Please join me in welcoming Saranac Lake resident Caperton Tissot as the newest contributor to the Adirondack Almanack. Caperton’s work has appeared in Adirondack Life, Adirondack Explorer, and includes a shared weekly “Friends and Neighbors” column in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.
She has published two books on her own Snowy Owl Press, History between the Lines, Women’s Lives and Saranac Lake Customs (2007), and Adirondack Ice, a Cultural and Natural History (2010). Caperton will be writing regularly about Adirondack ice through the winter. During the last three years Caperton has held a number of oral history workshops, and is currently touring the region with an Adirondack ice slide show and book signings. She also coordinates a winter lecture series at the Saranac Lake Free Library. “It is,” she says, “a wonderful way to meet new folks and learn about Adirondack art, history and culture.”
When not traveling or writing, she and her husband are active skiers, snowshoers, hikers, paddlers and bikers.
The Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) honored former State Parks Commissioner Carol Ash, Adirondack Almanack founder John Warren and other “champions of New York’s wild places” at the group’s 10th annual Presidents’ Dinner last Saturday.
Ash, who recently resigned her position as Commissioner of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, received the David L. Newhouse ADK Conservation Award and delivered the keynote address. John Warren, founder of the online journal Adirondack Almanack received the Eleanor F. Brown ADK Communication Award, “in recognition of outstanding talent and journalistic achievement in building an online, independent news source about the Adirondacks.” At the same event, John Schneider, long-time coordinator of ADK’s Adopt a Lean-to Program, received the ADK Trailblazer Award. Also, the Department of Environmental Conservation, The Nature Conservancy and Adirondack Mountain Club received the Arthur E. Newkirk ADK Education Award for the Adirondack High Peaks Summit Stewardship Program, and ADK Community Outreach Coordinator Thea Moruzzi received the Marie Lynch Haberl ADK Staff Award.
The Adirondack Mountain Club, founded in 1922, is the oldest and largest organization dedicated to the protection of the New York Forest Preserve. A nonprofit organization with more than 28,000 members, ADK helps protect the Forest Preserve, state parks and other wild lands and waters through conservation and advocacy, environmental education and responsible recreation. Photo: Adirondack Almanack founder John Warren (l) and Adirondack Mountain Club Executive Director Neil Woodworth. Photo courtesy John Kettlewell, ADK.
It’s that time of year – time to welcome back Almanack winter sports contributor Christie Sausa of Lake Placid. Christie is a member of the historic figure and speed skating culture in the Olympic Village, and writes about those sports for the Lake Placid News and on her own blog, the popular Lake Placid Skater, which she founded in 2007.
As the winter sports season gets rolling Sausa, who attends North Country Community College, will begin covering local competitions and local athletes and the broader winter sports experience from popular sports like ski-jumping, downhill, snowboarding, and cross country, to the sliding sports (luge, skeleton, and bobsledding), as well as the more obscure winter pastimes of biathlon, skijoring, and dogsledding. Sausa is a member of the Kiwanis Club of Lake Placid, the Connecting Youth and Communities Coalition, the Skating Club of Lake Placid, and the Lake Placid Speed Skating Club. When she is not on the ice herself, or writing about what happens there, Sausa and her mom run the Lake Placid Skate Shop.
Please join me in welcoming Dan Crane as the Adirondack Almanack‘s newest regular contributor. Dan has been visiting the Adirondacks since childhood and actively exploring its backcountry by hiking, backpacking, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing for almost two decades. In addition, he is a life-long naturalist with a Bachelor and Master of Science in Ecology from SUNY ESF and 10+ seasons working as a field biologist, five inside the Blue Line. Dan has hiked the Northville-Placid Trail twice and climbed all 46 High Peaks but currently spends most of his backpacking time exploring the northwestern portion of the Adirondacks. He will be writing about bushwhacking and backcountry camping, including providing insights on equipment and his observations as a veteran backcountry explorer. His posts will appear every other week on Thursdays, beginning today.
Dan will no doubt share some exciting stories of the backcountry. Hopefully none will match his most recent harrowing adventure, experiencing the July 1995 Great Blowdown first hand; he was airlifted out of the Five Ponds Wilderness via helicopter the day after the storm.
Dan is also the creator of the new blog Bushwhacking Fool where he details his bushwhacking adventures in the Adirondacks and elsewhere.
New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation will stop collecting garbage and recycleables from the state-owned islands on Lake George, a DEC spokesman said.
Starting in 2011, the DEC will maintain a “carry in – carry out” policy, said David Winchell.
