Reporter Pete Klein reports that at a meeting on July 9th, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation did its best to explain the Essex Chain Lakes Management Complex Draft Plan to a group of about 50.

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INDIAN LAKE — The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation did its best to explain the Essex Chain Lakes Management Complex Draft Plan to a group of about 50 who gathered at Indian Lake Theater here Thursday evening, July 9.

The Essex Chain Lakes Complex is part of the Adirondack Forest Preserve. The plan attempts to protect the environment while allowing access and recreational opportunities to the public who in theory own the land.

The Essex Chain Lakes Complex is in the Central Adirondacks, in the towns of Minerva and Newcomb in Essex County and the Town of Indian Lake in Hamilton County. It includes the Essex Chain Lakes and the Pine Lake primitive areas and portions of the Blue Mountain and Vanderwacker Mountain wild forest units.

The draft plan calls for trails for bicycles and horseback riding; extending the Upper Hudson Ski Loop to the Ord Road and ultimately to the Town of Newcomb; designated routes for public motor vehicle access, including parking; designated administrative routes to facilitate the maintenance of bridges and trails; a community connection, multiple use trail connecting Indian Lake to Minerva; construction of a bridge over the Cedar River to provide a route for four season recreation including hiking, biking, horseback riding, snowmobiling, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing; campsites and waterway access for the disabled; additional canoe carries between the Essex Chain lakes and along the Hudson River; lean-tos; continued floatplane use at designated tent sites on First and Pine lakes; maintaining 2.5 miles of public motor vehicle roads for access and camping during big game hunting season; and maintaining the historic farmhouse at the Outer Gooley Club until a final decision is reached for the structure.

COMMENTS

Of the over 50 people who attended the meeting, 22 made comments limited to three minutes each.

“No one gets everything they want,” Indian Lake Supervisor Brian Wells said, but, “The Town of Indian Lake supports the plan. It is a common sense plan.”

Neil Woodworth, executive director of the Adirondack Mountain Club, said, “There is a lot to like about this plan.” He said ADK would support a bridge over the Cedar River but opposes the Polaris Bridge.

Some thought there should be more access, especially for the elderly and disabled. Others support the plan but think protecting the waters from invasive plants should be included.

Several people confined their support to the proposal to maintain the historic farmhouse at the Outer Gooley Club, but went a step further. They want the open view of the river from the farmhouse to be kept open.

Lou Spada of Indian Lake fully supports the plan, but wants preserving the buildings of the Inner Gooley Club added.

More were in favor of the plan than opposed, primarily due to the planned greater access for all. The main objections focus on motorized access and bridges for snowmobiles.

The strongest objection came from Peter Bauer, executive director of Protect the Adirondacks, who began by saying, “I am here to speak for those who have no voice, the trees and the rocks.” He went on to voice total objection to the plan, saying it violates the Wild, Scenic and Recreational Rivers Act and the State Land Use Master Plan.

The DEC will accept written comments until July 27. Send them to Forester Corrie O’Dea, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, 232 Golf Course Rd, Warrensburg NY 12885.

Reporter Ashleigh Livingston reports that the Adirondack Park Agency is considering Verizon’s request to erect a cellphone tower in Chazy Lake.

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DANNEMORA — The Adirondack Park Agency is considering Verizon’s request to erect a cellphone tower in Chazy Lake.
Dannemora Town Supervisor Bill Chase told the Press-Republican he was recently notified by the APA that the cellular company’s permit application was under formal review.

If approved, the tower would occupy property behind the town’s Municipal Center in the town hamlet of Chazy Lake and provide cellphone service to that area.

Anyone wishing to write the APA in regard to the project may do so until July 23.
Letters should make reference to project number 2014-227 and be addressed to: NYS Adirondack Park Agency, Environmental Program Specialist, P.O. Box 99, 1133 NYS Route 86, Ray Brook, NY 12977.

Reporter Anthony F. Hall reports on a new effort for an Adirondack Park-wide program to prevent the introduction and spread of invasive aquatic species.

 Reporter Chris Knight reports that Loon Gulf, Inc. is selling off it’s holdings of thousands of acres on and around Loon Lake, including a swath of undeveloped shoreline and the former Loon Lake Golf Course.

