eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
His book is a romance, a story of first love between Americans and a thing they call "wilderness." For it was in the Adirondacks that masses of non-Native Americans first learned to cherish the wilderness as a place of recreation and solace.
In this lyrical narrative history, the author reveals that the affair between Americans and the Adirondacks was by no means one of love at first sight. And even now, Schneider shows that Americans' relationship with the glorious mountains and rivers of the Adirondacks continues to change. As in every good romance, nothing is as simple as it appears.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250135209 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 385 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Adirondacks
A History of America's First Wilderness
By Paul Schneider
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1997 Paul SchneiderAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-13520-9
CHAPTER 1
The Trapline
It was very odd. There were no signs of a struggle. There were no plants torn up, no disturbed mud. All four of the long, sharpened wooden stakes with forked tops that Bob Inslerman had pushed firmly into the lake bottom were still in place, exactly as he left them the day before. But the trap was nowhere to be found. In twenty-odd years of taking beaver, muskrat, mink, and otter on the Saint Regis Lakes, nothing quite like this had ever happened before.
Inslerman stood up and adjusted his yellow rain pants. He shrugged. He shook his head. He leaned back over the bow of his sixteen-foot Starcraft aluminum boat and poked around in the mud with a short gaff, and then reached around some more with his hands. The trap was of a type called a Conibear, with two sets of jaws that form a sort of tunnel when open, and close over the body of an animal that passes through them. It is typically set along a beaver path, or, as in this case, in the water at a break in the reeds used by the animals as a passageway. It is considered to be more humane than the foothold trap, as its prey inevitably dies quite quickly. There is no way for a beaver caught in a Conibear to drag the trap off without disturbing the stakes that hold it in place.
"It's just gone," Inslerman said finally. His gray-and-black beard was about ten inches above the tea brown water. "Gone," he said again. Twenty feet away the beaver lodge, a medium-sized pile of mud and chewed sticks, sat stoically in the November shower.
Perhaps a duck hunter was out earlier that morning and took the trap, Inslerman thought out loud as he stood again and moved back toward the stern of the boat. Or maybe someone opposed to trapping — a friend of the beaver, so to speak — removed it. But why would a trap thief take the time to replace the stakes so carefully? He gazed absently across the lake to the campus of Paul Smiths College, where he knew some of the students and faculty opposed killing wild animals for any purpose.
It seemed unlikely, though, that a college student would come out this far on such a drizzly morning. And he knew for a fact that the people who own the summer place nearest to the lodge would not disturb the set, even if they were still around this late in the season, which they were not.
As a member of the lake property owners' association, Inslerman has a fairly good idea of the trapping views of most of his neighbors. "They're from Manhattan," he said pointing to the camp, "and they're very active in Audubon, and they like to go out birding a lot. So even though this is state land, I never used to trap for beaver here out of respect for them. I figured they would be opposed to it." Though over the years he occasionally met the camp's owners during the summer social season at the lake, for a long time Inslerman never even told them that he was a trapper. There are plenty of places to trap without being right in front of somebody's summer home.
Then the beavers ate the telephone line to the camp. Not just once, either. The third time it happened the woman of the house called the Department of Environmental Conservation and asked to be connected with her neighbor Bob Inslerman. When he is not on vacation trapping, Inslerman is a regional wildlife manager for the state of New York. His professional territory includes roughly half of the Adirondack Park, and an increasing part of his job over the past five years has been responding to complaints about overzealous beaver. It's more often birch trees that need rescuing than telecommunications equipment, he said.
An adult beaver can weigh sixty pounds, which is about the size of a full-grown Labrador retriever. Inslerman categorizes the animal as a "large mammal," along with the deer and bear rather than with the muskrat and otter. At four feet long, it's a good deal bigger than the cuddly children's image of the busy little animal merrily singing as it works.
It does, however, work. In the 1950s Inslerman's predecessor at the DEC, a man named Greenleaf Chase, counted the beavers in a remote valley in the northern part of the park. On one river he found that a colony of several hundred had stepped a feeder stream all the way up the side of a mountain to its headwaters. On the other side of the ridge was a large stand of poplar and birch, which beaver like more than almost anything besides the smell of each other. But there was no stream there. So the busy rodents raised the water level of the top pond so high that the stream crested the ridge and flowed down the other side — into a different watershed altogether. There they constructed a whole new series of dams and feasted on the grove.
One-quarter of a beaver is tail. Six inches wide and one inch thick, the most remarkable thing about it from a biological viewpoint is that it is covered with scales like those belonging to a fish. Meat from the back end of the beaver is said to even taste and smell like fish, at least when compared to the front, which is decidedly more mammalian.
Mammalian, that is, with a full line of accessories for water life. Valves close off a beaver's nose and ears when underwater, and thin goggle membranes come down over its eyes. Skin flaps behind the front teeth allow it to haul logs around the pond without swallowing water. Two oil glands between the back legs supply a daily dose of preening oil, which the animal combs into its fur with a special toenail.
