ROADLESS AREAS - Part II

10 December 2009

Our objective was to document the good and the bad: recent victories for the biotic health of the Park, like the preservation of large parcels of land, and scars, like ATV damage and logging devastation. As an artist, my goal is always to make compelling images of issues that will motivate the viewer to question said issues, as well as her involvement. And why do we care about some ATV damage and logging scars?

Glad you asked.

The ball we live on is a big complex machine with many necessary moving parts that contribute to its doing what we need it to do for us to live on it. Large wild spaces: clean the air and water, produce oxygen, provide a home for the animals, which in turn perform a vital role in propagating that life system.

Unsustainable logging/ATV damage fragments the system, introduces invasive species - which usually crowd out the more fragile native species (already weakened by the loss of their habitat), and promotes erosion (loss of topsoil, water pollution, stream silting, lost fish habitat, no fish link in the food chain, etc).

So this stuff is important.

The wind, which had sped us along on the way up, now made our jobs difficult. With the hazy winter light, only certain angles work to produce good images, and as soon as Bob positioned the plane, the wind blew us away, and made getting back to that spot slow, and things happen very quickly in the air anyway.

Ultimately it was a very successful day. Cloudy light can ultimately produce some wonderful results if it lights the areas you want, leaving others darker, but it can do the opposite as well. Sometimes we wait for clouds to move and illuminate, other times we compromise, knowing we have deadlines imposed by fuel, weather and darkness.

Dropping John off in Saranac Lake, we comment on the large hangar that Citibank built so its CEO could park the company jet out of the elements when he came up to his retreat in the Adirondacks, and I reflect on the fact that it must belong to us since we bailed out Citi for just this sort of foolishness. And you can be sure that retired mogul is living large on our largesse. No need to mention his name.

ROADLESS AREAS

7 December 2009

The Adirondack Council has taken upon itself the Herculean task of trying to document the ATV damage to roadless areas in the Adirondacks Park. Surprisingly, after being in New York for so many years, only recently have I become familiar with this magical space. My first adventure was with the Northeast Wilderness Trust in an effort to save a large parcel of land from development on the Canadian border, ensuring connectivity between the Adirondacks and northern forests.

The Adirondacks is a mixture of public and private lands, set up as a park in 1892, after Verplanck Colvin proposed a bill to the legislature.

In the summer of 2008, at a friend’s suggestion, I flew with Lighthawk to shoot the old industrial scars in the park. This fall, I took a group of students into those same sites on the ground. I’m always game to take up sword against windmill, so with Bob Keller, Lighthawk’s indomitable environmental aviator, and John Davis from the Council, we lofted into the wild blue. On these projects, one is always throwing dice with the weather, and we had been trying to do this for a year, only to be clouded out at the last minute each time. This was no exception, and in a call the night before, Bob had expressed concern that an approaching weather front might trap us in the high peaks. Since I had to take a dawn train from NYC to Schenectady to meet him, mine was the longest trip of the day. But given the three previous aborted efforts, I prevailed that we should take the gamble, and we agreed that if his morning weather check sounded ominous, he could call me and I would just detrain and go back to NYC.

When we rendezvoused, the weather looked hazy-to-cloudy and the front was still in southern NJ, so we decided to move with dispatch, and bypass the paper mill nearby on which I had set my heart of adding to my collection.

It was a windy day, but in this case on our rear quarter, so we were quick getting up to Saranac Lake to get John, where we conferred on objectives and route, and groused about the weather. I’m just the idiot picture maker in the gang, and both of them knew the area, so this was their department. After a final bathroom pit-stop, we boarded, straightened out all gear, and took off. Bob, with whom I have flown many similar missions, and who keeps an immaculate plane, had recently burned a flat spot on his tire, which leads to slightly bumpy take-offs and landings, so I took great pleasure in teasing him about it through the day.

Adirondack high peaks (note the striated air pollution)