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Liberty Central School District has been recognized for the seventh consecutive year as one of the nation’s Best Communities for Music Education, an honor awarded by the NAMM Foundation.

The designation recognizes districts for their commitment to music education based on factors including funding, instructional time, participation rates, facilities and community support. Applications are reviewed and verified by WolfBrown, an independent research and evaluation firm.

“Music education is essential education,” said Eric Aweh, the district’s director of music. “Creativity, discipline and emotional expression as well as cognitive and motor skills are all enhanced through music.”

Students in the district participate in a range of music-related activities throughout the year, including concerts, ensembles, parades and all-county and all-state events. The district also hosted the Sullivan County All-County Music Festival in March. The Liberty Jazz Festival, typically part of the annual lineup, was canceled this year due to weather.

The district’s spring concert series is scheduled to begin May 6 with the Liberty High School Mixed Spring Concert, followed by performances on May 12 and May 14. An elementary concert is set for June 1. All concerts are scheduled for 6:30 p.m. in the high school auditorium. The annual Liberty Music and Community Fest is planned for June 10 at Lapolt Park.

“It is important for schools to foster an understanding — and love — of music in our students,” Superintendent Patrick Sullivan said. “The NAMM Foundation’s continued recognition of our dedication to providing a quality music education where that understanding and love can bloom is appreciated.”

Now in its 27th year, the Best Communities for Music Education program honors districts that demonstrate outstanding achievement in providing access to music education for all students. The NAMM Foundation is a nonprofit supported in part by the National Association of Music Merchants.

>Image: Musicians participate in the annual Sullivan County All County Music Festival at Liberty High School in March 2026. (Liberty Central School District)

The post Liberty Schools Earn National Music Education Honor for Seventh Straight Year appeared first on Radio Catskill.

Sew a quilt. Sing a song. Write a poem. Perform a one-act play. Help fight climate change?

An association of public health professionals met in Lake Placid on Earth Day to explore how the arts can help overcome the disconnect between the science of climate change and the slow pace of political and policy responses to that science. 

Art engages our minds and bodies in ways that science and policy simply cannot, presenters said, and art can serve as a means to engage people in the challenges of climate change that can often feel overwhelming or too big to tackle. 

Pamela Mischen, a professor of environmental studies at SUNY Binghamton, said that after the 2024 election she was dismayed by the lack of discussion of climate change. She wondered if there was a better way to reach people with a message of its importance.

“I realized at that moment climate change wasn’t even on the national scene,” she said. “We need to be more visible and more vocal about climate change.”

Taking inspiration from the AIDS Memorial Quilt, a sprawling community art project that raised awareness of the disease, Mischen sought to enlist crafters in a project instead focused on telling the story of how climate change will impact communities.

“Sometimes it’s hard to see climate change, but we can see quilts,” she said. 

Mischen, who led a sewing workshop during the event, said in the months after the election she and others on campus and the surrounding community made over two dozen quilts with varied designs. She said her goal is to inspire quilters around the country to participate and ultimately produce over 1,000 quilts to be presented at the National Mall on Earth Day 2028. 

“Quilters are getting mad,” she said. 

Mischen cited studies that showed people who experienced the AIDS quilt demonstrated greater empathy towards people who suffered from the disease than those who had not seen the quilts. She said she has been inspired by a rising wave of so-called “craftivism” and that it helps engage people searching for solutions. 

“There is something about this art form that connects people,” she said. 

Susan Harris, climate committee chair of the New York State Public Health Association, organized the event to bring together public health professionals with artists and cultural leaders in the region. 

“We are trying to show there are different ways of communicating climate urgency and the actions we can and need to take,” Harris said. “People disregard the arts as fluff, but they are anything but. Arts are an emotive tool and can move people to action.”

Roger Catania, the former Lake Placid schools superintendent who now serves on the state Board of Regents, shared an update on a new requirement that K-12 schools across the state infuse climate change lessons into their curriculum. Catania said it was ultimately the voice of students that drove the board to adopt the mandate. 

“We weren’t confronting the challenges they knew were happening right now,” he said of students. “They demanded we teach climate change.”  

