Adirondack ski video

On my lunch hour today, I climbed for 30 minutes up a small mountain and skied down through the woods. On the descent, I held my point-and-shoot camera in front of me to capture video. This meant I had to ski without poles, which I’m not used to doing. The results are only so-so. The clip is less than four minutes; apparently, the camera can accommodate only so much video. It truncated the first part of the descent, on the steeper part of the mountain. Anyway, this is just my first try. I hope to post other short videos in days to come. Incidentally, the tracks I’m following are mine from the day before. Click one of the links below to watch the video. The second one is for Macs.

Woods ski for PC

How I Spent My Lunch Hour

War of words over Lows Lake

The Albany Times Union recently ran a story in which Protect the Adirondacks blamed Governor David Paterson for the Adirondack Park Agency’s refusal to classify Lows Lake as Wilderness.

“To our knowledge, this represents an unprecedented level of interference from the governor’s office,” said Dave Gibson, the environmental group’s executive director. “The governor not only failed to appreciate this magnificent region of Lows Lake, but then … apparently allowed his staff to actively twist arms.”

The article drew a strong response from Fred Monroe, the executive director of the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board, which lobbied against the Wilderness classification.

“Lows Lake is a man-made lake, a feat of engineering created by two concrete dams,” Monroe wrote in a letter submitted to the Times Union. “It is not a wilderness and was never classified as ‘wilderness.’ The claim that a ‘wilderness area’ has lost its status ‘for the first time in memory’ is simply false.”

Click here to read the newspaper article. Click the link below to read Monroe’s response.

Monroe letter PDF

Bob Marshall’s booklet online

Bob Marshall was one of the original Adirondack Forty-Sixers, but he thought he was born too late. He would have preferred to have lived in the nineteenth century, before the Adirondacks were overrun by civilization.

Bob Marshall

Well, Bob is now part of the twenty-first century.

John Warren, the guy behind the Adirondack Almanack, reports in his blog that a number of old Adirondack books have been digitized and put online. Among them is Marshall’s 1922 booklet The High Peaks of the Adirondacks. It can be read online or downloaded for free.

Marshall wrote the booklet after he and his younger brother, George, and their guide, Herb Clark, climbed all the peaks in the Adirondacks that surpass four thousand feet–or so they thought. At the time, they believed there were forty-two such peaks, but they later discovered they had missed four and climbed them as well. Subsequent surveys revealed that four of these forty-six peaks are less than four thousand feet, but peak-baggers still adhere to the traditional list established by the Marshalls and Clark.

Marshall’s booklet was the first publication of the fledgling Adirondack Mountain Club and, in effect, its first guidebook. In it, he briefly describes how they climbed each mountain, and he rates the view from each. His favorite view was from Mount Haystack: “It’s a great thing these days to leave civilization for a while and return to nature. From Haystack  you can look over thousands and thousands of acres, unblemished by the works of man, perfect as made by nature.”

The Marshalls and Clark were hiking at a time when the scars from logging and  forest fires were a common sight in the High Peaks, and these influenced his ratings. He complained about the slash and burned territory on Rocky Peak Ridge and proclaimed the view “hardly worth the trouble to obtain.” Today, the hike to this summit from New Russia is thought by some to be one of the best in the Adirondack Park.

Physical copies of The High Peaks of the Adirondacks are rare today, but it was reprinted in Bob Marshall in the Adirondacks: Writings of a Pioneering Peak-Bagger, Pond-Hopper and Wilderness Preservationist, which I edited and published in 2006.

Marshall was a student at the New York State College of Forestry when he wrote his booklet. He went on to work for the U.S. Forest Service, explore arctic Alaska, and help found the Wilderness Society. He died in 1939 at age thirty-eight. The following year, the federal government established the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana in his honor. One of the Adirondack High Peaks, Mount Marshall, is also named after him.

Steve House at Mountainfest

Steve House

Reinhold Messner, regarded as one of the best mountaineers of all time, has described Steve House as “the best high-altitude climber in the world today.” So you know he’s good.

At this year’s Adirondack International Mountainfest, scheduled for the weekend of January 15-18, a small number of lucky ice climbers will get to learn from the master. House will teach a class in Intermediate and Advanced Ice on Saturday, January 16, and Advanced Ice the next day.

Both classes are full, but the public can catch House’s slide show at the Keene Valley Central School at 7:30 Saturday night.

The fourteenth-annual Mountainfest is hosted by the Mountaineer in Keene Valley and backed by a number of corporate sponsors, such as Black Diamond, La Sportiva, Petzl, Patagonia, and Outdoor Research.

Most of the classes taught by other instructors are also full, but openings remain for avalanche-safety courses on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. As of this week, there were a few spots left in ice-climbing courses taught by local guides Emilie Drinkwater and Don Mellor, author of Blue Lines: An Adirondack Ice Climber’s Guide.

The public also is welcome to attend a slide show by Erik Weihenmayer, the only blind climber to summit Mount Everest. It starts at 8 p.m. Friday at the Keene Valley Central School. A third slide show will be given on Sunday at 7:30. The presentation has yet to be announced.

The town’s fire department will host a spaghetti dinner from 5-7 Saturday  night.