How is Adirondack hiker traffic being managed? What more should be done?

If you want to hike from the Adirondack Loj or the Garden, which are two of the most popular trailheads in the park, you might need to get there...

If you want to hike from the Adirondack Loj or the Garden, which are two of the most popular trailheads in the park, you might need to get there by 5 a.m. on the weekends. As more people come to hike and camp in the Adirondacks, the state has tried new tactics to manage the uptick in traffic.

The Adirondack Explorer and the Adirondack Mountain Club are hosting a panel discussion Wednesday evening about hiker management in High Peaks. The Explorer’s Gwendolyn Craig has been reporting on the issue and what experts say is missing from the park’s management strategy.

Emily RussellHow is Adirondack hiker traffic being managed? What more should be done?

A crowded summit on Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondack High Peaks in late September 2020. Photo: Emily Russell
A crowded summit on Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondack High Peaks in late September 2020. Photo: Emily Russell

The panel discussion, which is free and open to the public, is Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the High Peaks Information Center. The Adirondack Explorer says the discussion will be recorded and later posted online.

EMILY RUSSELL: Can you start just by defining the issue that hiker management in the Adirondacks is meant to solve? I mean, you know, not every trail and not every parking lot and the park is super busy.

GWENDOLYN CRAIG: Right. So the state has sort of identified the High Peaks region to be the point of concern. We're seeing a lot of traffic in the Keene valley to Lake Placid area on Route 73, where it's not all the High Peaks, but a great number of them are accessible off trails on that offshoot. And there's concern that especially ones like Cascade or hikes accessed from the Adirondack Mountain Reserve, which is kind of in that St. Hubert's area on the Ausable, those are some of the areas where they're looking at.

RUSSELL: There have been a few different management strategies put in place. There's a reservation system at the Adirondack Mountain Reserve, and a hiker shuttle in the High Peaks. I know it's still early, but do we have any sense about what kind of effects those things are having on the high peaks?

CRAIG: We haven't seen any reports specifically, we've just had one year so far of the reservation system at the Adirondack Mountain Reserve, we are in year two. The state and the Adirondack Mountain Reserve trustees have all said that's going really well. We saw some feedback from hikers, ourselves, just from my reporting, that a lot of people do appreciate the idea of having a parking spot there. There are still some questions about whether or not they'll adapt more to some of the feedback where, for example, if it's a rainy day and there's nobody in the parking lot, why can't somebody pull in and just go hiking? There are still some questions there. As far as the shuttles go, I'm not sure how many people are using it at the moment, but that'll be an interesting question to see, too if that's helping with the parking and public safety issue.

RUSSELL: So the Adirondack Explorer in the Adirondack Mountain Club are hosting a talk on Wednesday night. I wonder if you could talk about the role of stewards and things like welcome centers to educate hikers more in a place as popular as the Adirondack High Peaks.

CRAIG: Yeah, so that's one of the things that I think we're seeing groups explore, and the Adirondack Mountain Club has just opened up this new information center. It'll be interesting to see how they feel it goes this year. So we're holding this talk and it's focused on educating the public and the role of stewards and the role of data collection. The Adirondack Mountain Club has their summit stewards. There are some front country stewards in Keene. So a lot of this is just actually getting to people directly, and just letting them know what to expect, that it's not always as easy as maybe someone on All Trails or other popular hiking forums will say,

RUSSELL: There's been a lot of talk about an increase in hiker traffic in certain parts of the park, a lot of anecdotal data. But I wonder— how much data do we actually have? And how much data do experts say we really need to understand this issue?

CRAIG: Yeah, this is an ongoing project for the Adirondacks and for everywhere else that's managing visitors. So right now, we don't have a lot of data in the Adirondacks and I think certain groups have tried to fill that gap. We obviously have the Adirondack Council that has gone out and collected some data and photo data to show the impact to alpine vegetation. We have different groups doing this, but we don't have anybody doing a very comprehensive study. So we're going to be talking to some folks who are doing that work now.

Jill Weiss, who is a researcher with SUNY ESF, is going out this summer focused on Summit stewards, but they're also collecting data from hikers. So they're asking: what is considered a crowded trail for you? Because it is a subjective question. And then we have somebody who's actually done this work— Peter Pettingill, who's an associate professor at St. Lawrence University, used to work for the National Park Service and was actually boots on the ground talking to hikers, asking them how many people could they see on a trail before they felt it was too crowded? So the more you collect that kind of information, the National Park Service is using that to decide: Do we need to implement a reservation system? Do we need to implement some other change in the way we're managing visitors here? And I don't know that we in New York have been doing that as much and I think there's a push now to change that and to gather more data.

NCPR is supported by:
Comments
Feel like talking about this? Join us on Facebook.