Protection – Adirondack Wilderness Advocates

AWA’s first order of business in serving on the High Peaks Advisory Group (HPAG) was to ensure that protection of the Wilderness was a paramount and inviolate principle. That was…

Leading with Principles

March 6, 2021

Friday, March 5, 2021 Dear AWA Supporter: Earlier this afternoon, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) released the long-awaited Final Report from the High Peaks Strategic Planning…

UPDATE: Development Continues on AWA’s Visitor Use Management App

December 13, 2020

Ari Epstein

Earlier this year, I wrote about a proof of concept app we had started working on to produce better data about visitor activity in the Adirondack Park. The concept was…

Wilderness Drop Zones: A Poor Management Practice

December 4, 2020

Ha-de-ron-dah Wilderness, High Peaks Wilderness, Lake George Wild Forest, Shaker Mountain Wild Forest, West Canada Lake Wilderness

Maintaining wilderness facilities such as trails, footbridges, and lean-tos is an important responsibility for the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the agency in charge of managing the forever-wild Adirondack…

Protecting the Wilderness with Positive Reinforcement

November 8, 2020

High Peaks Wilderness, Permits

Knowledge, Protection

The busy season in the Adirondacks is winding down, but with a bang. The Coronavirus pandemic, which depressed visitation for the first part of the summer, has clearly caused a…

The Future Forest

October 19, 2020

Part 4 of 4 It has been a slow process, but it has been a privilege to observe these changes over a twenty-year period. Now instead of imagining the future,…

Wilderness by Description or Proscription?

October 13, 2020

Part 3 of 4 When you walk through the woods for miles at a time, it stimulates blood flow throughout your body. The brain is often a passive beneficiary, and…

A Wilderness of Roads

October 3, 2020

Part 2 of 4 The year 2000 was memorable for two reasons: I had met Barbara McMartin that winter and became her newest guidebook assistant, and in the summer DEC…

Roads of Recovery

September 22, 2020

Part 1 of 4 – Introduction Recent news that the remaining portion of Whitney Park, one of the last surviving private parks erected in the 1890s, is on the market…

Wilderness Visitor Management: There’s an App for That!

March 1, 2020

Ari Epstein

A little over ten years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture Phil Brown delivered about his then-newly published collection of letters and essays by Bob Marshall, one…

AWA Takes an Active Role in High Peaks Visitor Management

February 7, 2020