Next to the oil glands lie the castor glands. They are about the size of tangerines and the few ounces of castor that comes out of them is umber in color and, as one writer put it, "thicker than Grand Marnier." A few daubs of the stuff are the best way to lure a beaver into the jaws of a trap, because a male beaver, especially, is likely to investigate the scent of a stranger. Trappers used to call castor "bark-stone," and fine perfumeries still occasionally use it to add an element of wildness to their concoctions.
"When she called about the telephone wires I said to her, 'Well, we could issue a nuisance trapping permit and you could hire someone to come and reduce the size of the colony,'" Inslerman continued, "'but I know you're uncomfortable with trapping. So let's think about other ways to control them.' And she said, 'No, I don't care. I want them out. Who do I call?'" Inslerman chuckled.
"And I said to her, 'Well, I happen to be a trapper.'"
In the distance, the base of Saint Regis Mountain appeared out of the mist for the first time of the morning. Inslerman started his ancient Evinrude WinSpeed outboard and guided the boat very slowly up a winding swampy slough not far from the beaver lodge. There was a line of muskrat traps up at the end that he wanted to check. As plentiful as beavers are these days in the park, there are even more muskrats. Muskrats, Inslerman explained, breed two or three times a season, with litters of four or five at a time.
Most of the Adirondack Park, he added, is prime muskrat habitat. There are more than four thousand lakes, ponds, swamps, and bogs tucked away in the park. There are thirty thousand miles of rivers, streams, and brooks. The headwaters of the Hudson are within the park, as are major tributaries to the Mohawk and Saint Lawrence Rivers, and Lake Champlain as well. Once a traveler is west of the High Peaks, which rise quite steeply from the eastern boundary of the park, the Adirondacks seem more a place of water than of mountains.
There are, however, plenty of peaks. Stretching from Lake Champlain in the east to Utica in the west, and from eleven miles south of the Canadian border in the north to just north of Schenectady in the south, the Adirondack Park is larger than Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite national parks combined. A fifth of New York State is inside the "Blue Line," which makes the park larger than New Jersey or Massachusetts. At six million acres, it's about the size of New Hampshire. There are within its borders roughly two thousand peaks that by regional standards qualify as mountains. Of those, more than a hundred rise above three thousand feet, and more than forty are higher than four thousand feet. Two in the northeast quarter of the park, Marcy and Algonquin, have summits greater than five thousand feet.
These are not towering giants by western standards, or even by comparison to the White Mountains of nearby New Hampshire. The five overlapping ranges of the Adirondacks are compressed and confused to a degree that can make for some fairly formidable hiking nonetheless. In thirteen and a half miles, the trail over the Great Range from the village of Keene Valley to the summit of Mount Marcy entails a vertical ascent of some nine thousand feet.
In addition to beaver and muskrat, there are black bear, white-tailed deer, red fox, gray fox, coyote, bobcat, otter, fisher, mink, raccoons, weasels, and some forty other species of mammals in the park. Three hundred different kinds of birds spend all or part of the year in the park. There are brook trout, lake trout, brown trout, rainbow trout, landlocked Atlantic salmon, and at least seventy other fishes. There are turtles, salamanders, snakes, frogs, toads, skinks, and newts. Ninety percent of the animal species that inhabit the eastern half of the United States can be found living somewhere, at some season, in the Adirondacks.
More than wildlife, and more even than mountains and water, this Adirondack wilderness is one of trees. There are sugar maples in the park, and black maples, striped maples, red maples, silver maples, mountain maples, swamp maples, and box elders. There are black oaks, northern red oaks, chestnut oaks, bur oaks, swamp white oaks, white oaks, American beeches, and here and there some surviving American chestnuts. There are fourteen species of willow, as well as various sumacs, ashes, buckthorns, lindens, tupelos, cherries, elms, and hickories. The deciduous trees dominate, but there are also eastern hemlocks, Scotch pines, white pines, pitch pines, red pines, and jack pines in the park. There are red, black, white, and Norway spruces. There are tamaracks, the conifers that shed their needles every fall like leaves, and there are balsam firs.
A conservative estimate of the number of trees in the Adirondacks — well, a true conservative wouldn't venture to guess how many trees there are — but there are probably in the neighborhood of a billion. A single freak storm during the summer of 1995 knocked down an estimated ten million trees across an area the size of the state of Rhode Island. Damage was quite severe, especially in pockets of the Five Ponds Wilderness Area in the northwest sector of the park. Massive logs were piled twenty feet high in places there. Yet the impact of the loss of even those millions of trees was more political than biological. Commercial interests immediately agitated in Albany for permission to undertake "salvage" logging operations, while ecologists insisted that the long-term effects of the storm on the forest were likely to be negligible.
