This Blog Has Been Supersized...

If you regularly visit this blog, and use a screen resolution below 1000pixels wide this blog might not display properly.

The blog has been resized so the center column can hold a reasonable 500pixel width image.

Today most monitors and graphics cards comfortably support 1024x768 pixels so if your still using 800x600 resolution it might be a good time to resize your screen and take advantage of the larger footprint that a higher resolution offers.

To do this, simply right click your windows desktop, select properties. Then select settings and select 1024x768 if you have a CRT monitor. If you have an LCD it might be wide screen so just select the closest 1000 pixel resolution.

Sorry for the inconvenience but I hope it will make the blog a better viewing experience.

Justin

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Mountain Visions New Years Day (almost) Sunrise On Rooster Comb

Leaving home at 3:30am and heading for Keene Valley for a 6:00am start, I thought I might sneak in a New Years sunrise before the weather turned snowy. Sometimes you just don't luck out. Despite the weather looking like it would cooperate and solid selection on the mountain, the sun never rose.

Well, obviously it rose, or you wouldn't be reading this, it just wasn't visible through the thick cloud cover.

After consulting my memory and then National Geographic Topo! Norteast I settled on a few possible options. The criteria were decent views, less than 3.5 miles and fairly easy to ascend. Afterall, I was hiking on 24 hours without sleep by the time I got back down. Rooster Comb, Hopkins, Noonmark, and Cascade all came to mind.

After checking out the azimuth of the sunrise and using the line of sight tool on the Topo! to make sure I had a clear view of the heading, I opted for Rooster Comb which was a fairly short 1:15 minute drive from home.

Rooster Comb is the traditional start of the Great Range Traverse and a mere 2700ft compared to the 4000ft height of the rest of the peaks beyond Hedgehog Mountain. It's about 3 miles from the trail head and a fairly nice hike with a lot of switch backs. The mountain has a nice open summit with 270* views, but the views are about average because the surrounding peaks block out any significant long range views. However, you peer right down Keene Valley, and the sun just happened to be rising behind the valley.

After putting on my boots and gaiters I was a little ahead of schedule but the weather wasn't looking like the 10am snow start that was predicted. After listening the the comedy channel on Sirius for a few minutes longer we started out at 5:50am. By the time we signed in at the register and I adjusted my poles and snowshoes it was 6am.

The issue wasn't getting to the summit early for me, but for Caney. He doesn't have a winter coat grown in yet and he gets cold easily when not moving, so getting there without too much standby time is key.

The weather was great, I hiked in my usual goretex bibs, and a thin base layer top under my goretex shell. Warm enough to unzip the pit zips and hike gloveless without a hat. When I left at 3:30a the temp in Lake Placid was about 18F so I'm guessing it was about 15-20F when we started, and windless.

After about 45minutes it was light enough to hike sans headlamp, but it was also snowing quite hard. Then just as I'd given up hope for a clean sunrise the snow stopped and it seemed to be getting clearer.

As we approached the summit, I could see some orange around the horizon but the sunrise was not to be. While it stopped snowing for about 45 minutes, it never cleared up and that faint orange glow behind the clouds was as good as it got.

We spent 25 minutes up there, of course the wind really picked up after sunrise (gusting to 25mph in Plattsburg at sea level), but nothing ever got photographically interesting. The trip down is fairly steep at the top, and well below the summit there are several chances to cut the switch backs and go cross country to link up with the trail. We really cut a few minutes off here and there and the deeper powder (about 3ft+) was more interesting then the well packed trail.

The hike out was very snowy with perhaps an inch falling. The poor weather was a great test for the weathproofness and usability in the cold of the K10D, as I looked to salvage the morning from a photographic standpoint . The camera and FA 28-70 f/4 lens handled the weather quite well, and even on digital this lens as been a workhorse for me since I bought it in 1998. (perhaps one of the best 28-70 zooms made from a performance to size standpoint, and only a stop slower but much lighter than most "pro" 2.8 zooms which I prefer not to carry while hiking).

The drive home was spoiled by flat landers and downstaters. Yep, I'm a geographic bigot and proud of it. If you can't handle the snow don't come to the North Country! My drive time doubled as people made their way home to their meager existence, in a life of expensive misery, in the sprawling metropolis of downstate NY and the equally crappy New Jersey.

So Happy New Year!!!

(Day 1 of 365...and I'm 1/1, solid 1.000 batting average, undefeated!!...if I could only keep this average till next Jan 1st I'd litterally be a happy camper).

technorati tags:Rooster Comb, ADK, Adirondacks, Noonmark Mountain, Hedgehog, Giant Mountain, Snow Mountain, Chapel Pond, Keene Valley, hike, backpack, photography, mountaineering, Mountain Visions, Pentax, K10D, weather sealed, NY, New York, downstate, North Country, sunrise, snowshoe

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Capital Region Fans Suck

Wow, talk about getting to the point.

