The mountain lion conspiracy

A top-secret confidential source sent me a link to a YouTube clip that offers definitive proof that the government is releasing mountain lions in the Adirondacks. It’s part of a Nazi plot.

Beaver resigns as state mammal

A coalition of environmental groups launched an ad campaign today to protest Governor David Paterson’s proposed $69 million cut to the Environmental Protection Fund, which is used to pay for a variety of green initiatives, including land preservation. The Adirondack Council sent us the ad below, which features a snapping turtle, eastern bluebird, beaver, and brook trout resigning as the state’s reptile, bird, mammal, and fish, respectively. The proposed cut amounts to about a third of the fund.

Rally for the VICs

Andy Flynn, local writer and publisher, is organizing a rally at the Adirondack Park Agency to save the state Visitor Interpretive Centers at Paul Smiths and Newcomb. Flynn has served as the VICs spokesman until he left the job last year. Below is an e-mail from him:

To all:

I invite you to join us for a peaceful rally to protest the Adirondack Park Agency’s planned closure of the Visitor Interpretive Centers at Paul Smiths and Newcomb.

The “Save the VICs” Rally will be held from 9 to 11 a.m. Thursday, March 11, 2010 in front of the Adirondack Park Agency headquarters in Ray Brook. Come for one hour or two, but please come help us celebrate the value of the VICs to the Adirondack Park.

What you need to bring:

-Warm clothing (as this is outside)

-Signage displaying your feelings (i.e. Save the VICs; We Love the VICs; Keep the VICs Open)

-Instruments (guitar, banjo) to play if you know “This Land is Your Land” (lyrics to be provided)

-Children if you have them

-A friend or two or three

-Stories about your experiences at the VICs

Remember, this is a peaceful rally to support the VICs – outside the APA headquarters. The APA Board of Commissioners will be holding their monthly meeting inside the building at the same time, and rally participants are asked NOT to take their protests inside the building. We will be singing and chanting and holding our signs proudly outside and will make enough noise to be heard.

I encourage you to help us pressure the APA Board of Commissioners to come up with a plan to keep both centers open.

Join us at the March 11 rally and let your voice be heard!

Thanks!

Andy Flynn

Former VIC Senior Public Information Specialist (2001-2009)

Saranac Lake, (518) 891-5559

Billy Demong addresses hometown (video)

Hundreds of people lined the main street in the tiny village of Saranac Lake on Friday afternoon to welcome home gold-medal skier Billy Demong and other local athletes who competed in the Winter Games in Vancouver.

Olympic skier Billy Demong raises a victory torch after Friday's parade in Saranac Lake. Photo by Phil Brown.

Saranac Lake and nearby Lake Placid, which hosted the Winter Olympics in 1932 and 1980, sent a dozen athletes to Vancouver, including two who won medals. Not bad for two villages whose combined population is about 7,600

Many of the athletes had moved to the Lake Placid region to train, but Billy Demong grew up outside Saranac Lake, in the rural community of Vermontville. He won a gold medal in the Nordic combined individual race and a silver medal in the Nordic combined team relay. The events feature cross-country skiing and ski jumping.

Amazingly, as a youngster, Demong competed on the same local cross-country-ski team with two other future Olympians: Lowell Bailey and Tim Burke, both of whom competed in the biathlon in this year’s games.

After the parade, Demong addressed a large crowd inside the town hall. “I feel like my life came full circle today when I drove up here from New York City …” he said. “This is the place where I grew up, in Vermontville, and at one point in my lived down the road from Tim Burke, three houses away and six miles or whatever.”

Demong, who will turn thirty this month, proposed to his girlfriend, Katie Koczynski. a few hours after he  became the first American to win a gold medal in Nordic combined.

The other local medalist was Andrew Weibrecht, who won a bronze in the men’s super G slalom and then made the cover of Sports Illustrated. Lake Placid, where he grew up, held a parade in his honor last week.

Another local hero, Peter Frenette, is still a senior at Saranac Lake High School. Frenette, who just turned eighteen, was the youngest member of the ski-jumping team.

The other regional athletes were: Ashley Caldwell, freestyle jumping; Haley Johnson, biathlon; John Napier, bobsled; and Mark Grimmette, Chris Mazdzer, Megan Sweeney, and Emily Sweeney, luge.

You can read more about these local athletes on the website of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Saranac Lake’s newspaper, which sent two reporters to the Olympics. Click here to read their coverage of the games.

Below is a video of Demong’s address to the crowd in the Harrietstown Town Hall.

Skiing Mount Marcy: Phelps Brook section

Alan Wechsler ascends into the clouds on Marcy. Photo by Phil Brown.

Yesterday I skied Mount Marcy with Alan Wechsler, one of the contributors to the Explorer. I had skied Marcy just a few weeks ago, but I never tire of this trip.

We had great weather until we emerged above tree line. The summit was a complete whiteout, and the wind was fierce, with wind chills below zero. Descending the summit bowl, we couldn’t see the bumps in the terrain or any landmarks to gauge our position. “It’s like skiing blind,” Alan remarked.

It took us a while in this ghostly atmosphere to reconnect with the hiking trail. Once we got below the clouds, we could see again, and the skiing was terrific.

One of my favorite stretches of the Marcy trail is along Phelps Brook. By the time skiers arrive at the brook, they have descended all the steep, difficult sections. Now they can relax while cruising the 1.2 miles between the two brook crossings.

I took a video of Alan skiing this part of the trail. I was right behind him until he took a small spill toward the end. The camera was strapped to my chest.