The requirement to include lessons on the causes, impacts and solutions around climate change at all levels goes into effect for the 2027-2028 school year. The state Education Department will release guidance outlining what that means for schools.

Event attendees and speakers explained the myriad ways the arts can provide new outlets for people to express how they feel about climate change, to inspire action and to overcome helplessness.

That helplessness is the new denialism, Paul Smith’s College Professor Curt Stager said, and is often seeded by incumbent fossil fuel producers. He cited research that a significant share of social media posts about climate gloom and doom are from coordinated bot campaigns seeking to foster those feelings. 

“It’s to get you paralyzed, to feel like it’s too late and not realize your power as a force of nature,” Stager said. “The fossil fuel companies are promoting hopelessness because it’s too hard to deny the science.”

The public will need a lot more convincing to jump on a permit or reservation system for some of the most popular trails in the Adirondack Park, the state learned Wednesday night at a virtual meeting on management recommendations in the High Peaks.

Using data collection that leaned on hikers’ feelings of crowdedness did not cut it for most, who were surprised that the $600,000 visitor use study the state Department of Environmental Conservation commissioned did not include any measurement of, well, the environment.

Commenter Steve Elson said the absence of natural resource impacts in the report was “curious and questionable” and wondered if the survey results would have changed if people were asked to choose between crowds and having access at all.

Even Peter Bauer, former executive director of Protect the Adirondacks and a staunch defender of the park’s forest preserve, thought the evidence was lacking.

“I don’t think this plan gives the DEC a solid foundation to enact new bold, long-term management policies,” he said. 

READ THE REPORT HERE: https://dec.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2026-04/highpeaksvum.pdf

The presentation came a few weeks after the state released the report, which recommends visitor limits, particularly at the Adirondack Mountain Club’s Adirondack Loj Road parking area, the new parking lot at the Mount Van Hoevenberg Mountain Pass Lodge, (which is supposed to have a new trail up to the popular High Peak Cascade) and to the Garden parking lot in Keene Valley.

The DEC is collecting public comments on the recommendations and the report until June 1. More than 85 people attended the virtual meeting on Monday, and 17 people spoke. Most speakers were against any hiker or parking limitations.

“New York state ran an effective ad campaign using my tax dollars,” said one speaker named Chris Rice. “Then they use my tax dollars to study the problem that the ad campaign has created with a supposed increase of visitors to the park, and now you want to restrict my access to my land.”

Rice and others said if there was any permit system in place, it should include an allotment for cancellations and priority to New York state residents. 

A few people expressed frustration with the only permit system in the park at the privately owned Adirondack Mountain Reserve, where a foot traffic easement gives hikers access to many popular High Peaks. Some were surprised that the DEC and its subcontractor did not include any surveys or data collection from that system to inform the report or the recommendations.

Another commenter, Eric Avery, said the AMR system is “onerous” and “favors certain groups of people in certain types of jobs over other types of jobs, namely the service industry.” Many cannot plan to reserve a free parking spot two weeks out, he said.

A commenter, who did not provide his last name, scolded the DEC for not investing in more trail maintenance, noting that the new trail up to Cascade Mountain is eight years late.

Tony Goodwin, renowned in the High Peaks and editor of a popular hiking guide, said he’s watched the “wringing of hands” over surges in use over the last several decades. Goodwin has since become a summit steward on Cascade in his retirement, and he said not one person has ever said they felt crowded when on the summit. 

It’s unclear when the DEC will release any determinations following the comment period completion. Josh Clague, chief of the DEC’s Bureau of Forest Preserve and Conservation, kicked off the meeting saying the report “does not signify DEC’s adoptions.” He said funding availability, ecological and trail assessments and community input will be part of the state’s decision making.

For more information and how to submit comments, go to https://dec.ny.gov/nature/forests-trees/forest-preserve/visitor-use-management/adirondack-high-peaks-kaaterskill-clove#feedback, 

Hoping to soften expected cuts to Medicaid slated to go into effect next year, the Healthcare Coalition of the North Country has proposed a plan to reimagine health care care in New York’s 10 northernmost counties. The proposal aims to protect an estimated 47,000 residents who could lose coverage under upcoming changes to federal law.