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LOON LAKE – Thousands of acres on and around Loon Lake are up for sale, including a swath of undeveloped shoreline and the former Loon Lake Golf Course.

Loon Gulf Inc., based in Italy, is selling off its holdings in the town of Franklin. It’s asking $5.95 million for the 13 lots containing roughly 2,600 acres, according to the company’s real estate agent, Brian Draper of Say Real Estate in Saranac Lake. The property went on the market last month.

"They would prefer to sell the whole thing as one parcel, which is the most attractive thing to any developer that would want to do anything out there," Draper said. "However, they have said they would sell off individual parcels."

Draper said one lot has already sold, two more are under contract and offers have been made on others, including one on the former golf course that wasn’t accepted. He wouldn’t identify the buyers or potential buyers. Among the parcels of various sizes up for sale is a 380-acre lot on the back side of the lake that Draper says has a lot of potential for waterfront development.

Loon Gulf’s bid to sell its acreage comes two years after it submitted a conceptual plan to the state Adirondack Park Agency to reopen the golf course and subdivide its holdings into 160 residential lots and three open space lots. The plan never went any further with the agency.

Draper said didn’t know why the company has decided to put the property on the market.

"I know they were talking to a developer and that they had plans set up and they had quite a bit of information prepared to do something," he said. "Loon Gulf is not closed to the idea of them doing something out there. It’s just they’re familiar with the struggles it would take to get a very large resort out there, i.e. (the Adirondack Club and Resort in) Tupper Lake."

Loon Lake was a popular resort destination for the affluent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anchored by the Loon Lake House. It began in 1878 as a 31-room-hotel, built on a bluff overlooking the lake, and eventually grew to accommodate 800 in two hotels and 60 private cabins spread across roughly 3,000 acres. The golf course, built in 1895, was one of the first in the Adirondacks. The resort hosted writer Oscar Wilde in 1882 and three presidents: Benjamin Harrison in 1892, Grover Cleveland in 1895 and William McKinley in 1897. The hamlet that grew up around the resort featured a general store, a post office and a large train station.

The resort went bankrupt in the early 1930s but continued to operate until the 1950s, when it was used as a summer camp. It burned to the ground in September 1956. Within the next two years, the property had been auctioned and many of its homes had been sold to families who had rented them while the hotel was operating. The golf course closed in 2003. Loon Lake’s population now is largely seasonal.

"Obviously the lake is a very quiet, family-oriented place," Draper said.

He thinks there’s a chance Loon Lake could see some of its prior prosperity return again.

"There’s a lot of potential out there, for sure, for a number of different things," he said. "I could see the golf course coming back and the old inns coming back and getting a cafe that would bring people out there again. You could have horseback riding and cross-country ski trails and other winter activities out there. Any kind of development in the Adirondack Park or in this area that can bring jobs and can bring stability to our economy here is a positive."

"Ultimately the goal would be to find a solution that works best for everybody out there, because there’s a number of people who do not want any (development) whatsoever, and then, of course, there’s the people who would welcome something."

Loon Lake resident Keith Silliman, who writes an online blog about life and happenings on the lake, said he doesn’t want to see any development around the lake "that would degrade the quality of this resource, both upland and aquatic.

"I would love to see the golf course reestablished, along with the Inn," Silliman wrote in an email to the Enterprise. "I am not opposed to some additional housing within the hamlet of Loon Lake. It would be great to see sustainable forestry practices used on the adjoining lands.

"It will be interesting to see what actually happens down in Tupper Lake. We have more challenges here – very short golf season, forty minutes to Whiteface, via back roads, forty minutes to quality grocery shopping."

Town of Franklin Supervisor Art Willman said he hadn’t heard about Loon Gulf putting its acreage up for sale until an Enterprise reporter told him about it, although he said he had heard rumors.

"I’ve actually been having conversations with some of the homeowners there, and I suggested, ‘Why don’t you guys buy up the shoreline. Then you control it,’" Willman said. "They’d like to leave it as is with no building up there. A bunch of them were talking at one point about getting a

Chris Knight reports that the New York State Mesonet has planned a statewide network of 125 weather stations that would include nearly 20 sites inside the Adirondack Park.  

