History, Natural History & the Arts
Lake George’s network of navigation buoys represents one of the lake’s most important safety systems, guiding thousands of boaters around hidden hazards every boating season.
From the main lake to the Narrows, buoys mark underwater rocks, shoals, channels and speed zones, helping boaters safely navigate one of New York’s most beautiful — and deceptively challenging — lakes. [Read more…] about Silent Sentinels: Lake George Navigation Buoys
Inside the Blue Line of the Adirondack Park, only John Brown’s Farm and the Crown Point ruins are managed by the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (State Parks). All other public lands and amenities – camp grounds, picnic areas, hiking trails and lean-tos, camping islands – fall under the supervision of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).
Wint Aldrich, a Deputy Commissioner for Historic Preservation at Parks through four administrations, once explained that anomaly to me. “The Conservation Department [precursor to DEC] didn’t want Robert Moses anywhere near the Forest Preserve,” Aldrich said. [Read more…] about Robert Moses’ Lake George Park Commission Opposition Began his Downfall
Lake Champlain’s Four Brothers Islands, an eighteen-acre archipelago owned by the Nature Conservancy and located two miles east of Willsboro Point, are home to the only nesting colony of Double-crested Cormorants in New York State. [Read more…] about Cormorants on Lake Champlain and Lake George
Once established, it is impossible to control the spread of the spiny water flea, an aquatic invasive zooplankton native to Eurasia that can alter the food webs of freshwater lakes.
In 2012, the invasive was found in Lake George, having already been detected in Great Sacandaga Lake, the Champlain Canal and the Glens Falls Feeder Canal. [Read more…] about Spiny Water Flea: The Ups and Downs of a Lake George Invasive Species
Before Adirondack conservation leader Paul Schaefer began to organize his coalitions and, after a titanic ten year struggle, finally defeat through public referendum proposed big dams on the South Branch of the Moose River and elsewhere (1945-1955), Paul’s mentor John S. Apperson (often known as Appy) was waging another, longer, but less well known struggle concerning an actual, late 19th wooden and early 20th century concrete dam at the outlet of Lake George, built to power pulp, paper, and other mills in Ticonderoga, and to float logs down to those mills. [Read more…] about John Apperson’s Battle To Protect Lake George’s Islands
Rather than a reprieve, “it was a shot in the gut,” said Lake George Waterkeeper Chris Navitsky. On June 28, State Supreme Court Justice Robert J. Muller lifted a temporary restraining order preventing the Lake George Park Commission from treating Eurasian milfoil with the herbicide ProcellaCOR on two bays on northern Lake George.
Less than 24 hours later, on Saturday, June 29, roughly nine gallons of the herbicide were poured into the two bays, the first time a chemical has been used to treat invasive plants or animals in Lake George. [Read more…] about Lake Gorge Park Commission Dumps Herbicide into “Queen of American Lakes”
Through September, the Lake George Park Commission’s boat inspectors have surveyed more than 35,000 boaters and vessels, placing 2023 on track to become the inspection program’s busiest year since New York State established it nearly ten years ago.
According to Justin Luyk, who supervises the program, trailered motorboats are the primary vectors for the spread of aquatic invasive species and nearly 500,000 of them are registered in New York State alone. [Read more…] about Lake George Boat Inspection Program Having Busiest Year Yet
For more than 25 years, historian Russ Bellico and the leaders of the Lake George Battlefield Alliance, including the late archaeologist David Starbuck, argued that grounds as historically rich and as hallowed as the head of Lake George deserve a visitors’ interpretive center.
Now we have one. [Read more…] about The Battlefield Visitor Center: Lake George’s Newest Attraction
The gates at the Mossy Point and Rogers Rock Boat Launches on Lake George will be closed overnight this boating season as part of the Lake George Park Commission’s (LGPC) Boat Inspection Program and DEC’s efforts to prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species. [Read more…] about Lake George Boat Launches Being Gated Overnight
Governor Al Smith helped block the construction of a highway along the shore of Tongue Mountain, but it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who was instrumental in protecting the east shore of Lake George, documents in the Apperson-Schaefer collection at the Kelly Adirondack Center at Union College in Schenectady suggest.
With funding from the bond acts of 1916 and 1926, much of Tongue Mountain and many of the islands in the Narrows were now protected, permanently, as parts of the Adirondack Forest Preserve.
But by 1926, John Apperson, the General Electric engineer who dedicated much of his life to the protection of Lake George, had become concerned about the future of the east side. [Read more…] about Adirondack Environmental History Going Online
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