The Healthcare Coalition for the North Country, which formed in February 2025, is a nonpolitical, volunteer coalition of 275 active and retired healthcare professionals, caregivers, business and community leaders, Medicaid recipients, and other concerned citizens.

The Challenge: Rural Inefficiency and Federal Cuts

While inspired by pending congressional cuts, the coalition’s plan also addresses pre-existing conditions that have long hampered rural health care. These include expensive, underutilized hospitals, a lack of specialists, and facilities that compete for a limited pool of staff.

The shifts are driven by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that was passed into law last year.

• Supporters of the law state it will reduce waste and encourage workforce participation for able-bodied recipients.
• Detractors argue the new requirements include superfluous paperwork and “red tape” designed to disrupt benefits for legitimate beneficiaries.

To avoid political friction during an election cycle, Congress postponed the effective date of these cuts until after this November’s mid-term elections.

A new model for rural care

The plan would replace small, Medicaid-dependent hospitals that are unlikely to survive congressional cuts with efficient, size-appropriate primary care clinics and on-call caregivers for off-hours emergencies. It also emphasizes telemedicine, sharing of medical records and recruitment of caregivers to the North Country’s health-care deserts.

What started as a Medicaid-specific plan morphed into more of a comprehensive health care model, under the recognition that Medicaid wasn’t the only problem. Along with cutting Medicaid, OBBBA stripped away Covid-era subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, and, driven by escalating medical costs, private insurance has risen to an average of $27,000 for a family of four, leading companies to scale back coverage by relying on high-deductable plans.

“What we’re proposing is to try to build on what we have, which is the hospital clinics and the federally qualified health centers, which have to take all comers, but also are a much more economical way of providing good care, because they’re not 24/7,” said Christopher Hoy, a Glens Falls physician. “Nine of our 15 hospitals are these critical-access hospitals with 25 beds or less that are at high risk of closing. They’re also very expensive because they’re 24/7 and they require lab testing and emergency rooms and X-rays and all kinds of other services that they may, in fact, not utilize that much.” 

With the cost savings, the region’s surviving hospitals might be able to do more.

“If we’re lucky, out of this will come strengthening of those hospitals with more services, including more pediatric services, more OB GYN services and more specialty care, perhaps,” Hoy said. “In the meantime, we’re trying to design a system where the supply of clinic visits is appropriate to what the town or village needs.”

The plan is in the initial phases of being discussed with existing care networks, as well as the state. Building the network would require collaboration among five hospital systems, three federally qualified health centers and 15 hospitals.

The ‘safety net’ and federal funding

The plan would build a “safety net” of existing primary care providers, urgent care centers, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and hospital clinics that would provide care to everyone, regardless of income or insurance. 

The proposal seeks to utilize a new federal source: the Rural Health Transformation Program. This $212 million fund is designed to reward innovative care models consistent with the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

While this funding represents only a fraction of the total Medicaid cuts, Dr. John Rugge, a founder of the coalition, believes it is a necessary step toward preserving access.

“Americans want accessibility, affordability, and peace of mind,” Hoy said. “And you don’t get peace of mind if you don’t have a safety net.”

In northeastern Pennsylvania, a growing debate over data centers is drawing attention from residents concerned about how development could reshape their communities.

“I grew up around the scars,” said Brian Wrightson, a rural broadband specialist from Archbald.

Wrightson recently spoke with Radio Catskill after reading reporting on proposed data center projects in the region. He is also running for Pennsylvania State Senate in District 40—a point he disclosed during the interview—but said his concerns come from his experience living and working in the area.

Lessons 

For Wrightson, the issue is personal—and historical.

He describes a region still marked by the legacy of the anthracite coal industry, where economic growth once came at a lasting environmental cost.

“I could drive around pretty much any part of northeastern Pennsylvania… and see the scars,” he said.

He remembers waterways that were once heavily polluted, later restored through years of cleanup.

“But those scars are still here,” he said.

That history, he says, should guide how communities approach new large-scale development.

Industry on the rise

Data centers—the facilities that power streaming, cloud computing and artificial intelligence—are expanding rapidly.

Wrightson says their growth is unavoidable.

