Political conflicts and bureaucratic infighting have delayed the development of plans governing the use of state-owned land, despite the fact that such plans were originally mandated twenty-seven years ago in the Adirondack Park Agency Act. This failure to enact Unit Management Plans has resulted in widespread environmental damage from recreational overuse. Record-breaking numbers of visitors to the eastern High Peaks has forced the state to close the woods to backpackers. During one recent fall weekend 816 people signed the register at one High Peaks trailhead, and 300 cars were parked along the roadway between exit 30 on Interstate 87 and Keene Valley. view draft of High Peaks Management Plan
Some of the greatest threats to the Adirondack Park come from outside the Park's boundaries. One of the first reports on acid rain in the Adirondacks in the mid-1970s came from Bill Marleau, a New York State Forest Ranger. Marleau was not a trained scientist, but he grew up and spent much of his life working, fishing, hunting, and camping in the Big Moose area. Over the years he noticed an ominous collapse in the fish population of Big Moose Lake and found the same situation in the surrounding ponds and lakes. Located in the western Adirondacks, Big Moose Lake is on the first high ground hit by the prevailing winds from the mid-west, and is especially vulnerable to pollutants carried eastward from high sulfur coal burning electric generating plants in the Ohio Valley. Bill Marleau's intimate relationship with Big Moose Lake made him as sensitive to the changes in the lake's ecosystem as any scientific instrument.
With its mixture of public and private lands, the Park is a living laboratory for wilderness preservation in a world which can only afford to keep a small number of wild places off limits to human communities. Adirondack residents chronically lag behind the rest of New York State in income, employment, health care, and education. The Adirondack Park contains the largest wilderness in the United States east of the Mississippi River, but for this great experiment to succeed human communities as well as the natural environment must survive and prosper.
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