A Little Wild: Lincoln Mountain State Forest

Monday, April 21, 2014

Little Hoover Dam

Elle and I got out yesterday for a few hours of walking in Lincoln Mountain State Forest. This area is less than 30 minutes from our home and it's both bigger (1000 acres) and wilder than the Hemlock Forest (though it is equally wet and swampy). Lincoln "Mountain" is a bit of a misnomer. The mountain tops out at 1000 feet and it's really just a bump on the Adirondack upslope that lies to the northwest of Saratoga Springs.

The area is crisscrossed with old roads and stone walls and 100 years ago most of it would have been cleared of trees and in active use for various types of agriculture. There are a few places where the trees appear to be older; protected we guess by the general swampiness of the area. There are several small swampy ponds in the area, and seen yesterday (4/20/2014), one was looking particularly pond like (Image One). Image Two, a screen capture of Google Earth imagery from July 2013, shows the swamp with very little open water.

Image One

Image Two

One of our favorite places at Lincoln Mountain is the outlet of this pond/swamp. The main outlet flows from the lower right in Image Two. We walked over to take a look and found just a trickle of water. That seemed odd. Following it upstream for a short distance revealed the reason; one of the larger beaver dams that I've seen. It's difficult to convey the extent of this dam in pictures and I highlighted the "face" of the dam in Image Four. The dam is at least 75 feet long and 4 to 5 feet high in the center.

Image 5 shows the water backed up behind the dam. The striking thing about this dam is its' height. The dam is four to five feet high in the center. Also, this dam is not the porous structure that you commonly see. Very little water is flowing through the dam. This is clearly a multi-year effort and it could even be multi-generational. As of April 2014 the dam looks pretty solid, but, there's a lot of water backed up behind it and if it were to fail all at once a lot of water going somewhere in a hurry.

Large beaver dam

The face of the dam is highlighted in yellow

Water backed up behind the dam

Friday, December 27, 2013

Swamps I have Known

I like swamps. I must be easily amused. Or maybe it's oddly amused. Either way, it must come with getting older because I don't remember thinking this way when I was younger. One of the reasons that I like the Hemlock Forest is that the area contains several different wetland types. Still, when you come right down to it those areas are pretty similar. So along with the swamps and bogs of the Hemlock Forest I've been visiting a larger (and wilder) swamp found in the central Adirondacks just east of Long Lake - what I call the Shaw Pond Swamp (not sure if there is a more official name). I've also made a couple of trips to Lincoln Mountain State forest just outside of Saratoga Springs. The Lincoln Mountain forest covers about 1000 acres and it contains a less common swamp ecosystem; a red-maple black-gum swamp. I'll be writing more about these areas in future posts but for now some photos will have to suffice.

Dec. 24th 2013 near the margin of the Shaw Pond Swamp.

The area includes Shaw Pond, which is not far being a swamp itself. The "swamp" includes a progression of bogs and swamp habitats of various types. View the Map in Google Maps.

The USGS Togopgraphic map of the area names Shaw Pond and Shaw Brook. Access is from the trail leaving NY Route 28 just east of Long Lake. This is the Northville-Lake Placid Trail so the trail goes both north and south from the parking lot. The swamp is a quarter mile south of the parking area.

Early winter is a good time to explore Adirondack wetlands.

The open swamp is visible here through the trees. There is a large area of flooded forest. (12/24/2013)

Back at home, looking at photos and working from memory I've been trying to figure out what kind of swamp this is. I think that it is a Larch Swamp but I need to go back and verify that. The value of taking good notes cannot be overemphasized.

Beaver are rarely faulted for a lack of ambition. Beaver have damned Shaw Brook just below the bridge the NTP crossing. As of Dec. 2013 the bridge is passable. That won't be the case if the water backs up much further.