Hiker's death highlights extreme state policy

We're in the upstate subtropics now

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A strain of fanaticism runs through the Adirondack environmental movement that sometimes gets exposed by events.

When cell phones were new, for example, hard-core wilderness advocates complained about their use by hikers. It disturbed their communion with nature if they had to listen to someone else gabbing on the phone, they said, and some called for a ban on phone use in the state Forest Preserve.

But it soon became clear that having a cellphone with you on a hike increased your odds of being rescued should you need it, and the anti-phone chatter died down.

A recent story by Times-Union staff writer Patrick Tine also published on the Adirondack Explorer’s website features interviews with two forest rangers who led the search in December for Leo Dufour. A 22-year-old college student from a Montreal suburb, Dufour set out on Nov. 29 to climb Allen Mountain in the High Peaks. The search was called off after a week, and Dufour’s body was found in May.

The rangers, Jamison Martin and Andrew Lewis, criticized state policy that has, in recent years, mandated the use of heavy machinery to make existing dirt roads in the Adirondack backcountry impassable.

Motorized vehicles are not allowed on state land in the Forest Preserve, but old logging roads crisscross the wilderness. For years, the state’s policy was to allow these old roads to gradually become overgrown, but that was changed in 2018 to a policy of forcible destruction.

I don’t know all the reasons the policy was changed, but I’m sure pressure from the extremes of the environmental movement was influential. The existence in the backcountry of “nonconforming structures,” such as roads and bridges, was a hobbyhorse of Peter Bauer’s, the former executive director of Protect the Adirondacks. Bauer would feature his own photographs on Protect’s website of what were framed as environmental outrages, such as a wilderness road rutted by the tires of all-terrain vehicles.

Ruts in the dirt aren’t the scandal Bauer presented them as, but he was right about recreational use of all-terrain vehicles having no place in the Forest Preserve.

Does it make sense, though, to bring backhoes and bulldozers into the wilderness to gouge pits and heap up dirt and stones in the old roads? That is what is happening now under the state’s policy, euphemistically described as “reclamation.”

To appreciate what an ugly mess this process creates, take a look at a December 2021 article by Bauer in the Adirondack Almanack. Old logging roads are picturesque. But what the photo shows are the remains of a forest road that appears to have been bombed.

Looking at the photo sharpens my sympathy for Martin and Lewis, who needed to move fast through the woods to have a shot at saving Leo Dufour’s life. You couldn’t even walk quickly over this “reclaimed” road, and you wouldn’t be able to drive 5 feet down it in a Jeep, an ATV or a snowmobile.

Aren’t there some circumstances — when a human life is at stake, for example —in which principles such as the sanctity of the wilderness should be ignored? Isn’t some mild compromising worthwhile if it will make future rescues more likely to succeed?

The question is not whether new access roads should be built through the wilderness — no one is proposing that. The question is whether old roads that may occasionally be used illegally by people on ATVs and snowmobiles but can also help rangers move quickly through the forest during emergencies should be made impassable. Astonishingly, New York state’s current answer is “yes.”

Aside from the debate over priorities, it’s expensive and polluting to bring heavy earth-moving machinery into the backcountry and pay operators to use it, especially when the alternative is letting nature do the work.

Reading Tine’s story, I could feel the frustration of the rangers, who tried so hard to save Leo Dufour, trudging many miles through deep snow, sleeping for days on the mountain. Perhaps their frustration, which motivated them to speak out about the state’s misguided policy, will inform this debate in the future.

This is the summit of Allen Mountain, the 26th highest of the 46 Adirondack High Peaks but one of the longer and more difficult climbs.

The heat is on

I dread summer more than winter now. It may no longer make sense to say we live in the North Country, with its connotation of long and brutal winters. Of course, it’s milder here than in Saranac Lake, where I grew up. But when we moved to Glens Falls in the early 1990s, it didn’t occur to us to have air conditioning. Now my National Grid bill can rise higher in summer months than winter, because of the AC cranking all day and night. Ringo has other ways of fighting the heat, like jumping in Halfway Brook during walks in Cole’s Woods, lying on the tile floor in the kitchen, and, outside on the lawn, digging himself a hole and curling into the cool earth.

Ringo cools off on the kitchen floor during the recent heat wave, showing off his summer coloration, caused by dirt from the hole he dug for himself in our yard.

Poems

Here are two poems from Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:

Postcard From Eternity

This is a vacation,                                                                                                                         in the

realm-of-respiration,

that we took                                                                                                                                   at life’s insistence–

a break from non-existence

in which we taste,                                                                                                                   and contemplate,

eternity...

and which                                                                                                                                   we (come to) wish:

didn’t have to end.

INFINITE AURORA

As if it is always dawn.                                                                                                              As if, say, we had slept, once,

and dreamed deep draughts                                                                                                       of a world too beautiful and,

thinking to have left those scenes there,                                                                        awakened to find not where we knew

but a place charged                                                                                                                 with that same atmosphere–

and with the effect as of being                                                                                transported back into the dream:

or as if the experience                                                                                                                is born through us...

as into a present constantly realized,                                                                                     and in which we never sleep.