On a beautiful Wednesday in June we set out from Cortland on a 3 ½ hour drive to Blue Mountain in the Adirondack Park. Unlike most visitors, we stopped at the entrance because we wanted to photograph the sign that welcomes visitors to the Adirondack Park. Visitors who don't want a photo of the welcome sign have no reason to stop at the park entrance because there is no gate, no uniformed park employees collecting entrance fees, and no list of rules and regulations to read about on a sign or pamphlet. With an estimated 10 million visitors a year, not halting the flow of vehicles into the Park makes sense, but given the 55 MPH speed limit on Rte. 28 and the fact that the brown and yellow sign is designed, like all official Adirondack Park signage, to blend in with natural surroundings, it is not surprising that a lot of visitors to the Adirondack's don't even realize they are staying in the largest park in the contiguous U.S.We tested the notion that many Adirondack Park visitors don't know they are visiting a park by conducting the following not-very-scientific experiment. We drove to Old Forge, a small village located several miles inside Park's boundaries, and asked the first five people we encountered walking through the parking lot of the Enchanted Forest Water Safari theme park if they could tell us where the Adirondack Park was. The response we got in each case was a variation of the following: "I'm sorry. I don't know where it is. I'm not from around here." Taking the experiment a little further we asked the same question of the young woman inside a glass booth who was selling admission tickets to Enchanted Forest. She did know that we were "inside the Adirondack Park," but when we faked puzzled looks in response to that piece of information, she had a hard time explaining further. "It's this county," she told us. "Well, it’s a lot of counties. It's…" Her voice trailed off and we nodded our thanks and walked away.
It is not surprising that many Adirondack Park visitors don't realize they are in a park, since homes, businesses, schools, churches, and crowded shopping districts regularly dot, and sometimes crowd, the landscape amidst the vast stretches of natural scenery. Unlike other parks in the United States, the Adirondack Park combines public and private land in a manner similar to some European parks, but on a much larger scale. Its six million acres of public and private land take up approximately the same area as the state of Vermont, and the 45% of the park that is publicly-owned protects more untrammeled land than any other national, state, or local park in the contiguous United States. The trail we climbed up Blue Mountain in search of Bicknell's Thrush illustrates this blending of public and private land by starting at the base of the mountain on private land owned by the Finch Pruyne Paper Company, then moving without notice onto public land on the way to the summit. Hikers that fail to register, or fail to read the brochure that is available at the trail head, will be unaware that they are experiencing this essential aspect of the Adirondack Park.
Many of the Adirondack Park's approximately 250,000 permanent and seasonal residents find
its marriage of public and private land to be a stormy one, mostly because development on 
private land is regulated by the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). The APA uses density zoning, compatible uses, and agency review of significant new construction to regulate development, and its decisions are often controversial. Environmental groups are frequently critical of APA decisions as well and, as a result, the Park is as much home to heated politics as it is to serene landscapes. After our hike up Blue, for example, we stopped for breakfast in Indian Lake and came across a woman wearing this t-shirt that read "Adirondack Porn Agency: Screwing the Little Guy Since 1972."It is the mixture of public and private land that makes lessons gleaned from the Adirondack Park so valuable. It is clear that merely setting aside land in public parks and preserves will not be sufficient to protect natural ecosystems from careless development and environmental degradation. Studying the Adirondack Park may help us learn how to preserve wilderness and protect natural ecosystems through land use planning on a regional scale, and Steve and I intend to look for, and try to learn from, its successes and failures as we explore the Adirondacks in the future.
Re Blackflies. We thought we'd experience the discomfort of blackfly season in the Adirondacks, but it turns out that warm spring temperatures arrived both late and suddenly, and that combination severely diminished the blackfly population. Having made a trip to the emergency room to cope with the aftereffects of a previous visit to the Adirondacks in early June, I can't say I'm sorry we missed them.
No comments:
Post a Comment