“Data centers are coming. They’re definitely coming,” he said.

But he says the speed and scale of that growth raise questions about long-term impacts—especially on land, water and infrastructure.

Across the Delaware River Basin, dozens of data centers are already active or proposed, and the region’s location between major metro areas makes it a likely target for more.

Who decides where they go

For Wrightson, the central issue is local control.

“If you come into my neighborhood, it’s on my terms,” he said.

He argues that large facilities should not be placed near residential areas and should instead be sited in locations that minimize disruption.

“They should never be placed next to residential communities,” he said.

He also questions whether the economic benefits often highlighted—like tax revenue—will outweigh the costs for the people who live nearby.

Calls to slow the process

Wrightson is among those calling for a pause in new development.

“I truly believe that the state itself needs to put a moratorium… even for one year,” he said.

He says that would give municipalities time to update zoning laws, coordinate regionally and prepare for potential impacts.

Without that, he worries development could spread quickly, putting pressure on natural resources and changing the character of local communities.

The post Residents Raise Concerns As Data Centers Expand In Northeastern Pennsylvania appeared first on Radio Catskill.

A trio of longstanding water infrastructure problems across the Adirondack Park are gradually moving toward solutions, though town leaders continue to call for more support from state officials.

Elizabethtown expects to advance engineering designs for its planned new public sewer system this year. Tupper Lake is on the verge of testing well sites and locating a new treatment plant. And a task force in Ticonderoga is exploring options it hopes will allow a wilderness pond to continue being used as a water source for a pocket of residents around Eagle Lake. 

For years, leaders of all three towns have sought to address core water issues that stymie economic growth and threaten public and environmental health. Tupper Lake and Ticonderoga are both under standing orders to move away from surface water drinking sources — or adopt costly treatment technologies — while Elizabethtown has long considered establishing a municipal sewer system, the only county seat in the state without one.

While still far from sure things, community leaders are growing more hopeful they may be closer than ever to finding long-term solutions to the persistent challenges. Adirondack projects are seeking tens of millions of dollars to rehab public drinking and wastewater systems, and some communities are banking grant wins and dollars. 

Building a $38 million project in Elizabethtown

Elizabethtown Supervisor Cathleen Reusser is taking every chance she can to explain her town’s need for public sewers to state officials.

During a recent visit to Albany, she met with Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Amanda Lefton and briefly pitched the project to Gov. Kathy Hochul at an event. Reusser later hosted a meeting with staff from DEC and the Environmental Facilities Corporation (EFC), resulting in suggestions for ways Elizabethtown could bolster its chances at future state dollars. 

A $500,000 grant from the Northern Border Regional Commission along with $125,000 of the town’s money will support more detailed engineering plans, which could in turn boost the town’s state grant scores. The town recently signed a contract for the engineering plans, which Reusser said would take most of the year to complete.

The plan is to establish a wastewater treatment plant on town land near a public golf course and run sewers in a new sewer district comprising much of the hamlet.   

“I’m feeling very optimistic about this,” Reusser said.

The project, which also includes decommissioning current septic systems, is estimated to cost around $38 million. Elizabethtown in recent years has unsuccessfully applied for EFC funding, conducting a door-to-door income survey and stream water sampling to improve its chances. 

Reusser said she doesn’t think residents of the sewer districts — shown through the income survey to have median household income of less than $35,000 — should have to shoulder the cost burden of building the system. She said she hoped to build a financing package through state funding and a mix of other grant programs, as well as payments from the system’s largest users. 

“It is very loudly stated that those folks can’t afford a lot,” Reusser said. “Operations and maintenance is the only thing you can realistically put on those household ratepayers.” 

Reusser said the town was gaining momentum for the sewer project but there were still a lot of details to work out.

“This is still not a for-sure project,” she said. “But I think we have done a great job of painting the picture of a disadvantaged community and the absolute necessity of this project for the health and wellness of the tributaries to the Boquet River and ultimately the health of Lake Champlain.”

Fixing brown water in Tupper Lake

Tupper Lake is also pursuing a major infrastructure project to move its drinking water supply completely to groundwater sources and resolve a persistent problem with browning and discoloration caused by high levels of iron and manganese.