Adirondack Backcountry Ski Festival

A backcountry skier descends a birch glade in the High Peaks. Photo by Susan Bibeau.

The Adirondack Backcountry Ski Festival is back this weekend, and though most of the guided ski trips are booked, there are a number of cool events open to the public.

For starters, you can test skis and boots at Otis Mountain, a private hill with a rope tow south of Elizabethtown, and enroll in telemark and skinning lessons, taught by Ron Konowitz, and avalanche clinics, taught by Mike Kazmierczak, a representative of Dynafit and Mammut. It’s all free.

The clinics and demonstrations are on Saturday, starting at 10 a.m. A schedule can be found on the website of the Mountaineer, the festival’s host. Otis Mountain is on Lobdell Road off Route 9N (the turn is to the east).

At 6 p.m. Saturday, Backcountry magazine will host a dinner at Keene Valley Lodge, located a few doors from the Mountaineer.  Price is $20. After dinner, starting at 7:30 p.m., Backcountry will show two ski movies at the Mountaineer: The Freeheel Life and The Fine Line. Admission is $10.

As of today (Wednesday), all of the ski trips were booked except the Karhu Traverse, an intermediate tour through Avalanche Pass that starts in Tahawus and ends at Adirondak Loj. Karhu demo skis are available for this trip.

The Mountaineer will donate proceeds from the festival to the Adirondack Ski Touring Council and the New York Ski Educational Foundation.

Call the Mountaineer (518-576-2281) or check the store’s website for more information.

Interview with avalanche survivors

In light of Saturday’s avalanche on Wright Peak, I thought it’d be instructive to post an in-depth interview with two survivors of the avalanche that occurred in the same spot in February 2000.  Four skiers were swept up in the earlier avalanche, and one died.

The interview with Ron Konowitz and his then-wife, Lauren, appeared in the Explorer in 2003. Although usually reluctant to talk about the avalanche, they agreed to the interview in part to correct the record and in part to warn others of the avalanche danger in the Adirondacks.

 What emerged was the most detailed story of the disaster ever published and a frightening account of what it’s like to be caught up (and buried, in Lauren’s case) in an avalanche.

To read the interview, click the PDF files below.

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

Customer feedback on the trail

Tom O'Sullivan, left, and Dave Richman on the Marcy trail. Photo by Phil Brown.

This past weekend, I encountered Tom O’Sullivan of Albany and his friend, Dave Richman of New Hampshire, near Fifty-Meter Bridge on the Van Hoevenberg Trail to Mount Marcy. I had stopped to put climbing skins on my skis and engaged them in friendly conversation.

We ended up introducing ourselves, and when Tom heard my name, he asked if I were the editor of the Explorer. I allowed that I was.

“You guys do a great job,” he said. “I love that publication.”

He’s not lying: Tom has been a subscriber for ten years.

One of the most gratifying things about working for the Explorer is meeting subscribers on the trail. It happens often, and like Tom, nearly all of them praise the publication and express a personal connection to it. I guess it’s  no surprise that readers share our love of the outdoors and of the Adirondacks.

Take Tom, for example. He’s middle-aged (like me), but he hasn’t slowed down. He tries to ski Marcy, the state’s highest summit, a few times every winter—and he’s has been doing this for twenty years.

Before Tom and Dave continued up the trail, I took their photo and mentioned that I might write a short blog about our encounter.

“Don’t make me out to be a big Marcy skier,” he said. “I just slog up and slog down.”

Our readers are modest, too.

Master skier on the Marcy trail

Mark Meschinelli at Marcy Dam. Photo by Phil Brown.

Last weekend I encountered Mark Meschinelli and Dave Hough, two members of the notorious Ski to Die Club, on the trail to Mount Marcy. Back in the seventies and eighties, Mark, Dave, and their crew set a standard in boldness by tackling difficult terrain–slides, frozen brooks, glades, you name it–in the gear of the day, namely lightweight leather boots and skinny skis.

These guys still got it. After summiting, I skied down with them and took a short video of Mark making parallel turns on the ski trail below Indian Falls. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear he’s on alpine or randonee skis, but he’s actually using a telemark setup, meaning his heels are free. A friend tells me that Mark was equally adept at making parallel turns on the old cross-country gear in the heyday of the Ski to Die Club.

The clip is only about twelve seconds long. Look for Mark to enter the frame from the top. The figure is quite small at first, but you can tell he’s making graceful turns.

Incidentally, Mark also is an expert rock climber. A resident of Plattsburgh, he often can be found on routes at Poke-o-Moonshine Mountain just off the Northway. Last spring, Mark led a friend and me up Catharsis, one of the classic Poke-o routes. Look for a story on this adventure in a future issue of the Explorer.

Avalanche Pass ski video

Looking toward Avalanche Pass from Marcy Dam.

The trip to Avalanche Lake from Adirondak Loj is one of the most popular ski tours in the Adirondacks, and justifiably so. You’re treated to a variety of spectacular scenery along the way, culminating in the lake itself, a frozen sliver of white immured between the cliffs of Mount Colden and Avalanche Mountain. On the return, you enjoy a half-mile descent from the pass on one of the few trails in the High Peaks designed for skiing.

A few weeks ago, I posted a video on Adirondack Almanack of my descent from Avalanche Pass. But I actually took several short videos that day, and now I’ve stitched them together to create an eight-minute movie. It features some of the highlights of the tour: Marcy Dam, the slide on Little Colden, the rock walls of the pass, the Trap Dike, and the lake itself. And, of course, the descent from the pass on my return (with the camera strapped to my chest).

I apologize for the crude production. I’m new to this happy medium.