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**Please note that a paid subscription is required to view the article online. A version of the article appears below.

 A planned statewide network of 125 weather stations would include nearly 20 sites inside the Adirondack Park.

The New York State Mesonet, funded by a $23 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is designed to provide emergency management officials with access to real-time, high-resolution data – more than they’ve ever had before – to use in preparing for and responding to natural disasters like hurricanes. Organizers also say the network will have applications for day-to-day weather forecasting, farmers, airplane pilots and others.

The push for the mesonet started in 2011 after heavy rains brought by tropical storms Irene and Lee triggered flooding that caused millions of dollars in damage to infrastructure across the state, including here in the Adirondacks.

"The funding wasn’t provided until after Superstorm Sandy (in 2012), but the genesis for the mesonet started with those flooding events," said Jerald Brotzge, the mesonet’s program manager. He’s based at SUNY Albany.

The program is modeled off of similar mesonets already in operation in other states like Oklahoma and Kentucky, Brotzge said. Each of the 125 primary stations will measure air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, solar radiation, atmospheric pressure, precipitation including both snowmelt and rain, and soil moisture and temperature at three different depths.

"Between all those different measurements, we hope to create a weather network that’s valuable to a number of different sectors: agriculture, emergency management, aviation, ground transportation and education," Brotzge said. "Every county will have at least one station, and the larger the county, the more stations they’ll have."

There is a current weather station system in New York, the federally operated ASOS and AWOS network, but it consists of just 25 sites and only provides data on an hourly basis, Brotzge said. One of those sites is located at the Adirondack Regional Airport in Lake Clear.

"All 125 of our sites will report data every five minutes," Brotzge said. "We will collect all that data immediately and send it back out to emergency managers in an instant. For example, we’ll be able to track and monitor rainfall around the clock. Right now, you miss a lot of rainfall in the valleys, particularly in the more mountainous terrain, because we simply can’t see it. The mesonet allows us to fill in those gaps."

Twenty of the 125 weather stations will also measure snowfall. Most of them will be within the boundaries of the Park, Brotzge said.

"Right now there’s a snow network deployed across the Catskills, monitoring the watershed for New York City," he said. "But what we don’t have is a similar program for monitoring the hydrology and snowmelt across the Adirondacks.

"Another aspect of the project is vertical profilers. Seventeen of the 125 sites will have additional equipment providing vertical information on temperature, moisture, windspeed and direction every five minutes. Right now we only have three places across the state that launch weather balloons twice daily. That just doesn’t provide the atmospheric info the weather service needs for truly accurate modeling and forecasting."

The raw data provided by the weather stations will be available for the public to view for free in real-time, but there will probably be a fee for viewing archived, analyzed or "value-added" data, Brotzge said.

Brooke Tabor, a Burlington, Vermont-based National Weather Service meteorologist, said he’s aware of the project and thinks it will be a benefit.

"We’re going to have more data available, and that will lead to better analysis of conditions, especially in complex terrain like the northern Adirondacks or the St. Lawrence River Valley," he said. "It’s also supposed to include a profile up Whiteface (Mountain), so we’ll get a vertical profile of the weather. That will be helpful. It will also help with snow depths and for the flood potential in the spring time: How much snow is in the mountains and how much, when it releases (and) could come into the waterways and cause flooding?"

Each mesonet site will include a 30-foot-tall tower, where most of the sensors will be located, surrounded by a fence. So far, organizers have identified 50 of their planned 125 sites, and they’re looking for more.

"We’re looking for a 30-by-30 foot piece of property where we could put a weather station," Brotzge said. "We have a number of criteria. For example, the sites can’t be in flood zone or wetland. It really needs to be on a generally flat area with no trees preferably within 300 feet. Most of the sites so far will be placed on private land.

"We have 19 sites planned right now inside the Park boundaries. We’re working closely with the (state Adirondack Park Agency) to approve those sites, and we’re trying to be very careful where we deploy them so as not to interfere with views or wildlife or the environment."

Of the 19 planned sites in the Park, between five and seven have been selected, Brotzge said. The goal is to have all 125 sites across the state selected by the end of the year.

For more information, visit www.nysmesonet.org.

