Forest rangers say wilderness restoration policies hampered abilities to search for missing Canadian hiker Leo DuFour, who died on Allen Mountain
By Patrick Tine, Times Union Staff Writer
ALBANY — The herculean effort to rescue a Canadian hiker in the Adirondacks was impeded because forest rangers were unable to use access roads that had been rendered impassible due to the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s wilderness-restoration policies, according to two rangers who led the search.
Leo Dufour, a 22-year-old college student from Vaudreuil-Dorion, a Montreal suburb, had set out to hike 4,340-foot Allen Mountain on Nov. 29 and was reported missing on Dec. 1. Forest rangers and personnel from other state agencies searched for Dufour for over a week in perilous conditions as winter descended across the North Country. Officials scaled back the search on Dec. 9; Dufour’s remains were discovered by hikers last month.
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Two forest rangers told the Times Union that DEC decisions “kneecapped” their chances to find Dufour. There is, they said, widespread discontent across the 153-person forest ranger force about how the department weighs search-and-rescue concerns against conservation priorities.
Jamison Martin, who served as incident commander during the Dufour search, was blunt in his assessment of the trails around Allen Mountain and much of the Adirondacks: “They’re brutal, they’re rugged, they’re s___,” he said. That presents a serious problem for rangers who need to cover a lot of remote ground as quickly as possible when they’re called upon to rescue people in distress, Martin and fellow forest ranger Andrew Lewis said.
For years, rangers had been able to bypass the public trails to move around the mountains more quickly by traveling on unpaved roads previously used by logging companies to move timber and machinery. Under a policy of returning man-made features of the landscape to a more natural state, the DEC “proactively destroyed these roads to the point where it’s unsafe to take machines” like ATVs and snowmobiles, Martin said.
Lewis and Martin said forest rangers had taken to calling the dug-out sections of former logging roads “tank traps.”
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An amendment to the 2018 DEC unit management plan for the Adirondacks ordered “structures designed for motor vehicles such as roads, culverts, and large bridges” to be decommissioned as nonconforming structures unsuitable for the High Peaks wilderness. The forest preserve’s history is marked by similar decisions weighing the imperative to maintain wilderness against acknowledging and supporting ongoing human activity.
The effort to return the land to a state of nature, however, can involve a lot of mechanized effort. “Imagine putting an excavator on a gravel road and (having) it dig up the entire width of the road and make a giant pile of all that material, leaving behind a six-foot-deep hole and a six-foot high berm and then it backs up a little ways and does it again,” Lewis said. “That’s the level of destruction.”
“You can’t even take your ATV 100 feet; that’s how bad these roads got destroyed,” Martin said.
The rangers said the consequences may have been deadly in the Dufour search, which began at 2 a.m. on Dec. 1.
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Though it is impossible to say, Lewis and Martin agreed that Dufour might have been rescued alive if searchers had access to the logging roads, as the ability to more effectively navigate the mountain during the search’s active phase would have been enormously helpful.
Being able to more quickly retrace Dufour’s steps as his tracks were rapidly disappearing under fresh snow “could have made a difference,” Martin said. “There’s a good chance we could have got him that night if it weren’t for those roads.”
‘Cheat routes’
Lewis and Martin first spoke to the Times Union in a conference call arranged by the DEC’s press office. Department spokesperson Jeff Wernick, who was on the call, did not immediately dispute their allegations regarding the decommissioned roads. After the call, Wernick said the men made those comments in their capacity as delegates of the Police Benevolent Association of New York State, the union representing forest rangers. Both men agreed they had a wider latitude to speak freely due to their positions in the union.
Rangers faced life-threatening conditions that were compounded by an inability to use motorized vehicles on the logging road during the search, the rangers said.
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“Everything pointed to (Dufour) being high on the mountain,” Martin said. “We had a singular set of tracks up high (and) nothing down low.” At the outset of the search, two rangers hiked 10 miles through increasingly heavy snow. They hoped to retrace Dufour’s steps. It was an enormous expenditure of time and energy when rescue workers had little to spare, the men said.
One searcher became so fatigued and disoriented that he began calling Lewis’ name instead of Dufour’s, Martin said.
“If (the searchers) would have gone in on machines, they would have been within three miles of the summit in minutes,” Lewis said.
With no ability to drive motorized vehicles on the mountain, some forest rangers were forced to live on the mountain during the active search phase of the operation. Rangers, already laden with equipment, trudged through waist-deep snow carrying canvas tents. Helicopters aided in the search when weather permitted. Forest rangers relied on them to air-drop bundles of firewood to rangers deep in the wilderness.