Like many other communities, Tupper Lake was ordered to move from surface water to groundwater sources but has struggled to fully replace its previous sources with reliable wells.

The community, which still gets about one-third of its water supply from Simond Pond, explored both options, said village mayor Mary Fontana, but determined a new treatment plant and a third well was the best option. 

“Groundwater is the most sustainable and affordable option for the community,” Fontana said. 

Tupper Lake has also struggled to win the state funding its leaders say are needed to make the project work. State lawmakers have raised Tupper Lake’s challenges specifically with state officials during public hearings. Fontana said she continues to make the case that it should be a priority for the state.

“I think supplying clean drinking water to a rural community in the Adirondack Park should be at the top of that list,” Fontana said.

Residents have been deeply frustrated by the discoloration that has persisted since switching to groundwater wells, regularly posting pictures on social media of brownish water filling drinking glasses and bathtubs. 

Fontana called the results of a pilot test last year of the proposed water treatment technology “remarkable.” The idea is to use a special filtration system to target the iron and manganese that are causing browning of the water.

“We will be able to treat the water and deliver clean, clear water to our customers,” she said. 

Solving a decades-long problem in Ticonderoga

Jim O’Bryan took the reins as Ticonderoga town supervisor at the beginning of the year, with hopes of solving a problem that has stymied town leaders for decades. He wants to find a solution that keeps Gooseneck Pond in the Pharoah Lake Wilderness as a viable drinking water source for residents in Chilson and Eagle Lake, as well as eventually for the town.

“This has been an issue for the town for 34 years,” O’Bryan said. “One of my goals was to hopefully solve it.”

O’Bryan established a task force charged with evaluating options. He said he hopes to move toward a plan to set up a new water district for Eagle Lake residents, while finding a viable treatment option at Gooseneck that will pass muster with regulators. 

Alternatively, the town is using state funds to study potential wellfield sites that could also supply Eagle Lake residents with a drinking source. He said an engineer that specializes in ultraviolet filtration will meet with the task force in the coming weeks.

“There are very few waters you will find in the Adirondacks with as clean of water as Gooseneck,” O’Bryan said.

He said he hoped in the long term they could also find a way to send water downhill from Gooseneck to Ticonderogra to mix with the town’s existing well sources to help reduce that water’s hardness.

For other communities, success comes slowly

For seven straight years, Lake Luzerne applied for a $1.5 million grant from EFC to upgrade its aging drinking water system. Last year it asked for $1.75 million to account for rising costs. 

Every request was rejected.

“We get the same form letter,” said Jim Niles, who took over as Lake Luzerne supervisor earlier this year. “It says your application was excellent, but we didn’t have enough funding to get to you. It’s been kind of disappointing.”

Niles said after several years of sending in the same application, Lake Luzerne started to make more tweaks in recent years, hoping more details would improve its chances — still to no avail.

“If we keep striking out on some of these grants, at some point we are going to have to borrow some money,” Niles said. “We can’t keep kicking the can down the road.”

But the village recently landed a federal grant to cover similar needs, thanks to U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik. Niles said those funds will support upgrading old water storage and distribution lines. There’s still more work to do, he said.

“Our whole system is old,” Niles said. 

In Bloomingdale, the Town of St. Armand recently landed a $5 million grant and over $5 million in interest-free financing to replace its drinking water treatment plant, specifically to address the threat of PFOAs, commonly known as “forever chemicals.” 

Supervisor Davina Thurston said the community’s water is not in violation of the current regulatory standard for PFOAs, commonly known as “forever chemicals,” but could in the future as those thresholds are expected to be lowered. 

“My whole focus is to get as much grant funds as humanly possible so that our ratepayers are not given the brunt of these expenses,” she said.

Town leaders also argued that water infrastructure projects are fundamental to housing challenges — a tie Hochul is seeking to make with new water funding in her proposed budget. The final budget remained under negotiations as of Thursday, but Hochul originally proposed $50 million in new water spending earmarked for projects connected to housing preservation in small rural communities.

“There is no doubt in my mind that these projects are critical for affordable housing,” Thurston said.

