Why we Need Wolves

          Wolves are no strangers to the Adirondacks. This may come as a surprise to many of you due to their non-existence in the Park for the last 100 years, but wolves need to make a comeback. Humans do not hunt many species the wolves normally hold in check; those they do are not hunted as efficiently as they are by wolves. Animals like beavers and deer are wreaking havoc on the Park. Beavers have changed the flow of rivers throughout the Park and pose a problem to the navigable waters. I speak from experience; this past summer I had to portage my canoe loaded with supplies over numerous beaver dams on the Marion River. Not to say beavers are inherently bad for an ecosystem, but if the population is too large they can cause problems such as erosion and water blockage.

Now the reintroduction of wolves can put people on edge; after all you are reintroducing a predator equal to man on the food chain. However, the reintroduction of wolves has already occurred in Yellowstone National Park. Since their reintroduction in 1995, Yellowstone has become much healthier. Wolves eat deer; which had no major natural predators for 70 years, and had cut the vegetation of the park down to a fraction of what it should have been. Wolves began to eat the deer, but also they began to change their behavior, forcing them to stay away from riverbanks, where the deer could easily be trapped. This in turn allowed for the quick regrowth of the plants around the rivers. As the video posted in the link below says, some trees quintupled in size. Because the plants were allowed to grow, their roots reinforced the riverbanks, which had become soft and prone to cave ins. The lack of erosion forced the rivers to flow straighter, and created a healthier flow rate of water for other organisms that rely on the rivers. Now Yellow Stone has larger game than the Adirondacks for the most part. Consequently the wolf population should not get out of control if reintroduced, because they would not have as much to feed on. Based on the model of Yellow Stone, the rivers and waterways of the Adirondacks will be healthier after just a decade with wolves back in the park.

 How Wolves Help

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-wolves-can-save-ecosystem

Frigid Winters Aren't a Walk in the Park

With a blue sky peaking through the clouds overhead and only six people sharing the back country trails of the High Peaks in the Adirondacks with us, one would normally be shocked to see the trails this empty on such a beautiful day.  However, given the 40 mile per hour winds practically pulling my fellow hikers and I off Skylight Mountain's exposed summit, the two feet of snow we fought through to arrive here, and the average temperature for the week somewhere between -10 and -30 degrees Fahrenheit, winter in the Adirondacks is no walk in the park.

Be it guides, gift shops, or water parks, a large part of the economy in the park is supported by tourism.  Of the 10 million visitors the park annually receives, 100,000 of them are seasonal residents come to live on the private land within the park's boundaries.  The remaining visitors may be drawn to the scenic and historic towns and lakes spread throughout the park, but the main attraction is Lake Placid and the High Peaks region of the northeastern section of the Adirondacks.  Boasting a fully equipped winter Olympic Stadium that hosted the games in 1932 and 1980, Lake Placid is a central hub for sports fans and outdoorsy people alike.  It is only a 15 minute drive from the sports complex to the Adirondack Loj, one of the central outposts into the High Peaks wilderness.  Come to this region on any weekend in the summer, and you'll meet dozens of friends hiking along the trail.

However, as soon as the nights turn chilly and frost coat the tent, the number of people on the trails and within the Adirondacks drastically drops.  Between September 1 and March 31, a period of seven months, the park experiences only 40% of its total annual visitors.  Where as within the three months between June 1 and August 31, 49% of the yearly tourists visit the park.  Whenever I am in the Adirondacks, I notice the versatility of the companies fighting to survive.  With too few people exploring the park in the winter, residents and companies must adjust to the change in economic demand.  Many companies that cater towards outdoor summer sports, such as canoeing and paddle boarding, hide their snow mobiles for rent until the winter, when they switch over and cater towards winter recreation sports.  The ingenuity is all for naught if no one is there to buy the gear, though, and increasing tourism in the winter months is a constant battle against the elements.  In order to survive,  Adirondackers need to find a new pull to the wilderness that does not include sleeping in -30 degrees.  Maybe the Olympics need to make a third round through the park in order to reinvigorate the winter spirit.





Work Cited:
Adirondack Forest Preserve Visitor Survey Summary:
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.esf.edu/nywild/publications/docs/Visitor-study-summary.pdf&sa=U&ei=YsrPVLGgFoubyQTz04CoDg&ved=0CCEQFjAB&sig2=2eMq9rPD18NEcmKzYJBweA&usg=AFQjCNEdsADU_6tYvNEoWdeZ3rPseuCzVQ

Lake Placid: Olympic Center and Lake Placid Museum:
http://www.lakeplacid.com/do/family-fun/olympic-center-and-lake-placid-olympic-museum

The Adirondacks. Schneider, P. 1997.

