When out on assignment in the Forest Preserve, I seem to take photos of every trail sign I come across. However, after I download them, they disappear into my archives and are never seen again.

This image isn’t necessarily one of my favorite trail sign shots, but the photo assignment when I took the image was interesting.

That day, in late June, I was tasked with meeting writer Betsy Kepes at 10:30 a.m. at the Cold River near Shattuck Clearing. Kepes was writing a story about backpacking through lowlands in the western High Peak Wilderness.

So that day I got up early, paddled roughly 8 miles to the lean-to at the north end of Long Lake, where I could connect with the Northville-Placid Trail. From there, I hiked in the rain for another 5 miles to meet Betsy and her two friends at a bridge over the Cold River.

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With over 350,000 described species, the beetles are insects with many different attributes. The scientific name for the beetles, Coleoptera, is based on the Greek word “koleopteros,” meaning sheathed wing. Beetles in the Adirondack region show that this sheath can take a variety of forms.

The outer pair of wings located on a beetle is known as the elytra. For the ironclad beetles, the elytra are so hard that some of these specimens can resist being run over by cars. Ironclad beetles native to New York tend to be small, brown denizens of rotting trees. The drab hardness of ironclad beetles contrasts sharply with the flexible, flashy wings found on net-winged beetles. There are several species of net-winged beetles in New York, including the banded net-winged beetle Calopteron discrepans Newman (Coleoptera: Lycidae), the reticulated net-winged beetle Calopteron reticulatum Fabricius (Coleoptera, Lycidae), and the end band net-winged beetle Calopteron terminale Say (Coleoptera, Lycidae), which is shown in the picture. The transverse depression across the wings, combined with the equal heights of its wing ridges, are the diagnostic features of the end band net-winged beetle.

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As 2020 starts to wind down (sad, right?), I find myself reflecting on how the Adirondack Explorer has evolved this year. We’ve come a long way, and not just in learning how to work effectively as a remote newsroom during a pandemic.

As busy as we’ve been gathering and reacting to the news and compiling recreational insights, it’s easy for me to forget how different we were as a magazine and website a year ago. That’s around the time that Ry Rivard joined us to cover Adirondack waters. His addition gave us a sharp focus on the emerging (and sometimes improving) environmental threats to the lakes, streams and groundwater that we consider among our park’s greatest assets, especially in a changing climate that is harming or drying supplies elsewhere. Ry’s January magazine piece about harmful changes in our biggest water — Lake Champlain — signaled the kind of big-picture thinking we’re developing. But he has also drilled down on topics of immediate concern to individuals who get their water from wells.

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