In most places the forest is relatively young; second or third growth after successive waves of farmers, loggers, charcoal makers had taken what they wanted. But not everywhere. There are groves of hardwoods in the Pigeon Lake Wilderness Area, west of Raquette Lake, that were probably never cut. Some of the birches there belie the reputation of that family of trees for slender delicacy; mature yellow birches, for instance, with trunks that two adults standing with arms outstretched cannot reach around. Along the Powley Road, south of Piseco Lake, there are spruces six feet around at the base that are probably close to three hundred years old.
And at a place called the Pine Orchard, a few miles east of the Sacandaga River in the section of the park called the Wilcox Lake Wild Forest, are three-hundred-year-old giants that centuries ago would have warranted protection by the English Crown for the sole use of the mast makers of the Royal Navy; straight-grained white pines six feet in diameter and perhaps two hundred feet tall.
There are many such patches of original forest sprinkled around the park, places that by virtue of remoteness or lack of the species sought by loggers at a given time managed to escape the depredations of earlier generations. North of the Stillwater Reservoir in the northwest sector of the park is the 93,000-acre Five Ponds Wilderness Area, more than half of which constitutes the largest remnant of virgin forest in the eastern United States.
The most optimistic recent estimate, by the writer and mathematician Barbara McMartin in her fascinating and exhaustive analysis of the changes in the forest, is that there are half a million acres of true old-growth forest in the park. Of these, some 200,000 acres have probably never been logged. The rest, though technically not "virgin," were cut so long ago — 125 years or more — and so selectively that biologically speaking they have recovered completely. There are perhaps a million additional acres where only a well-trained forest ecologist can recognize the mark of past human intervention, not so much by the age of the existing trees but by the relative absence of the logger's favorite species, spruce.
The mark of humanity past and present is by no means absent from the Adirondacks, however. One of the most unusual aspects of the Adirondack Park, as parks go, is that people can actually own property and live within its borders. In fact, the state of New York owns only 43 percent of the land inside the Blue Line. These 2.6 million acres, the Adirondack Forest Preserve, are probably the best-protected wild lands in the country. Any change in their "forever wild" status requires that an amendment to the Constitution of the State of New York be approved by two consecutive sessions of the Legislature and then ratified by a referendum of the voting public.
The rest of the park, 3.4 million acres of it, is private property of one sort or another. There are rules and regulations regarding its use, but it is all to some degree either developed or vulnerable to development. According to the most recent census, 130,000 people live on private land within the park year-round, mostly in the many villages and hamlets, but occasionally in remote roadless areas. Another hundred thousand or so move there seasonally from more crowded sections of the Northeast. In all, ten million people are thought to visit or at least make a scenic drive through the park each year.
There are traffic jams on the Fulton Chain Lakes among the boats on their way down to Old Forge to see the Fourth of July fireworks. There can be a hundred hikers on the top of Mount Marcy on the right day in August, though this is largely due to the near universal desire to climb the highest peak in the state rather than the loneliest one. And around the shores of the Saint Regis Lakes, where Inslerman traps, are the "camps" of summer people, including the more than sixty buildings that make up Topridge, once the summer residence of Marjorie Merriweather Post.
Here and there, throughout the park, are the former and current woodland palaces of the superrich families that also built the great mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, Fifth Avenue, and elsewhere. Here, too, are the summer retreats of thousands of families of more modest tastes and means. Here are summer camps for children, and members-only clubs and rustic hotels for their parents. Here are subdivisions, condos, motels, theme parks, water slides, golf courses, tennis courts. Here are (and were) factories, hospitals, mines, logging operations, paper mills. Wal-Mart hopes to build a superstore inside the park.
More people arrive every year. According to the Adirondack Park Agency a thousand new houses are built inside the Blue Line every year; ten thousand every decade. Some who love wilderness say the implications for the future of the park are obvious and ominous. They agitate for stronger controls on development. The gloomiest among them moan that the place is already ruined, or fast getting there. But the visionaries see the Adirondack Park's mix of private and public lands as a model, however flawed, for other places where people and wilderness hope to coexist. To them the park could be a rough prototype for the sustainable development of the world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Adirondacks by Paul Schneider. Copyright © 1997 Paul Schneider. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction,
A Few Words about Boundaries,
1. The Trapline,
2. Mohawks and Missionaries,
3. Dances of War,
4. The Price of Otter in China,
5. The End of an Era,
6. Squires and Speculators,
7. Love and Sweat,
8. Death of a Zealot,
9. A Farewell to Farms,
10. In the Township of Industry,
11. The State of Science,
12. The Mother Lode,
13. The Trap Dike,
14. The Romantics' Arrival,
15. At Play in the Great Longhouse,
16. Nowhere Like This,
17. Feller-Buncher,
18. Logs!,
19. Forever Wild,
20. Death and Taxes,
21. Birth of a Great Camp,
22. Haute Rustic,
23. The Collector,
24. A Home in the Woods,
25. The Long Good Fight,
26. Wild Bureaucrats,
27. The Global Park,
28. Wild Trout,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
About the Author,
Copyright,