What is the deal with Capital Region folk? They have this chip on their shoulder that they don't have any of the big sports or nice stadiums, but when they have something that is good they lose interest.

I've heard this about stores, "we want Macy's to stock the nice stuff." Macy's complies, people don't buy the stuff, Macy's goes back to selling what it had been selling.

When you want something, you have to support it. Albany isn't a vibrant metropolis, it's a 8-4, Monday thru Friday city. Most people living in the burbs of this shrinking city never have a desire to head downtown. The sad thing is, Albany has done a great job revitalizing itself, IN SPITE of the fact that the suburbanites don't support this. Believe me, you won't get shot walking from the car to the TU. As dead as it is, you might not even see another person on your short walk.

The most interesting stat about Albany, a telling tale, is that over the last 20 years the Capital Region population has remained fairly steady while the urban sprawl has increased drastically. One the flip side, the city of Albany's population as dropped like a rock.

I'm guessing the spread out of the population has made it inconvenient for this work day based population to get to the arena. Unfortunately, arenas are designed to put fannies in the seats. When they don't, they stop selling tickets and the team leaves.

Albany does a great job over the summer with various festivals in Washington Park, at the Empire Plaza, and Live At Five at Corning Preserve. All of course free, on weekend days, and always well attended.

I've always defended people of this region. When they chased out the Albany-Colonie Yankees, a team filled perpetually with up and coming stars (Jeter, Williams, Rivera, Petite and many others), I said baseball is a sport that needs a quality stadium to draw the casual fan. Heritage Park was at best a decent high school field and not proper for this region.

Then came the Joe, Joseph L. Bruno Stadium, in Troy and baseball fans have come out every year for the last 5 years. Not only that, they have increased attendance yearly. Of course, you have a beautiful stadium, a team that has won 4 out of 5 years, and if you didn't show up you'd have no excuse.

What I can't understand is why at an arena as nice as the Times Union, with a quality hockey team that is run by an organization that lets the team play to win, cannot draw a decent crowd.

Arenas are arenas, nothing special about any of them. There is only so much you can do to a giant warehouse with a sports court in the middle of it. But the TU is legit pro arena, it seats close to 20,000, and you can fill it when Billy Joel comes, or Hanah Montana. So why can't you show up to watch a few hockey games a year? Maybe support your Albany Conquest as well.

It can't be the ticket prices, because they are fair. Nope it's not NHL, but it's not NHL prices. You can afford to take the family to a Rats game, but how many can take a family of 5 to an NHL game???

Sure the Devils sucked the life out of the River Rats, but Carolina is letting the Rats play, and the hockey is good. The team is winning. It's not a great offensive team but they are physical, and can play defense.

Why can Rochester draw 7000 a night, but Albany only 3000 on a good night. Rochester also regularly sells out it's AAA baseball games. And Rochester is just 1 hour from Buffalo with an NHL team and another AAA baseball team. I use Rochester as an example because it's very similar in size and location to larger cities as Albany is.

Bottom line, Albany-Schenectady-Troy if you don't support your teams you will lose them, and while I'm sure you all fantasize about pro teams and the big city...AHL hockey, NY-Penn League baseball, and arena football are all you are going to get, unless you want to take a 3 hour drive every time you want to watch a live sporting event.

So support your teams (or don't cry when they are gone)!!!!

technorati tags:Albany, River Rats, Tri-City Valleycats, Troy, Schenectady, hockey, AHL, NY-Penn, League, NHL, Rochester, New York, baseball, NYC, Buffalo, Times Union Center, Times Union, Pearl, Albany Sucks, fans, Carolina Hurricanes, Hurricanes, Carolina, sports, K10D, D1H, Pentax, Nikon

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Finch-Pruyn Purchase 161,000 acres of Adirondack Biodiversity

I believe back in June 2007, the Nature Conservancy aqcuired the rights to the Finch Lands. The deal allows Finch Pruyn to use the land as a working forest for an additional 20 years which will hopefully keep a lot of people at the paper mill in Glens Falls happy.

This is both sadly and happily one of the last, and perhaps largest, contiguous parcels of private land in the forest preserve.

But as you can read below, 161,000 acres of biodiversity doesn't come without a cost. Lots of hungry mouths to feed including the tax man, the conservationist, the hunter, hiker, snowmobiler and the developer.

Nevertheless, having the Nature Conservancy try to figure out this mess puts me more at ease. Like ANWR, even if I never get to set foot on most of this land, it makes me all warm and fuzzy to know it's there and never going to have a Walmart, strip mall, or some over sized seasonal house built on it.

Well, I can wish though...how about renewing the leases to the hunting clubs for 20 more years, then slowly bringing most the land into the forest preserve.