“This is the system that is used in the rest of the forest preserve,” he said.
The decision to discontinue garbage collection was made to save money, said Winchell: “Due to funding reductions to the Department of Environmental Conservation from the state’s historic budget shortfall, all DEC programs are seeking ways to reduce operating costs while still providing the basic services.”
According to Winchell, the island campsites are more expensive to operate than other camp grounds, and garbage collection increases those costs. “The DEC recognizes that this is somewhat of an inconvenience for some campers, however, the costs for operating the campgrounds must be reduced to avoid other steps that campers are less receptive to, such as raising rates or reducing the number of campsites,” said Winchell.
Erich Neuffer, a Bolton Landing deli owner who operates the Glen Island commissary as a concession, said his contract with the state requires the DEC to collect garbage and recyclables from the store.
But his contract expires at the end of 2010 and he said he had no definite plans to renew it.
New York State began collecting garbage from the islands in 1955, a service that provided summer employment to hundreds of local youths.
“People told us we were the hardest working state employees they had ever seen, said Kam Hoopes, who worked on the barges in the 1970s
A petition has been circulated among the island campers calling upon the state to maintain the service
Approximately 700 signatures have been collected at the Glen Island store and sent to DEC, said Marie Marallo of Rutland, Vermont.
“This decision will be devastating to Lake George and the beautiful land and water,” said Marallo.
Marallo said she fears people will ignore the “carry in- carry out” policy and leave their garbage on the islands, or throw it into the lake.
“I was told that people have made the comments that they will just bring burlap bags, put the trash in them, weight them and then throw these into the lake,” said Marallo.
Lake George Waterkeeper Chris Navitsky said he would urge the DEC to reconsider adopting the new policy.
“The new policy is not lake-friendly,” he said. “It will lead to a lot of rubbish problems.”
Lake Placid photographer and regular Adirondack Almanack contributor Larry Master will show images of the diverse wildlife that can be seen through the cycle of an Adirondack year. Mammals, birds, and amphibians of the Adirondacks will be featured.
This special presentation of the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) will be held on Saturday, July 31, at 8:00 PM at the ADK’s High Peaks Information Center, located at Heart Lake in Lake Placid. This presentation is free and open to the public. This presentation is part of ADK’s Saturday Evening Lecture Series which offer presentations on natural history, backcountry recreation, Adirondack history, art, and music.
The Adirondack Mountain Club, founded in 1922, is a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to protecting the New York State Forest Preserve and other wild lands and waters through conservation and advocacy, environmental education and responsible recreation.
For more information about programs, directions or questions about membership, contact ADK North Country office in Lake Placid (518) 523-3441 or visit our Web site at www.adk.org.
An advocacy and educational organization with historic roots in the 1940s will re-launch on Friday according to a press release issued today.
Organizers for the group Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve, originally founded in 1945 by Adirondack wilderness advocate Paul Schaefer, say it will focus on the benefits of wild lands across the state, including Forest Preserve lands in the Adirondacks and Catskills. “Adirondack Wild will advocate when wild lands are threatened, be a strong partner to protect them, and train stewards to care for them,” according to today’s announcement. » Continue Reading.
More than 3,000 people get Adirondack Almanack each day via RSS, e-mail, or Twitter or Facebook updates. It’s a convenient way to get the latest news and information about the Adirondacks.
I’m happy to announce that local journalist and WNBZ news director Chris Morris will be the newest contributor here at Adirondack Almanack.
Chris was born and raised in Saranac Lake and got his start in journalism as a stringer for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise’s sports department. He graduated from St. Lawrence University in 2006 with a degree in English writing and religious studies and covered the Malone beat for the Malone Telegram.
Chris then moved to Vermont and took the editor’s position at the Vermont Times Sentinel, a weekly paper distributed throughout Chittenden County. From there, he went on to take the news editor position at Denton Publications and later joined Chris Knight at Mountain Communications as assistant news director of WNBZ radio. When Chris Knight left WNBZ to join the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Chris took over as news director – a position he currently holds. At WNBZ, Chris reports on Tri-Lakes and Adirondack region news and occasionally contributes at North Country Public Radio and for other upstate publications.
If the Morris name sounds familiar to regular readers, it should. Chris’s dad Don Morris has been a contributor on Adirondack paddling here at the Almanack for some time.
Rain usually accompanied our hikes out of YMCA camp at Pilot Knob, on Lake George, in the late fifties and sixties, sometimes hard rain. We camped without tents, lying on the bare ground under the sky if the lean-to were occupied or none availed. Often we got wet. Mosquitoes and no-see-ems dined on us at their will. It gave me both a taste for and an aversion to discomfort.
