The ground beneath the once-flooded Duck Hole in the High Peaks Wilderness was soft underfoot and teeming with life.
Monarch butterflies fluttered among summer flowers. Mosses, bog plants, grasses, shrubs and early succession trees carpeted the wide basin ringed by McNaughton, Panther and Seymour mountains. First-generation evergreen saplings sat low in a shady tangle, the tallest rising only five or six feet. Birds darted from branch to branch.
More than a decade after Duck Hole Dam crumbled during Tropical Storm Irene, draining the old logging pond populated by otters, loons and brook trout, a storied stop on the Northville-Placid Trail, the landscape has emerged as an open meadow, a bog and a fledgling forest in the heart of the High Peaks.
Guide and educator Matt Burnett first visited Duck Hole as a teenager during a North Country Community College outdoor leadership trip, and for years he helped patrol the area as an assistant forest ranger. He remembered his sister catching an 18-inch brook trout in the former pond and stories of his grandpa landing a floatplane there.
He returned last August leading a group of high school students from Upper Works trailhead along the Cold River to Long Lake. A couple of journalists from the Adirondack Explorer tagged along.
“It doesn’t seem like something is dying,” Burnett said as he took in the new
