Bats vs. batteries
In the five years before the iron mine closed for good in 1930, miners hauled 400,000 tons of the world’s finest ore out of Barton Hill. When they left to mine in other Adirondack mountains nearby, Barton Hill’s gutted innards went quiet, got dark and filled with bats.
Tens of thousands of bats.
The conditions inside the closed mine, its long passages still flowing with air, were perfect for hibernating bats, which need a safe place to hang helpless through long Adirondack winters. Even when a strange fungus crept across the ocean and began killing most of New York's bats, the bats in the Barton Hill Mine fared better than most.
The old mine, in the Town of Moriah near the shores of Lake Champlain, is now one of the most important refuges for bats in North America. The Barton Hill hibernaculum, as it’s known, is a winter home to some 50,000 bats, including one of the largest populations of endangered Indiana bats outside of the Midwest. There are more bats in the mine than almost anywhere else in the Northeast.
They may now all be in peril.
Just down the hill, a developer is looking to reopen a pair of mines that closed in the 1970s to create a new hydroelectricity project.
The $300 million project, in effect a giant water battery, would use massive subterranean passages to create electricity by pumping water up
