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Patience and parking stress

A roadside parking lot on state Route 73 is seen here Saturday, Oct. 10, 2020, with a digital sign that read: "Hiker parking limited; seek other hikes." (Enterprise photo — Elizabeth Izzo)

In my opinion, there are only a few times of year when leaving the Adirondacks is worthwhile. With so much to do during almost every season, I think November and April are some of the only months I feel cooped up here. This year, as is fast becoming a tradition, I headed to the desert and explored the canyons of Utah for a month.

Throughout that month, the issue of overuse was much on my mind. With the exception of the most remote canyons, we saw plenty of people on our trip. In every town we stopped through on the way there and back, there was someone ready to tell us about how they had never seen so many people visiting before. Much as we’re experiencing here, traffic is rising, and folks don’t know quite what to do with it.

As I was preparing to head home, I was filled with curiosity about what I’d come back to. When I left, debate over the new parking system at the Adirondack Mountain Reserve was still at full volume. It seemed reasonable to assume that there would be some new bit of controversy waiting when I got back. By the time I got home, it was clear that the new buzzword was “delineator” and that parking near Roaring Brook was still the flashpoint in the running effort to address different facets of overuse.

During a little bouldering session this week, I was discussing some parts of the issue with a friend who is new to the area. The conversation took us through the tumultuous debate about overuse here in the Forest Preserve, its many and varied impacts, attempts to mitigate it, and the intense emotions being ignited around it.

Pertinent to our chosen activity of the day, our conversation moved on to the climbing community and its concern over the newly “delineated” parking areas. Climber concern has grown loud enough to spur the involvement of the Access Fund, which has published a campaign to “save access to Adirondack climbing.” The concern that I have heard most consistently voiced is that these blocked parking areas, in conjunction with the AMR restrictions, were going to drive more hikers to park at spaces usually populated by climbers, thereby limiting access to some popular spots.

This campaign highlights some important points in this ongoing debate here, but in my eyes, it fails to capture the complexity of the situation. The fallout from the AMR parking system is being broadly felt, with all sorts of people frantic about the implications. Battle cries like “eminent domain” and other such exaggerated frustration are evident in different discussions, especially online. For the Access Fund to create such a dramatically titled campaign that is focused on parking in two specific roadside locations seems, to me, to be adding gasoline to a fire surrounded by dry grass (especially when there are other issues pertinent to climbing that might, if unattended, have a greater impact on the sport here). I can certainly see the argument against letting this instance become a precedent for the future, but this isn’t mentioned.

We were starting to spin off on an analytical tangent about the choice of wording and the threat to other parking areas when my friend said, “You almost wish you could just reply to everyone: ‘lol, be patient.'” This simple, generationally branded statement struck a chord immediately and seems, to me, to carry a lot of weight. Figuring out how to maintain a sense of calm and look at the broad picture while everyone in this region, the state Department of Environmental Conservation included, figures out how to manage overuse is likely to be critical to success. This is particularly evident in work that the Adirondack Climbers’ Coalition has already done do address climber access in the region.

The debate regarding overuse and access — from parking lots to permits, enforcement to education, and all of the other attendant issues — has turned parts of recreating in the Adirondacks into a partisan minefield. Recreation groups and advocates for different outdoor activities are increasingly staking out the battle lines and piling dirt on the hills they swear they’ll die on. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t taken part in countless, breathless conversations about the right course forward for different forms of recreation in the Adirondacks. In fact, I’ve done so in this publication with some frequency.

Patience and understanding is frequently lacking in these debates. Perhaps this is because of a perception that folks here have been waiting for a solution for so long and that the tide of impacts is rising beyond what can be reasonably contained or managed. Perhaps it’s because of the extreme visibility of miles of parked cars on Adirondack roads and recreators crowding major points of access. Comment on the apparent secrecy of these decisions at the state level deserves its own article, as does a history of funding and political support for the DEC. (I strongly encourage readers to delve more deeply into those issues for greater context, though I’ll say no more about it here.) There are plenty of reasons for passions to be inflamed over these issues, but identifying blame and hurling stones rarely leads to solutions.

Whatever the reasons, I think a call to patience is both timely and appropriate right now. While it may feel like there are things happening that will change how we interact with parts of Forest Preserve land in new and potentially unwelcome ways, many of these are attempts to better regulate the chaos that has come to define outdoor recreation in this region as crowds have grown.

With that, this is also a good time to examine personal notions of hierarchy and ownership in Adirondack recreation as well. It’s highly romantic and, frankly, rather selfish to think that any part of the Forest Preserve should be exclusively the territory of one type of recreator. There is a clear perception that, with these limits on parking and the growing crowds, a cherished resource once perceived as nearly limitless is becoming more scarce by the day. While this feeling is understandable and relatable, it’s one that should be carefully examined. The sense of competition, the mistrust and enmity that these feelings breed toward other outdoor enthusiasts in the same space is, in my opinion, truly awful and antithetical to the sort of experiences we seek when we enter wild spaces.

I think returning to the example of rock climbing is instructive in this regard. Over the past several years, the Adirondack Climbers’ Coalition has done incredible work to advance the cause of climbing here. Prior to this work, it was a sport barely acknowledged by the state, and climbers had very limited voice when it came to land use decisions that affected them. Now climbers are recognized land users, unit management plans contain more language specific to climbers and their concerns, and access to popular climbing areas has been slowly but surely improving. This work has been done with tenacity and resolve, but also with what seems to be patience and a sense of long-term vision.

Advocating for community needs and driving forward the process of improving access feels critically important. That said, doing so without catastrophizing and with an extra nod to patience will give credit to the process and will, hopefully, bring us closer to whatever the elusive solutions to access and overuse in the Adirondacks might be.

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