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On this 2020 Columbus Day weekend, peak use of parts of the High Peaks and Giant Mountain Wilderness areas in the Adirondack Park were again exceeded. Now is the time to consider a permit reservation or limited entry system for key points of entry into these wilderness areas as necessary, helpful, practical, and practicable.
Adirondack Wild is concerned with a spate of recent comments made to North Country Public Radio that our NYS DEC is not ready to launch a limited entry or permit reservation system. Of course, DEC is not ready right now. They have not been given any direction from the Governor and the DEC Commissioner to get and be ready. Given such a direction and expectation, DEC could be ready in summer and fall of 2021. DEC is fully capable of studying, gaining public input, designing, and implementing with partners a fair and effective limited entry pilot program next year.
I appreciate the Adirondack Council’s 
Even during the summer’s pandemic, development submittals to the Adirondack Park Agency have not slowed very much. Case in point: the proposed developer of Woodward Lake in Fulton County has submitted additional information to the Adirondack Park Agency this month (of July). APA has issued multiple requests for additional information since the applicant, New York Land and Lakes LLC, Oneonta, NY, first submitted an application in 2018 to subdivide an undeveloped 1,100-acre lake and forest near Northville into 37 second home lots, driveways and onsite septic. There is no public water or sewer here and the applicant proposes none.
The protection and planning for the Adirondack Park’s six million acres, one-fifth of the state, rests in large measure on the motivation and independence of the Adirondack Park Agency’s staff and board members in Ray Brook. Seven members were just nominated by Governor Cuomo and confirmed to sit at the APA’s table by the State Senate. How should we think about them? How should we think about them in light of Governor Cuomo’s challenge to reimagine and improve public policies and practices – to “build back better”?
George Davis is a visionary and practiced land use planner and ecologist. In the early years of the Adirondack Park Agency, George helped to conceive, draft, and implement the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan and the park’s Private Land Use and Development Plan.
Marking 50 years of Earth Day (1970-2020) should not pass without paying tribute to the late New York State Senator Bernard C. Smith. The late State Senator and chair of the Senate’s environmental conservation committee combined a strong moral and ethical compass with political talent and negotiating skill to protect and conserve our state’s wild lands, wild rivers and natural resources from 1965-1978. He was a steadfast and very influential Republican proponent for the environment precisely when such a Republican was needed in Albany. He worked his political skills at the State Capitol, but his love for fishing and the outdoors was expressed at his home on Long Island and in the streams and rivers of the Catskills, where he had a camp near the Esopus Creek, and on the upper Hudson River in the Adirondacks.
How has the Adirondack Park Agency fared under Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2020 executive budget proposals? The question hasn’t received any media attention for obvious reasons. It’s a mini state agency, budget-wise.
General inquiries about the Adirondack Almanack should be directed to editor 
Wilderness Training to Match our Mountains
None of what gets debated weekly about the High Peaks is truly untethered from these historical roots. As Almanack contributor Ed Zahniser has written, “take courage for your own work for visitor use management in wilderness. It has a history, a history set in concern for the common good, a history stemming from the American people’s long-standing concern to protect some remnant of our public lands in their wild, natural state. “
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