Full Circle
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The Adirondacks harbor one of the world’s largest and best-protected temperate deciduous forests, thanks to state-funded conservation set in
motion in 1873.
Photos © Mark Godfrey
The Long View
When The Nature Conservancy made its Adirondack debut 35 years ago, it did so with a distinct advantage: the opportunity to build on 100 years of publicly supported land preservation. Since then, the organization has had a hand in safeguarding one out of every nine acres of protected land in New York’s Adirondack Park.
“Today, Adirondack Park provides one of the largest, best-protected and least-fragmented temperate deciduous forest landscapes anywhere in the world,” says forest ecologist Charles Canham of the Institute for Ecosystems Studies. Historically, temperate forests have suffered even greater habitat loss from human activities than have their tropical and boreal counterparts.
Adirondack Park, just five hours north of New York City, stands as one of the few places where the challenge for conservationists is shifting from curbing losses to restoring a globally important temperate forest and the complete array of plants and animals it sustains. Yet the fate of this forest and its ecological integrity remain far from certain.
On a local level, invasive plants and development pressures threaten the Adirondacks’ lands and waters: Of the park’s 6 million acres, 2.7 million are open to development. Global influences, such as climate change and unsustainable logging resulting from volatile timber markets, also pose threats. To address these changes, the Conservancy is partnering with a wide range of public and private interests to purchase key lands and waters, mount invasive-plant eradication campaigns, and plan for wildlife corridors that link the Adirondacks with natural areas in Canada, Vermont and western New York.
—CONNIE PRICKETT
The Nature Conservancy,
Adirondack Chapter
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A clear night with the moon just past full, a heavy dew to shake from our tents, a rising sun as we paddled across Rock Pond and an osprey to watch over us as we made our way. “That nest was there in 1960,” says Bill. “Right on the same branch. How about that.” Almost too good to be true, which also could be said of the day’s start: We’d paddled only 20 minutes when the time came to get out, pack gear and start the first of many portages. In the Adirondacks we call them “carries,” but never mind—they’re the same the world over, the sweaty toll extracted for the right to skim these lakes, these highways of the forest. This carry began with a series of epic mudholes. I nearly lost a sandal in the very first and had to stick my arm in well past the shoulder to pull it out, affording me a neat layer of Adirondack sunscreen. Fortunately, Bill and Jim were (as usual) out of sight up ahead, sparing me the indignity of an audience.
The rhythm lasted most of the day: short paddles across small ponds, long carries between them and occasional stops for landmarks, like the spot near Touhey Falls where in the early 1930s one logging baron had built a railroad to get his logs out. The tracks were gone now, but the level grade remained, a reminder that though we were the only people out in these wild tracts, we were accompanied by ghosts of a busier day. Ghosts who were doubtless giggling as we humped the canoes along the last hard carry of the day, and then settled with some relief into the waters of Shingle Shanty Brook, a glorious meander that doubled back on itself in infinite and hypnotic variations. Exploring the brook, barely a paddle’s width across in many places, was like meandering the hallways of a vast country estate: around one corner, and another, and another, never sure what treasure would be revealed next. Cardinal flowers, in this case; great scarlet banks of them.
And then finally, as the sun was losing its sweaty power, out we came from the reeds into the sweeping shallow bay at the end of Lake Lila, a beloved queen of Adirondack waters. Lila Vanderbilt was the wife of the man who owned these lands once—another 19th-century baron, this one named William Seward Webb. In 1978 the Conservancy bought the lake and surrounding forests and transferred them to the state. Lila has been a favorite of paddlers ever since. We pulled tired into a campsite along a sandy beach, and swam, and waited. Waited because we knew that Todd Dunham of the Conservancy staff was even now paddling in to join us. Waited because we suspected he might be bringing beer.
As it turned out, we were right: Saranac Ale, one of the finer local brews. And he brought stories, too—in particular, the story of how the Conservancy had come to purchase the 26,500 acres at either end of our trip, the land that made this extended journey possible. “Seven or eight years ago, International Paper did an analysis of what it was costing them to pay taxes on the bodies of water where they couldn’t grow any trees,” Dunham says. “Even with leasing lands to hunting camps, the taxes on waterfront property were so huge that they couldn’t cover their costs.” The company brought together a variety of Adirondack interests, including the Conservancy, to discuss the prospects for the lakes, but real action waited until a real estate agent found a buyer for Round Lake, the 800-acre gem where we’d begun our journey. “Their buyer was ready to meet IP’s price,” Dunham adds. “But when they were a month from closing, the company said to us, ‘If you can match this price, you can buy it.’
“It wasn’t cheap,” says Dunham. “But when was the last time someone sold an 800-acre lake around here? So we started throwing all sorts of various pieces on the table. Would you sell us this, and this and this? By the end, we were up to 26,500 acres.” The land was protected less with an eye to particular rare species (indeed, much of the acreage had been heavily and repeatedly logged) than with the knowledge that it would consolidate some 195,000 acres of protected land around it—including the Five Pond Wilderness, one of the Adirondacks’ largest wilderness areas. That it would also round out the great canoe routes of the area was a bonus. “We got one tour of the property in an IP pickup truck, but that was enough to help us realize the recreational possibilities,” says Dunham. That helped interest the state of New York, which is in the process of purchasing some of the land from the Conservancy for inclusion in the Adirondack Forest Preserve.
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