Adirondack Explorer

BY TIM ROWLAND After Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the Moriah Shock Incarceration Facility would be closing March 10, her office received a bundle of 50 letters in protest. They weren’t from employees in fear of losing their jobs, nor from busines

Most hikers, when they arrive at the Adirondack Loj trailhead, emerge from their cars in a flurry of activity. They are eager to lace up their boots, get their gear together, and hit the trail after a long drive into the mountains. Some of these hike

In a darkened room at Indian Lake Central School District, six students sit quietly and at attention, eyes fixed on the two screens in the front. Using a mix of smartly edited video clips and live, online instruction, these screens immerse the teenag

On a sunny July day in 2007, Seth Jones for the first time stepped atop Mount Marcy. He took in the power of the summit and its seemingly endless views and encountered a uniformed woman. Julia Goren, an Adirondack Mountain Club summit steward, told J

Fish biologist Kurt Heim waded through the waist deep Saranac River current as technician Dylan Jennison's feet splashed through the shallows along the shoreline. Each man, dressed in a tan dry suit, held the end of a net. “Yeah, we got a fish,” Jenn

No one is asking the state to close a local family’s garnet mining operation near the Siamese Ponds Wilderness. No one seeks to send 130 Barton Mines workers into unemployment. But dozens of people are alerting state regulators that they’d like somet

Located on a stretch of Route 86, about halfway between Wilmington and Lake Placid, sits a discolored and weather-beaten sign. It notifies motorists—via two barely visible, yellow directional arrows—of the route to F.C.I. Ray Brook and Adirondack C.F

On a chilly Adirondack day in early December, Tamara Jolly and her fiancé Colin Hackett arrive from Baltimore, Md. to visit the SUNY-ESF Ranger School in Wanakena. The last time they were both on campus, they were students in 2020 in the middle of th

It was a cold March day when we reached Cooper Kill Pond, after a three-mile uphill ski on a deep snowpack. I’d been to this pond just a few other times, including once to sleep in the lean-to when I was helping with a birding survey. The spot never

Fire towers were built to provide visibility, to give lookouts a bird’s-eye view of the surrounding forest so they could pinpoint smoke and prevent bigger fires. Before towers, open summits on some mountains provided opportunities for scouts keeping

I’m not a big fan of snowmobiles. A good argument can be made that riding gas-powered sleds through the Forest Preserve violates Article 14, the section of the state constitution that says state lands in the Adirondacks and Catskills “shall be foreve

The $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure bill means $170 billion is slated for New York. Working with the Adirondack Association of Towns and Villages, we asked 100 municipalities what they see as the top project in their communities. (Stay tuned for

During a field trip to Bloomingdale Bog that my wife and I led for Northern New York Audubon, a woman who hadn’t said a thing for an hour and a half, nor smiled, turned to me with a merciless look and demanded: “I wanna see a white-breasted nuthatch!

For millions of years, conifers, plants that produce seeds in cones and abound in the Adirondacks’ most picturesque places, dominated the world’s forests. Conifers are largely evergreen. The exception in the Adirondacks is the deciduous tamarack, whi

While casting a line into an Adirondack lake, you hear a sharp squeak breaking the solitude. You look to the trees and see a bald eagle alight and fly over the lake. You consider paddling toward the tall pine onto which this majestic raptor glides to