It was an 80-degree Friday in June and Richard Goldmann was trying to enjoy his day off. The anesthesiologist from Poughkeepsie planned to ride the Warren County Bike Trail with his wife Jill. That was before his bike was stolen.
In one last ditch effort to enjoy the outdoors, the Goldmanns drove to a dead-end street in the village of Lake George. A green-and-yellow sign tacked to the back of a stop sign pointed to their destination. They parked at a gravel pulloff, climbed stairs to a bridge over the Adirondack Northway and hiked Prospect Mountain.
“The views from the top are very nice,” Richard Goldmann said, but the trail itself was “very eroded … a goner.” Jill Goldmann said it looked like someone had diverted the worst parts. Her husband thought it was hikers creating herd paths. Rather than returning on the worn woods floor, they walked along the paved Prospect Mountain Veterans Memorial Highway. The Goldmanns weren’t the only ones astounded by the trail the state has called “hazardous to hikers.”
On a July day, a hiker worried about another breaking his ankles on the marked trail up the mountain’s rocky riverbed. He recommended they try the unmarked herd path. Others took the diversion.
The trail these visitors found was lacking the kind of care intended by state leaders for decades, one of numerous cases of poor maintenance hikers might find throughout the Adirondack Park.
A months-long investigation by the Explorer found vast tracts of forests, waterways and mountains have been shortchanged by a state government ill-equipped to complete an enormous responsibility.
To build safeguards in its use, state government was charged a half century ago with creating “unit management plans (UMPs).” Environmental guardians, including at least one governor, considered them essential and demanded their completion in five years.
But almost 25 years since former Gov. George Pataki made that charge, nearly a third of the state-owned lands and waters in the largest park in the continental United States are missing these bylaws to protect its vulnerable ecosystems and dictate recreational opportunities.