Lewis, who ran operations and provided Dufour’s family with updates during the search, described the response as “the most complex and challenging ops job I’ve ever had.”
“You’re just throwing darts at the dartboard,” he said. “There’s a constant game of ‘How the hell can I get a ranger in as far as I can before they start burning thousands of calories to cover any amount of distance to effectively search? ‘”
While the hunt was taking place, Martin said he wanted to enlist a private Essex County bulldozer operator to fill in some of the “tank traps” on the logging road to provide better access for the rangers. But superiors at the DEC rejected the idea.
The department explained its reasoning in a statement. “While provisions are made for emergency use of motorized equipment (Environmental Conservation law and the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan) do not contain exceptions for building infrastructure in wilderness areas,” it said. “In addition, the remote nature of the area, winter conditions including frozen ground and mileage of road that would have been required to establish passage for snowmobiles or other emergency vehicles would have made any construction work both challenging and impractical to complete on an expedited timeframe necessary to support an emergency response.”
State regulations, including the Adirondack State Park Land Master Plan cited by the DEC, have made the life-saving efforts of forest rangers harder, Lewis said.
“We don’t manage for emergencies, we manage for the state land master plan,” he said. “It’s gospel.”
The tension between regulations dictating how state lands should be conserved and the realities faced by forest rangers tasked with protecting the people who use the land is a universally acknowledged problem for the men and women who serve, Lewis said.
“Ask any ranger in the state,” he said.
Lewis and Martin questioned why the decision was made in the first place to disfigure the roads, which they describe as “cheat routes” and “sneak routes,” considering the potential usefulness in emergencies.
“I’ve asked that question a lot of times, particularly to the people that actually did the physical work, that called the shots and were pulling the levers on the machine,” Martin said. “And to be frank, every answer I got was a pile of s___.”
He noted that formerly private roads elsewhere in the Adirondack Park, including at Marcy Dam in one of the park’s most popular hiking areas, are used regularly for High Peak rescues.
“Nobody is looking for a paved road and a Walmart in the High Peaks,” Martin said. “You’re not going to find people who love the wilderness more than the rangers, but we’re looking out for the safety and well-being of our folks.”
“DEC prioritizes the safety of both the subjects of search and rescue missions and their rescuers in the face of complex responses in the most remote areas of the state,” Acting Director of the Division of Forest Protection Robert D. Cavanagh said in a statement. “Our top priority is always saving lives and protecting people. In this challenging rescue, DEC considered every option when making difficult life-saving decisions that involved extremely challenging conditions and an inaccessible location. Time and grueling weather conditions were the critical factors that drove the actions executed by all involved.”
Trail’s end
While searchers had found Dufour’s water bottle close to the summit and cellphone tower pings had placed him there, his body was found on May 10 far closer to the end of what the guidebooks describe as an 18-mile “out-and-back” hike: He was only about three miles from the trailhead, and roughly 40 feet off the trail.
Martin said Dufour, described as an experienced hiker for his age, was still strapped into his snowshoes and his pack was buttoned.
“It looked like he was eating a snack and fell over,” he said.
A State Police spokesperson said investigators were still awaiting the results of his autopsy.
The discovery of the hiker’s body jolted Lewis and Martin, who had become close with Dufour’s family during the search.
Lewis said he had just finished breakfast with his children in Plattsburgh and headed to the mountain when he heard the news. “I need to be the one who notifies Leo’s father,” Lewis recalled thinking. “Because it was either Jamison or I that had to do that job, based on the fact we felt so connected with him.”
Both men talked about Dufour’s father, Sylvain, with fondness and respect. (Dufour’s family declined to comment for this article.)
“We have to make a lot of snap judgments on people,” Martin said, “… and Sylvain was just one of those guys where you can tell he’s a good dude with a good soul and a good heart.”
A few weeks before Leo Dufour’s ill-fated trip to Allen Mountain, he and his father had hiked Algonquin Peak, the second-tallest mountain in New York.
“He was such a stand-up kid at a young age,” Lewis said.
While filling in the “tank traps” may have been helpful in this case, it is unlikely that without continual use and maintenance, the old roads would grow in with brush and trees, be choked with blowdown, and subject to washouts that would render them impassable.
The rangers have a difficult job with often grim tasks, but using this attempted rescue as an example of bad policy is farcical. Wilderness involves remoteness and stepping back from the urge to tame it.