UPDATE: Development Continues on AWA’s Visitor Use Management App
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…
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Wilderness Drop Zones: A Poor Management Practice
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…
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Protecting the Wilderness with Positive Reinforcement
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…
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The Future Forest
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,…
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Wilderness by Description or Proscription?
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…
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A Wilderness of Roads
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…
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Roads of Recovery
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…
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Wilderness Visitor Management: There’s an App for That!
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…
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AWA Takes an Active Role in High Peaks Visitor Management
At Adirondack Wilderness Advocates we refer to our core mission as KEEP: Knowledge, Enjoyment, Expansion and Protection of the Adirondack Park’s wildest places. That goes for the High Peaks Wilderness as much as…
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Adirondack Explorer – It’s Debatable: No To Permits
The term “overuse” implies that we have too many people visiting the High Peaks. This term, while convenient and perhaps apt, greatly oversimplifies the problem and solution. Certainly, there is…
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Planning for a Wilder Pepperbox
The NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) recently announced plans to revise the unit management plan (UMP) for the Pepperbox Wilderness, a relatively small and seldom-visited area in the western Adirondacks…
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AWA Proposes Adjustments to Wilderness Snowmobile Plan
The NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) recently announced plans to construct a 4-mile segment of a community connector snowmobile trail through lands classified as the Blue Ridge Wilderness. Adirondack Wilderness…
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