The Changing Face of Farming

Growing up in the Midwest, my image of farming was flat cornfields that extend until they touch the horizon, run by the same family that owned the land 200 years ago. In his book Wandering Home, Bill McKibben brought my attention to a different kind of farming. On his journey from Ripton, Vermont to his home in the Adirondacks, Bill stopped at his friend Chris Granstrom’s farm as well as the Middlebury College Organic Gardens. These visits proved that the face of farming has changed from a career passed down from generation to generation to a new venture taken on by hopeful college graduates with little to no experience in the area.

            While college was originally treated as a way to get opportunities off the farm, farming is now accepted as a legitimate career path after obtaining a college degree. A 2012 New York Times article entitled “After Graduating From College, It’s Time to Plow, Plant and Harvest” focuses on this rise in popularity and notes that the “Agricultural Census in 2007 showed a 4 percent increase in the number of farms, the first increase since 1920, and some college graduates are joining in the return to the land.” With the growing focus on living an environmentally-conscious life and eating locally, it makes sense that more young people would be drawn to the root of the movement through college farms and summer experiences such as “WWOOFing” (volunteering on an organic farm).

            Though McKibben wrote specifically about the surge in first-generation, college-educated farmers in Vermont, the Adirondack agricultural environment has benefited from this trend as well.  The 2014 article in the Adirondack Explorer entitled “A New Crop of Farmers,” profiles several young farmers who have experienced success farming the land in the Champlain Valley. The article credits the rise of the Slow Food Movement and the “fundamental shift in thinking about food and where it comes from” as the reason behind the surge of young adults pursuing careers in agriculture. Compared to Vermont, where farming has long served as a substantial part of the economy, the decline in agriculture in the Champlain Valley over recent decades left many opportunities for first-time farmers in New York. Though these hopeful farmers face many hurdles during their first years, they learn from their experience and have proven that small-scale farming in the Adirondacks is a viable opportunity. With the support of organizations such as the Adirondack Farmers' Market Cooperative and the use of creative techniques such as growing in greenhouses and hoop houses to combat the long winters, farmers are able to sell their home-grown food locally and support themselves. 

Sources:

Wandering Home, Bill McKibben

“After Graduating From College, It’s Time to Plow, Plant and Harvest,” by Natalie Kitroeff, The New York Times

“A New Crop of Farmers,” Tracy Frisch, The Adirondack Explorer

“Farming in the Adirondacks,” Adirondack Journal

Thoughts From an Ice Climbing Trip...

Yesterday, a group of Hamilton Outing Club members went on an adventure to the Central Adirondacks for a day of ice climbing.  While we were climbing, I realized that I had rarely, if ever, seen other climbers at this particular climbing area, even though I climb there just about every weekend.  Although the area boast a short, easy hike in and a decent selection of fun climbs.  This climbing area never seems to attract the same crowds that the areas in Keene Valley and Lake Placid do.
If you read a history of ice climbing in the Adirondacks, you'll learn about Jim Goodwin's early ascents of Gothics, Colden's Trap Dike, and the Chapel Pond Slabs, Yvon Couinard introducing Adirondack climbers (and the rest of the world) to new crampon and ice tool technology that allowed him to climb things previously thought to be impossible, and all of the hard climbs that were done at Chapel Pond, the Cascade Lakes, and Poke-O-Moonshine Mountain in the last few decades.  But there's one thing all these climbs have in common- they are all in or near the High Peaks Region.  Of the 180+ pages in Don Mellor's Adirondack ice climbing guide book, Blue Lines, only 12 are devoted to areas no in either the Keene, Lake Placid, or Lake Champlain regions.  Since the book was published, there have been many developments in climbing areas in the Central and Southern Adirondacks, however, there is still a clear difference between a climbing or hiking trip to the High Peaks and one just about anywhere else, namely the amount of other people you encounter that are also climbing or hiking.
While the Adirondacks aren't nearly as crowded as any national park, it isn't uncommon for the trail of Cascade and Porter Mountains to become a human foot traffic highway in the summer, with a line of cars stretching half a mile down Route 73.  Bill McKibben's comment in Wandering Home about the hundreds of hikers that can routinely be found on the summit of Mount Marcy on a beautiful summer weekend, while not a single person in on a nearby mountain lower than 4000' in elevation, is unfortunately true.  Although I enjoy regularly having a climbing area to myself, the reason I do is because everyone else in up in the High Peaks.  The concentration of outdoor enthusiasts in the High Peaks region likely has implications beyond having to wait in line for a climb, and raises the question of the impact that people have, not only on the land and its ecosystems, but on the surrounding communities and their economies.

Texts:
Blue Lines: An Adirondack Ice Climber's Guide - Don Mellor
Wandering Home - Bill McKibbon

The Accessibility of Nature: The Pros and Cons

Improving access to the Adirondack Park remains a topic of contention among visitors and dwellers of the park. Interstate 87 for instance, which runs through the park from Albany to Canada, has made the park more accessible, reducing the trip from New York City from ten hours five or six hours.   Yet, John Davis refers to the highway as “the worst ecological disaster in Adirondack History.”  Evidently, there are costs and benefits to making the Adirondacks more readily available.

