Pilots win reprieve

Just before we went to press for the May/June issue of the Adirondack Explorer, the Adirondack Park Agency voted 9-2 to allow floatplanes to continue landing on Lows Lake for three more years, thus ending almost a year of public debate. As a sop to green groups, the APA and state Department of Environmental Conservation agreed to classify Lows Lake and adjacent state lands as Wilderness. Look for a story on the decision when you get your Explorer. I am posting here two of the important documents relating to the decision. In one, DEC spells out the rationale for allowing commercial pilots to land on Lows and the rules they must abide. The second is a memo to the APA board in support of the proposal, written by the APA’s acting executive director and its counsel. It’s interesting that the memo fails to mention that the APA’s state-lands staff concluded that extending floatplane access to Lows Lake would violate the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan.

• Lows Lake Memo PDF
• UMP amendments PDF