Zach Hirsch in Chesterfield, NY reports that The main trail on Poke-O Moonshine Mountain in the town of Chesterfield, in the northeast corner of the Adirondacks will get a makeover this fall.

Amanda May Metzger reports that the Lake George Land Conservancy, the nonprofit land trust that purchases and preserves land, met the deadline to take the next step toward buying roughly 75 acres of the mountain known as the Pinnacle.

 Chris Knight, Senior Staff Writer says that although village officials are are open to hosting a boat washing station to help prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species, they don’t want it along the Lake Flower shoreline.

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SARANAC LAKE – Village officials are open to hosting a boat washing station to help prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species, but they don’t want it along the Lake Flower shoreline.

At a meeting Monday night, the village Board of Trustees soundly rejected a plan to put a boat wash and decontamination station on village property next to the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s Lake Flower boat launch on River Street. Lake Flower has been picked as one of nine such decontamination sites around the Adirondack Park under a one-year, state-funded pilot program.

The station would be on the flat, grassy area where the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival Ice Palace is built each winter. Under the plan submitted to the village, a boat inspector from the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute would assess boats that come through the launch. If a boat has visible aquatic plants or animals, or has come from a lake that’s known to have aquatic invasives, it would be directed to the decontamination site, where an AWI technician would wash it.

A stone driveway would be built from the boat launch, through the village’s property and exiting back out to River Street. An infiltration basin and swale would also be constructed to hold the water used to wash boats until it infiltrates back into the ground. Water for washing boats would be taken from a 550-gallon tank that would be put on the site and filled with water drawn, and filtered, from Lake Flower.

A site visit took place last week involving representatives of the village, the Watershed Institute, the Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program, the state Adirondack Park Agency and Department of Transportation, and the Lake George Park Commission.

Village Manager John Sweeney, who attended that site visit, said Monday he shared concerns about managing the amount of traffic that would use the site. DOT officials had similar concerns, he said.

Under the plan submitted to the village, boats would be allowed to move through the launch without inspection or decontamination if traffic at the site gets backed up.

"Overall, I still think they’re pushing forward with this site," Sweeney said.

"Do they have authority to push us?" asked Mayor Clyde Rabideau.

"No, I don’t believe so," Sweeney responded.

Sweeney said two alternative sites were considered: one in the village and another at the DEC offices in Ray Brook.

Rabideau said he wasn’t in favor of using the village’s property on Lake Flower. He said there are other sites "that make a lot more environmental sense, especially at the (DEC Second Pond) boat launch site upriver, where contamination may happen more so than it happens here at Lake Flower."

The mayor also said the Lake Flower site is a main thoroughfare and vista for Saranac Lake.

"It’s busy all through the summer. There’s a lot of traffic there," Rabideau said. "Plus, I fear that a boat decontamination site would be unsightly there. I dare say they wouldn’t get that far if they wanted to do it in Mid’s Park in Lake Placid. That would go over real big there, I’m sure.

"(The Lake Flower site) is a valuable piece of real estate in the summer, has a great vista, and there are other sites for this. I will not support it there."

Eric Holmlund, a village resident who directs the Adirondack Watershed Institute, told the board last month that Lake Flower was picked because it gets a lot of traffic, has several aquatic invasive species in it and it’s centrally located in the Tri-Lakes. If stewards at nearby launches inspect a boat and find invasives, they would refer the boat to Lake Flower for decontamination, Holmlund said.

Rabideau said Monday that backers of the proposal also want to use the Lake Flower site because it would give the program "public exposure" and "advertisement value."

"That’s nice, but why take up the best real estate in the whole village of Saranac Lake for a whole summer?" he said. "That’s not fair to the village of Saranac Lake."

Trustee Allie Pelletieri said he understands the idea that the site could be an educational tool to raise awareness about invasive species, but he said it makes more sense to do it at Second Pond.

"If you don’t clean (boats) at the state bridge, it just comes downriver to us," he said. "It seems more practical to do it upriver. We should push them in a different direction and see how we could make it work."

"I think it’s important to raise awareness about invasive species," said Trustee Barb Rice, "but that has to be balanced against a very prominent piece of property in the middle of the village. I wouldn’t want to say no completely, but if we could steer them to an alternate