            Efforts to make nature more visitor-friendly are evident throughout the world and could provide some guidance on how to approach issues surrounding access to the Adirondacks.  In Cape Town, South Africa for example, there is a cable car that transports tourists to the top of Table Mountain, one of the seven natural wonders of the world.  This allows visitors the option to bypass the hike usually required to reach the mountain’s peak and resultantly, broadens the scope of people able to experience Table Mountain.  Yet, I must admit, during my own experience, the crowds brought by the cable car diminished the aesthetic appeal and quiet, natural beauty that Table Mountain retains.

            Interstate 87 in New York has served a similar purpose to Table Mountain’s cable car, making land available in the Adirondacks for tens of thousands second-home owners and vacationers.  Unfortunately, as I found on Table Mountain, increased access to nature interferes with the qualities of nature for which many hold it dear.  Kevin Fedarko highlights the magnitude of this problem in an article arguing against the construction of a tram traveling into the heart of the Grand Canyon.  He argues, increased access “would amount...to the annulment of a space whose value resides not in its accessibility to the masses, but precisely the reverse. It is a violation of the very thing that makes the space holy.”  Bill Mckibben points to this issue in the Adirondacks, stating that the “High Peaks Wilderness in particular, gets too much use.” 

There could be positive ramifications of improving the Adirondacks’ accessibility however.  With more visitors, the park gains supporters and appreciators who will likely advocate for the park’s preservation as a result.  In fact, when the park was created, the individuals promoting the protection of the Adirondacks were those from Albany and New York who owned vacation homes in the park.  Thus, the question remains how to increase proponents for protecting a place without jeopardizing the very essence of the place itself.

Sources: 

Wandering Home, by Bill McKibben

A Cathedral Under Siege: Two Development Projects Threaten the Grand Canyon, by Kevin Fedarko, The New York Times

Wild

    Bill McKibben references nature in his novel Wandering Home stating, "Enough to reorient their compass in a new direction, too. Most of the time we live under a kind of spell, a lulling enchantment sung by the sirens of a consumer society, telling us what will make us happy. That enchantment is a half truth at best-you don't need to look very hard at our culture to see that deep happiness is not it's hallmark, " (136). This passage struck me on a similar chord that the recent film Wild did. Wild tells the story of Cheryl Strayed a young women crushed by her mother’s death at just 45 who spirals into drug addiction.

Wild captures Strayed’s last ditch effort to find herself as she embarks on a solo trek through the 1,100 mile Pacific Coast Trail. As Strayed struggles with the difficulties of such a long journey she begins to reorient her life and depicts the appeal of escaping from civilization for a short time. There may have been films more technical than "Wild" this year or even more ambitious but I find it hard to believe any were as raw. It touches at a part of society worth examining, “My mother used to say something that drove me nuts. There's a sunrise and a sunset every day, and you can choose to be there for it -- you can put yourself in the way of beauty,”(Strayed).

McKibben and Strayed take very different journeys as they walk through nature but they certainly both come out on the other side better for having done so. Wild may win Reese Witherspoon the Oscar but more importantly the film has garnered a 300% increase in hikers on the PCT.  The interaction of humans and nature is necessary for survival on a physical level, that much is obvious, but it has become apparent to me that nature plays an important role in mental sanity as well. It became clear Strayed thought so as well as she ended her book with, “It only had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way,” (Strayed).

Texts
Wandering Home Bill McKibben
Wild Cheryl Strayed

What Wendell Berry Has All Figured Out

I put down Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home and said to my room mate, “you know, Wendell Berry is the man”, and proceeded to read out loud to him Berry’s nine line poem that he wrote for his friend’s funeral. The fact that I was reading poetry to a peer is indicative of just how powerful Berry’s writing really is. After reading that poem, I remembered another one of his poems that I had been forced to memorize in high school, a poem called The Wild Geese. I went back and read it, and was struck a second time by its powerful simplicity. The poem describes “horseback on a Sunday morning”, fields, clouds, persimmon seeds, geese, and other pieces of nature and finishes with the line “What we need is here.” It seems to me that Berry’s writing is so effective at describing the the simple existence of nature because it is so simple itself. This same simplicity in turn is what is so alluring about the Adirondacks. 

“What we need is here” is obviously something that we all can say. Food in the dining hall, friends a few steps away and academic pursuits seem to be “what we need,” but I think Wendell Berry meant more than simply “the basic necessities of life are here”. He meant that something here, in nature, is essential for our existence. Why do people go to the Adirondacks? Why do people go to the wilderness at all? Is it for the fresh? For the exercise? For the wildlife? For the simplicity. What Wendell Berry realized, and what I am beginning to realize, is that modern life is hectic, cluttered, cramped and what we really need is the open space, room to breathe, and the simplicity that only nature can provide.