Conservancy weighs fate of 161,000 acres in Adirondacks
By FRED LeBRUN
First published: Sunday, December 2, 2007
Albany Times Union


After driving endless numbers of internal roads and an hourlong fly-over in Tommy Helms's 30-year-old Cessna sea plane, what's most striking about the 161,000 acre Finch, Pruyn & Co. property in the Adirondacks is its vastness and continuity.

Or as biologist Michelle Brown of the Adirondack Chapter of the Nature Conservancy put it, the property's "intactness." Viewed in a global context, which we seldom think of for the Adirondacks, Brown says the Finch, Pruyn & Co. lands represent one of the last, best places on earth to conserve, protect and keep whole a significant temperate deciduous forest system.

What a stunning acquisition this is by the Nature Conservancy, still breathtaking to contemplate six months after it happened.

A meticulously maintained working forest in the pumping heart of the Adirondacks kept very private for 146 years, with 144 miles of river, 70 lakes and ponds, 80 mountains and and a ton of natural wonders only a few eyes have seen.

On very short notice, timber products giant Finch, Pruyn & Co. came calling and Adirondack Chapter executive director Mike Carr and his staff dropped an already full plate of land stewardship issues in the North Country to accommodate. They scrambled, borrowing $110 million from John Hancock Insurance and the Open Space Institute to seal the deal.

But now the madness begins. While an expensive clock driven by the interest on those loans is ticking, Carr has given himself a year to put together a complicated plan for the future of the property that takes into account myriad demands and desires from a broad range of stakeholders, and the Nature Conservancy's own mission statement.

"I'm not going to please everybody, probably nobody completely," the affable Carr said, as we were driving down a private road to a trail head that would take us in under a half-hour to a postcard view of Ok-Slip Falls.

In future generations, this little trail to the highest waterfall in the Adirondacks, and one of the tallest in the state, will become as popular as the trek from Adirondack Loj to Marcy dam -- if it becomes part of the Adirondack forest preserve, or becomes public through an easement. It probably will, because it is very high on the wish list of environmental groups looking to steer about half of the 161,000 acres into the Forever Wild forest preserve.

That means the state will have to make a significant purchase here. But at the same time, local governments, which have a veto if Environmental Protection Fund money is used, will have their demands, primarily centering on economic development opportunities. A snowmobile trail linking the towns from Long Lake to Schroon Lake is a high priority for them. The hunting and fishing clubs with a combined membership of 3,500 that lease 131,000 of the acres now would like a voice in the future as well, even though they may have to settle for smaller leases than they have now, and then there is Michelle Brown's voice, most compelling of all.

The Nature Conservancy, after all, is about protecting nature, biological diversity. Not about guaranteeing public access, or honoring hunting leases, or developing recreational opportunities. Mike Carr is certainly aware of all these other hands out, and wants to satisfy as many as he can, but not at the expense of the fragile ecosystems, the unusual, threatened and endangered.

The Adirondack Chapter has launched a hurry-up $35 million fundraising effort over this property, which tells me in the end they hope to keep a hunk of it. Interestingly, in short order they've raised more than $5 million, most of it coming in far from Long Lake. There are those in distant places who may never see the Adirondacks who understand the global importance of this piece of property.

So Mike and his staff and board will get a chance to decide how best to divvy it up to give it the wisest protection and use, while getting out from under a groaning debt load and a $1 million a year in taxes.

I do not pretend to have an inside track on Mike's thinking. Besides, I think his evolving plan is very fluid at the moment. But here are my impressions of where we'll be when the dust settles on this phenomenal legacy for our grandchildren.

Much of the Finch, Pruyn & Co. property will continue as a working forest. Done right, it works.

Mike Carr is a big believer in the dynamic that currently exists, that's kept the Finch, Pruyn & Co. properties beautifully maintained and conserved. In all likelihood, sexy items like the Essex Chain lakes, the Hudson Gorge, OK-Slip Falls, and maybe even Boreas Ponds will go into the forest preserve, as environmentalists wish. But there will be a place for the hunting and fishing clubs, which have proved to be excellent stewards and represent a strong Adirondack tradition.

There will be a connected snowmobile trail along existing logging roads, and probably named lakes and ponds that Tommy Helms and the other seaplaners can fly into, to keep that old tradition alive too.

Through the manipulation of transferable development rights, struggling towns and hamlets surrounded by forest preserve will get buildable property for growth.

In other words, my hunch is Mike Carr will come up with a complex mish-mash of public and private interests interlocked through easements, leases and fee purchases. A new paradigm for land acquisition in the Adirondacks.

This arrangement will require unprecedented cooperation and respect among parties, and pose a huge challenge for enforcement and all new headaches for the DEC.

But you can be sure the delicate ferns and mosses growing around rare limestone outcroppings, around Pickwacket Pond and up in the higher elevations, around Squaw Brook valley, and elsewhere, will never be safer.

Albany, N.Y.: Timesunion.com - Print Story

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