After ProcellaCOR treatment, northern Adirondack property owners call on state to control invasives in connected lake

The fight against milfoil continues at Horseshoe Pond and Deer River Flow

By Zachary Matson

Town of Duane property owners who fought invasive milfoil in Horseshoe Pond with an herbicide this summer are now calling on state officials to do the same in the connected Deer River Flow.

The flow is enlarged by a state-owned dam and surrounded largely by state land.

The Horseshoe Pond-Deer River Flow Association represents private property owners on the two northern Adirondack water bodies and has sought to combat Eurasian watermilfoil for years. 

This year the association was one of a handful that earned Adirondack Park Agency approval to kill milfoil with ProcellaCOR. The group gathered $33,000 from garage sales, bake sales and raffles to help finance the project.

Association members said the treatment focused on privately-owned Horseshoe Pond went “better than expected”, but they remained concerned that untreated milfoil beds in Horseshoe Pond would provide a breeding ground for future reinfestation. 

Since the state owns the dam on Deer River Flow and a majority of the 396-acre lake’s shoreline is part of the Debar Mountain Wild Forest, they argue, the state Department of Environmental Conservation should manage the problem.

“Basically, this is a state lake,” said Gill Paddock. For four decades, he has owned and operated the Deer River Campsite for RV campers. “The state should be doing the treatment, the state should be coming up with the money to take care of milfoil.” 

The association, which includes nearly 50 Horseshoe Pond property owners and some Deer River Flow land owners, in the past contracted divers to harvest milfoil by hand and deployed benthic barriers that block plant growth on lake bottoms. 

After grants and other funding dried up, the group reduced its milfoil control around 2016. 

A few years later, after the milfoil rebounded, a harvesting contractor estimated it would cost about $70,000 per year for 10 years to remove the milfoil. “We knew if we ever stopped, the milfoil would come back at us,” said Bob Mayville, lake association president. “And it did.”

Around that time, ProcellaCOR was gaining more interest and in 2020 was used in the Adirondack Park for the first time in Minerva Lake. 

The APA has approved its use on eight Adirondack lakes, including Lake Luzerne, Brant Lake, Paradox Lake, East and West Caroga lakes and the controversial Lake George application. 

After multiple years of planning, fundraising and applying for permits, Horseshoe Pond received APA approval in May and used the herbicide in June. 

“It’s been an effort and it’s been a good result,” Mayville said. 

But association members don’t think it’s reasonable to expect them to do the same for Deer River Flow – even as it looms as a threat to the progress they are cheering on Horseshoe Pond. 

“Between garage sales and bake sales, we just can’t come up with the money to do the work,” Paddock said. “Why should we as the private sector do an application for public land?”

The DEC in a statement said the agency does not have a program funded to conducts its own milfoil treatments and noted numerous grants in place to support the invasive species mitigation work of others. It also explained that while invasive species can spread in other means, water flows from Horseshoe Pond to Deer River Flow, so milfoil is less likely to migrate solely from natural currents.

“Organizations such as lake associations and local governments typically take lead on control efforts,” DEC said in the statement.

Glenn Sullivan, a lake management consultant who applied ProcellaCOR to Horseshoe Pond, has worked on numerous herbicide projects in the Adirondacks, including on Lake George. 

Earlier this month, Sullivan returned to Horseshoe Pond and paddled the area to assess how the herbicide worked, reporting no milfoil in the treated areas. Another contractor will conduct a formal plant survey at sites previously surveyed.  

Sullivan said he had also recently returned to Brant Lake, another application he worked on this summer, and did not find any living milfoil.

“It’s been really the best control of milfoil I’ve seen,” Sullivan said. “This is my fourth post-treatment survey in the Adirondacks, and I haven’t found any milfoil yet.” 

Sullivan said his company Ready Scout LLC is in communication with about a half dozen other Adirondack lake communities interested in the herbicide. He said the herbicide “has worked as advertised” so far but that it remains to be seen how quickly milfoil will return to treated lakes and for how long local stakeholders will be able to manage a reduced milfoil load by hand. He also dismissed concerns of unknown long-term impacts, which were widespread among opponents to the Lake George project, and emphasized how milfoil can harm biodiversity in lake. 

Based in New Jersey, Sullivan has a camp in the North Creek area. He said he has seen native plant communities decimated by milfoil invasions in his home state. 

“I come to the Adirondacks for the ecosystem in part, and I don’t want to see invasive plants,” Sullivan said. “I’ve treated many lakes in New Jersey where diversity is six plants in a lake. You come up here, and you find 20 plants or more in a lake.”

Nancy and Mark Beddoe, who split time between Ottawa, Canada, and their camp on Horseshoe Pond, have visited the area for four decades. They first met on the lake. 

As they toured the area in a small boat with a battery-powered motor, they pointed out long stretches of water where in the past milfoil had grown to the water surface by the end of August. The camp sits on the shore of a channel connecting the flow and the pond. This month it was clear. In past summers, they said, it was choked with milfoil.

“It was almost solid green, there were very, very large patches,” Mark said. “We had a way of getting around. You pretty much had to stay along the shore.”  

They said the channel behind their camp and the pond it leads to has taken on a whole different feel and look since the milfoil was killed. 

“It expanded the view of the water, everything seems wider,” Nancy said. “Never in our wildest dreams would we have expected it to be like this.” 

“Nancy comments on it every day,” Mark said.