The town of Jay in the eastern Adirondacks is becoming a hot spot, in more ways than one.

After years of unsuccessfully trying to convince carriers that the hamlet of Au Sable Forks and much of the Ausable River Valley is a communications dead zone, the town, in conjunction with the Essex County IT department and the Lake Champlain Regional Planning Board, has worked out a hack that basically turns the town’s three hamlets into wifi hotspots.

“I got sick of beating my head against the wall with Verizon,” said Jay Supervisor Matt Stanley.  “And it’s tough for a for-profit company, which Verizon is, to come in and make profit in a town of 2,500 people. I can’t control that. I can control our public Wi-Fi network, and if you’re driving through the area and your cell phone’s not working, you’ll be able to stop in the town of Jay and have Wi-Fi everywhere.”

“Stopping” is key. Three thousand cars pass through Au Sable Forks on any given day, a share of which are traveling from the northeast—Plattsburgh, Montreal, Vermont—to recreate in the Adirondack Park. And typically, they zip right through.

Jay advocates hope motorists will stop to connect. Right now, there are three spheres of public Wi-Fi in Au Sable Forks: the Community Center, Grove Road park and Riverside Park next to the Tops supermarket.

“Once you connect your phone, no matter which one you go to, it’s all got the same wireless network, so your phone automatically recognizes it and jumps right on,” Stanley said. “If you’re in a pinch and you need to make a call, go down where the rivers meet.”

The town plans to build out the system from there.

Adding a visitor center, EV chargers

The Ausable River Valley Business Association, in conjunction with the town and the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism (ROOST), is opening a visitor center on the ground floor of the Tahawus Cultural Center in Au Sable Forks.

“From my perspective the visitors center will liven up Main Street by bringing a vacant store front to life, where we can help promote our region and area activities, along with our businesses,” said ARVBA President Knut Sauer. “It will help us tell the story of the Ausable River Valley—our businesses, our people, our natural beauty, and our opportunities. We’re thrilled to be opening our doors and to welcome a part‑time manager who will help us make this a vibrant and helpful hub for everyone who stops by.”

The town is also adding electric vehicle chargers in Jay and Upper Jay, where kiosks will tell the story of Jay—although again, the ubiquitous QR codes that provide further information will have to wait until there is Wi-Fi.

A game-changing moment for Jay

The utility of Wi-Fi, and its importance in the modern world, can manifest in interesting ways.

At a meeting in Upper Jay with the Adirondack Innovation Initiative (A2i) in mid-March, Stanley told the tech-savvy crowd that when the ice jam on the East Branch of the Ausable River broke, Stanley was in Florida, where his daughters attend school. No matter.

“I was able to watch the flooding, communicate with all the emergency personnel and declare a state of emergency from Florida while I was down there for parents’ weekend,” Stanley said. “And that’s all because of the tech side of stuff that we can do.”

To spread the signal through the hamlet, the town will beam signal from one utility pole to another by way of small-cell nodes.

A fiber installed by the Development Authority of the North Country on the east side of the East Branch will carry signal to the covered bridge in the hamlet of Jay and then on to Upper Jay. There won’t be push notifications alerting motorists to Wi-Fi’s availability, so the town will depend on signage to spread the word.

“The more reasons we can get people to stop and get out of their car in the town of Jay, the better it is going to be for us to create tourism and economic development for our town,” Stanley said. “This is, in my opinion, a pilot program that, once people can see what we’re doing, can be a model for other rural communities.”

Take a step back and consider that the guiding force behind perhaps the greatest economic engine in the Adirondacks this decade has a meager $175,000 annual operating budget, gets half its money from donations and has one full-time employee who is only grant-funded for two more years. Not to mention that a quarter of its budget goes to pay for portable toilets.

This would be the nonprofit Adirondack Rail Trail Association (ARTA), which was officially incorporated in 2012. Unofficially, the association came to be during the debate over the rail corridor running between Lake Placid and the Town of Remson outside the southwestern rim of the park.

The debate focused on whether the railbed was best used for a scenic railroad or a multiuse trail. In the end, the state did both, fixing up the track between Remsen and Tupper Lake and tearing it out between Tupper Lake and Lake Placid.

