Don Wharton, an Adirondack Life contributor since 1979 and author of Backwoods Tales: Adirondack Reader and Adirondack Forest and Steam: An Out-doorsman’s Reader, worked as a forester in Essex, Hamilton and northern Fulton Counties and spent a lifetime fishing and hunting in the backcountry. We asked him to share some of his more memorable mishaps.
In the Line of Fire
About 1970, we were building a logging road in the town of Bleecker, Fulton County. The road originally connected Bleecker with Warner Hill overlooking Great Sacandaga Lake. At the time, beech bark disease was ravaging beech trees in many parts of the Adirondacks and in that area about 30 percent of the beech were either dead or dying. In some places large beech lay crisscrossed on the ground. The road was needed to salvage the diseased trees.
The road was nearly
