When Enchanted Forest Water Safari — one of the longest running attractions in the Adirondacks — announced the park would not open for the 2020 season due to the COVID-19 crisis, Old Forge area residents and businesses feared that the closure would hit the local economy hard. There would be lost summer jobs, lost sales-tax revenue, and lost business income that would ripple through the local economy like wavelets from a vigorously paddled canoe on Old Forge Pond.

The family-owned Water Safari is the largest summer employer in Herkimer County, drawing workers from Herkimer, Lewis, and Oneida counties, as well as J-1 Visa workers from abroad, many of whom spend money that circulates through the local economy. Read how the community of Old Forge, as well as other tourist-dependent towns in the Adirondacks are coping in the wake of closures of key businesses and events in this story from the weekend, in the Adirondack Explorer: https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stories/closures-hit-some-adirondack-businesses-hard-but-there-are-silver-linings

(Enchanted Forest photo from 1973, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)