After successfully advocating for a trail, ARTA pivoted to become a friends group and a liaison between the state, which was building and maintaining the trail, and the communities that the trail would impact.

“In order for the rail trail to be the successful economic development engine that everybody foresaw, you needed more than just a trail,” said Julia Goren, executive director of ARTA. “You need a way for people to navigate off the trail, to get into downtown areas to spend money, to get back on the trail, to find a place to stay and to have information about the amenities that would make the trail really appealing.”

The final phase of the rail trail was completed in the fall of 2025, which shifted the focus from construction to making the trail a “transformational asset for these communities,” she said.

That isn’t as straightforward a mission as it might sound. The rail trail is actually part of the Adirondack Forest Preserve, which means that, for example, signs pointing the way to local businesses are prohibited. As such, the rules are understandable—it would be no more appropriate than a sign advertising a lunch counter on Mount Marcy, Goren said.

Nor can the state be seen as being partial to one business or another, so it falls on ARTA to work with the towns to develop commerce-related corridors off the trail into their communities. Instead of service signs on the trail or adjacent parking lots (the state corridor is 100 feet wide), ARTA relies on maps that show local business, and soon the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism (ROOST) will have an app doing the same.

Even though the full trail has yet to log a full season, the numbers are already indicative of the trail’s economic potential. While in the planning stages, the state estimated the trail might attract 80,000 users. ARTA believed it could be far more than that, and as the Adirondack Rail Trail prepares for its first full season of end-to-end use, its own estimates of 330,000 users looks solid.

The traffic has already had a demonstrable impact. When Canadians boycotted U.S. travel last year due to unfavorable trade policy and derogatory comments emanating from Washington, it looked  to be a bad year for tourism, particularly for counties such as Franklin that share a border with Canada. But tourism held steady, which local officials attributed to the rail trail.

To establish a baseline, ARTA will work with Franklin County tourism officials and SUNY-ESF this summer to start quantifying the economic impact of the trail. That will allow officials to track growth over time in metrics such as sales taxes.

“My expectation is that there will be substantial economic benefit, however you have to be intentional about making that happen,” Goren said. “Like right now in Saranac Lake, if you are from another area and you are riding on the rail trail, there is no way for you to know that a block and a half away, you can have a meal, you can see a play, you can get your bike repaired, or you can get gas for your snowmobile, or you can go shopping or buy a painting. There’s no way for those folks to know that, and this is where I think ARTA is so critically important.”

Economics, of course, are only part of the equation. Goren said the trail has been surprisingly popular with the community as well, from kids riding to get ice cream to grown ups commuting to work, to people hauling a bike that hasn’t been used in years out of the garage. There are runners and dog walkers and birders. There are people in wheelchairs. The trail is a cross-section of people, and also a cross-section of the park. 

“It’s a microcosm of what makes the Adirondack Park special because you get to experience the hamlets, and the backyards of  people living in the park, as well as the wilderness and Wild Forest,” Goren said. “You go right past the St. Regis canoe wilderness, and you get these really distinct and very different ecosystems like a boreal swamp, or a northern Tamarack swamp.” 

The health benefits, while difficult to quantify, seem obvious, and the trail, smooth and flat, is accessible to all. But perhaps most important of all, it is making thousands of people happy.

“If you are out on the rail trail on a nice day you can feel it, because people are smiling, they’re happy, they’re saying hello and they’re engaging with people,” Goren said.

For a small-budget nonprofit with one staff member that relies heavily on donations and volunteers, it is hard to imagine a better return on the dollar than that.

This story was collected as part of OurStoryBridge Listens: Present in the Moment, a new, non-partisan Partner Project by OurStoryBridge Inc.

A long-awaited consultant report on High Peaks visitor use proposes curtailing hiker access at key launching points into the High Peaks Wilderness during the region’s busiest trail days.

The report summarizes years of study of how to best manage visitor use of the High Peaks, where hikers, park advocates and land managers have all fretted over the negative impacts of high use, particularly during summer and fall weekends. That high use can diminish the wilderness experience codified in the Adirondack State Land Master Plan, harm the mountains’ sensitive ecosystems, strain trail infrastructure and increase the risks to hiker safety, according to researchers and park advocates.

