The only independent, nonprofit news organization solely dedicated to reporting on the Adirondack Park.
This year’s report finds a lake that routinely produces safe drinking water, swimming and fishing, but that also has problems that are likely to worsen as the world continues warming.
By Ry Rivard
Wild-born lake trout, long a rare catch, thrive in changed waters.
By Ry Rivard
When it was last relicensed, the owners of Treadwell Mills dam on the Saranac River put in a fish ladder so salmon could get through. The ladder, which looks like a wet wheelchair ramp for fish to swim up, has never been used, though, because salmon still can’t get past Imperial Mills. The Lake Champlain…
By Tim Rowland
This 150-acre lake is a popular venue for anglers, boaters, hikers and birdwatchers. It was created nearly two centuries ago when the industrialists dammed up Putts Creek at the head of a precipitous chasm whose falls from the mountains into the Champlain Valley produced an awesome amount of industrial muscle.
By Ry Rivard
Bacteria in Champlain—cupped by New York, Vermont and Quebec—are feeding on polluted runoff from around the lake, especially Vermont’s dairyland, and thriving in water that is warming along with the rest of the globe.
The only way to prevent a bloom is by targeting and stopping the source of excessive nutrients.
This winter, when the National Weather Service reported that Champlain finally froze all the way across to Vermont on March 8, it was like hearing that a steamboat had crossed the lake: typical in the 19th century, improbable in the 21st. The lake ice officially “closed” in almost every year of the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, but has done so only 11 times since 1990.
Loss of ice is one factor in the water temperatures in the lake, where the surface on average has warmed by 6.8 degrees Fahrenheit in August since 1964, according to the Lake Champlain Basin Program.
Among larger state grant approvals were $2.5 million for the Town of Moriah along the southwestern shore of Lake Champlain to reduce overflows at its sanitary sewer system by constructing some five miles of water collection systems, manholes, siphons and pump stations.
By Tim Rowland
The double-crested cormorant made a miraculous recovery after the ban on DDT, a pesticide that had once imperiled the bird’s existence. But while conservationists hailed the return of birds such as the bald eagle, they became increasingly wary of the collateral success represented by the cormorant.