The camp transported us, cattle-like, to Crane Mountain, Sleeping Beauty, the High Peaks, Pharoah Lake, the Fulton Chain and points as distant as the White Mountains, in the back of an ancient Ford ton-and-a-half rack-bed truck with benches on the sides that looked like something out of a WWII movie. We loved that truck, the open-air freedom and daring of it, its antique cantankerousness, though as often as not we huddled together in ponchos against the cab out of the wind and the cold rain or sleet biting our cheeks. » Continue Reading.
More than 3,000 people get Adirondack Almanack each day via RSS, e-mail, or Twitter or Facebook updates. It’s a convenient way to get the latest news and information about the Adirondacks.
Please join me in welcoming Adirondack Almanack‘s newest contributor Lawrence Gooley. Gooley is an award-winning author who has hiked, bushwhacked, climbed, bicycled, explored, and canoed in the Adirondack Mountains for 40 years. With a lifetime love of research, writing, and history, he has authored eight books and several articles on the region’s past, and in 2009 organized the North Country Authors in the Plattsburgh area. His book Oliver’s War: An Adirondack Rebel Battles the Rockefeller Fortune won the Adirondack Literary Award for Best Book of Nonfiction in 2008. His most recent effort is Terror in the Adirondacks: The True Story of Serial Killer Robert F. Garrow.
Gooley’s fascination with area history serves his readers well and he’s not afraid to get away from his desk an onto the ground where that history happened. He once researched a brief history of each bay on the Lake Champlain shoreline for example, prepared it in a binder with protective plastic sheets, laid it open on the bench seat of his canoe, and “lived history” for a week while paddling from Whitehall to Plattsburgh. Gooley is a strong supporter of the Lyon Mountain Mining & Railroad Museum, where a 6-foot-long wall plaque hangs with the names of 162 men who died in accidents in Lyon Mountain’s iron mines. The plaque is based on information from his book Out of the Darkness.
With his partner, Jill McKee, Gooley founded Bloated Toe Enterprises in 2004 and have recently begun to expand their services and publishing work. They especially enjoy helping organizations and new authors navigate all the pitfalls of getting their work published, and seeing authors earn profits from their books. Besides Bloated Toe Publishing, they also operate an online store to support the work of other regional folks. The North Country Store features more than 100 book titles and 60 CDs and DVDs, along with a variety of other area products.
Lawrence Gooley’s regular contributions to Adirondack Almanack will appear on Mondays.
Please join me in welcoming Ed Forbes as the newest contributor to Adirondack Almanack. Ed graduated from St. Lawrence University with a degree in English, history and Canadian Studies in 2002. He went to work at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in Saranac Lake, N.Y. as a reporter, covering local government and the Adirondack Park Agency. In 2003, he became editor of the Enterprise’s weekly sister-paper, the Lake Placid News.
Ed left the News in 2007 to pursue a master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Upon earning that degree in 2008, he joined the staff of The Journal News, in White Plains, N.Y. as page one editor. In March of this year he became interactivity editor. In that role, he is a member of the editorial board and oversees the paper’s blogs and social media efforts. Ed blogs regularly at ejforbes.com and lives with his wife, Emily, and their beagle, Kennedy, in Bronxville, N.Y.
More than 2,500 people get Adirondack Almanack each day via RSS, e-mail, or Twitter or Facebook updates. It’s a convenient way to get the latest news and information about the Adirondacks.
Just a quick reminder that Adirondack region new media / social media writers and producers are invited to gather at the Adirondack Museum on Friday, May 7, 2010 from 5 until 7 pm for a networking event and backstage tour of the Adirondack Museum’s exhibit “Let’s Eat: Adirondack Food Traditions”.
Local bloggers, Twitter users, social media writers and producers and new media journalists, will be getting together in the Adirondack Museum’s “Living With Wilderness Gallery” for food, drink, and networking, before taking an early behind the scenes look at the Museum’s featured 2010 exhibit. This event is sponsored by the Adirondack Pub and Brewery and the Adirondack Winery and Tasting Room (both in Lake George), the Adirondack Museum, and Adirondack Almanack.
Please RSVP as soon as possible to John Warren at adkalmanack@gmail.com
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Please join me in welcoming Saranac Lake resident Caperton Tissot as the newest contributor to the Adirondack Almanack. Caperton’s work has appeared in Adirondack Life, Adirondack Explorer, and includes a shared weekly “Friends and Neighbors” column in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.
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