The report’s recommendations — which are now up to the state Department of Environmental Conservation to adopt or reject — call for a broad emphasis on education and ongoing monitoring. But it also proposes limits on the number of daily visitors to three popular areas of the High Peaks: Adirondack Loj in North Elba, Cascade Mountain and the Garden trailhead in Keene. The proposal suggests managing trail use with parking restrictions and, potentially, a hiker permitting system.

The report finds that the Adirondak Loj and South Meadows trailheads, the most used access point in the High Peaks, can sustain about 400 visitors per day “without unacceptable impacts to visitors’ wilderness experience, park and partner operations and public safety.” 

A study of daily visitor use in the High Peaks conducted in summer 2023 as part of the broader work culminating in the new summary report identified around 15 days where daily use was estimated to exceed the 400-person threshold, often by more than 100 hikers. On most days, visitor use falls well below 400, but during popular weekend days in August and September, usage approached nearly double that level. 

The report proposes restricting daily visitors on the Cascade Mountain trail, one of the most popular and accessible trails in the park, to 240 visitors per day. The 2023 study identified about a dozen days when usage exceeded that level, reaching as high as 450 visitors on the busiest days. 

“Current levels of visitor use on weekend days and holidays during the summer season create parking, traffic circulation, crowding, and public safety issues,” according to the report.

The report recommends 2026 as a planning and public outreach year ahead of implementing the visitor limitations in 2027. It also outlines a long-term monitoring plan to continue tracking High Peak trail use and to refine use limits. The plan calls for measuring the number of people on a particular mountain summit, the frequency of encountering other hikers on trails and vehicle traffic at key parking locations. 

The state and the private Adirondack Mountain Reserve in Keene in recent years have been testing a parking reservation system in an effort to control usage at a separate gateway to the High Peaks.

In a statement on Friday, state officials highlighted that the report’s release “did not signify DEC adoption of the recommendations,” calling it “one set of tools and recommendations that DEC will utilize in future land management decision making.”

The Adirondack Mountain Club, which owns and manages the parking lot and trailhead at the Adirondak Loj, in a statement on Friday applauded the release of the report and called it a “first step” in developing a visitor use management strategy for the area.

In the statement, ADK Executive Director Cortney Koenig Worrall emphasized the importance of strengthening public education and infrastructure in managing visitor use, calling hiker permits a “last resort.”

“ADK remains committed to ensuring access to the High Peaks Wilderness for all people,” Worrall said. “Although the report recommends permits as an option for the High Peaks Wilderness, permits are the management tool of last resort. Education, infrastructure, and staffing are the only first management tools, and these elements have not been fully implemented to date.”

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ITHACA, N.Y. — About six transgender rights demonstrators braved a thunderstorm as they briefly blocked rush hour traffic to march down Seneca Street late Tuesday afternoon.

The demonstration coincides with International Transgender Day of Visibility, which is held annually to raise awareness of discrimination and violence against transgender people.

The demonstrators, some wearing the colors of the transgender flag under their umbrellas, seemed equally unfazed by the torrential rain and lightning as they did by the honks of some frustrated drivers. 

A demonstrator with a bull horn led the small group in chants as they set off from The Commons around 5:30 p.m. The event was organized by the Queer Anarchy Collective, a recently formed local activist and community group.

Legislation targeted at the trans community has seen an uptick during the second Trump Administration. More than half of U.S. states have passed laws banning some kinds of gender affirming care. A recent law in Kansas immediately invalidated identification documents for people whose gender marker does not match their sex assigned at birth.

Transgender people are more than four times more likely to be the target of violent crime compared to cisgender people, according to a study by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles. The disparity is even greater for trans people of color.

On Tuesday evening, at least five Ithaca Police Department vehicles were on hand to direct traffic along Seneca Street. The group of demonstrators was able to block all lanes of traffic for at least part of their march, which appeared to continue at least until Meadow Street.

At several points, the driver of a silver pickup truck revved his engine loudly and briefly appeared poised to rush at the small group. The driver eventually turned off of Seneca Street, but not before driving past the group loudly a second time.

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