On a rainy day in June, John and Margot Ernst sat before a roaring fire in their second home in North Hudson. The four-bedroom contemporary house provides spectacular views of Elk Lake and distant High Peaks. On this day, the mountaintops were shrouded in clouds. The Ernsts stepped out on their stone terrace, pointing to the purple lupine that each year has spread down their hillside. A loon called in the mist.
Aside from the 1965 home and a waterfront resort the Ernsts operate down the road, the panorama was perhaps unchanged since John Ernst’s grandfather, Bernard Ernst, admired it over a century earlier. The president of the Society of American Magicians summered on nearby Clear Pond in the early 1900s. It was when Finch Pruyn timber company owned the land and operated hunting and fishing lodgings.
Now, the approximately 12,000 acres is owned by the Ernsts with protections from development. The family was the first to give a conservation easement to the state in 1963. John and Margot Ernst protected the remainder of their land in 2012. There are several developable lots left, but the rest of the Elk Lake shoreline will never see new structures.
“I just wanted to try and freeze it, preserve it,” John Ernst said. “Strange things are happening in the world, and it may not always be going the way you want it, but this place will look the same.”
Many in the Adirondack Park champion John Ernst and his family’s conservation legacy, but his performance as chair of the Adirondack Park Agency this past year has left some deflated.
Environmental groups haven’t seen the push for public hearings or ecological protections they had hoped for from
