

The organization also hopes to reconnect Indigenous people to Follensby.

“It’s not just seen as a historical presence, it’s a continued presence on the land,” said Jess Grant, who helps coordinate educational access at Follensby.

The site also has a long and important conservation history. When state conservation officials in the 1980s sought to reestablish nesting bald eagles in the state, one of two locations to host the reintroduced eagles from Alaska was Follensby. The remnants of the towers set up to encourage nesting remains visible on the shore. 

“Every eagle you see in the Adirondacks came from here,” Grant said. 

Science preserve

After acquiring the 14,600-acre property in 2008 and while working through other land deals with the state, TNC funded research to evaluate the Follensby Pond fishery and what should become of it.  

The time it took to manage transferring the other land parcels to the state enabled TNC officials to consider a different approach at Follensby, where they had initially planned to also transfer to the state Forest Preserve.  

“We learned a lot about this place and how special it was,” said Michelle Brown, a conservation scientist with TNC. 

One researcher who studied Follensby’s lake trout population during that time called it an “old growth fishery,” Brown said. 

In a study published in 2016, the lake’s only scientific survey to date, researchers estimated Follensby’s population of lake trout at least a year old at around 7,300, including around 2,300 considered a fishable size, 1,300 at sexual maturity and a little more than 100 trophy-sized trout topping 30 inches. The lake’s trout were estimated to reach up to 24 years old.

The study also examined how the trout population would respond to different levels of fishing pressure. The results suggested that Follensby’s slow-growing and slow-maturing lake trout population could be threatened if opened to anglers. Even if the population seems large, a scientist involved in that research previously told the Explorer, with such slow sexual maturation, fishing could quickly harm the population. 

So, TNC decided to restrict access to the lake and instead establish a scientific outpost to study lake trout and climate change in a protected watershed. 

The science carried out at Follensby will be guided by a consortium that includes TNC, the state Department of Environmental Conservation, Cornell University, the Adirondack Watershed Institute at Paul Smith’s College, SUNY-ESF, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey. 

The consortium has outlined the site’s primary research objectives and are working out the details of what specific long-term monitoring and studies are needed to meet those goals. A DEC-funded research buoy has collected data on water temperature and oxygen for a few years, but TNC has yet to expand the monitoring infrastructure as the specifics are ironed out.

“If you say you are going to monitor something long term, you have to do it,” Olsen said.

Follensby did join the Adirondack Lakes Assessment Program and will be a study lake for the Survey of Climate and Adirondack Lake Ecosystems set to examine hundreds of Adirondack lakes in the coming years.  

Terrestrial monitoring plots have also been established and, with 75% of Follensby’s watershed under TNC control, scientists will be able to examine how the land relates to water quality for decades to come.

“We have a chance to do freshwater conservation in a different way,” Brown said. 

Photo at top: Follensby Pond, owned by the Nature Conservancy, as seen on Monday, August 18. Photo by Mike Lynch