Adirondacks
On the idea of an Adirondack Mountains National Park – – The Adirondack Almanack
The plan for a national park within the central portion of the Adirondack Park was released by the Office of the Governor and proposed as consisting of 1.12 million acres owned by the state as part of the Forest Preserve and 600,000 adjoining acres owned by timber companies and other private landowners to be acquired over time for the national park. The approximate boundaries of the proposed national park would be Saranac Lakes/ Lake Placid/High Peaks to the north, the I-87 Northway to the east, Indian Lake to the south, and Fourth Lake/Stillwater Reservoir to the west. The Laurance Rockefeller plan excluded from federal acquisition Lake Placid and four other villages, Saranac Lake, Blue Mountain Lake, Inlet, and Indian Lake, all envisioned to become the principal commercial service centers for the national
Watching the sunset ?
Communities face garbage double bind | Adirondack Explorer
The Adirondack Park’s 6 million acres of pristine waters, mountain peaks and forestlands were not always the main attraction for all vacationers.
Some came for the dumps.
In the 1960s and ’70s, nearly every town in the Adirondack Park had its own dump or landfill. With lax regulations, black bears would descend on these open-air pits and feast on garbage. Tourists and residents descended, too. They lugged cameras, set up lawn chairs and took the family out for a night of wildlife viewing—some of the bears close enough to touch.
“It was a big attraction on a Saturday morning,” said Kevin Hajos, superintendent of public works for Warren County. Hajos used to go with his grandparents to watch the bears at the North Creek landfill.
That was before Gov. George Pataki and his administration decided in the 1990s that the Adirondack Park was not the place for trash.
For the last couple of decades, New Yorkers have spent millions of dollars keeping dumps out of the public-private park. Annual subsidies have helped the two counties that are wholly within the Adirondacks to truck their garbage elsewhere. But those subsidies are now in doubt, and some observers question the practicality of continuing to haul out all of the garbage that tens of thousands of residents and millions of visitors generate each year. The uncertainty could dump a financial load on park residents as local officials figure out how to tackle garbage in the future.