Adirondack

GLENS FALLS, N.Y. -- Maybe more than just the names have changed for the Baltimore Skipjacks. Maybe the changes, brought about by promotions, demotions and trades, have resulted in a team that can bust an opponent's momentum by answering goals with goals.Maybe this finally will be a team again in search of the Calder Cup.Then, again, maybe it's too early to be considering such %J possibilities.The Skipjacks, now undefeated after two games, held on for a 6-5 American Hockey League victory over the Adirondack Red Wings last night before a season-opening crowd of 3,993 at the Glens Falls Civic Center.

ALBANY, N.Y. - A few years back, when Hank Fischer of the Defenders of Wildlife was trying to persuade hostile Western ranchers to accept the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park, he was sometimes met with a counterchallenge: Since Easterners are so interested in wolves, "why don't you introduce them to New York City or Washington, D.C.?"Washington may be a little too dangerous for wolves, Fischer jokes, and they are not likely to be in Central Park any time soon. But a nascent effort to return them to New York state - specifically, the Adirondacks - is gaining traction with the surprising and widely publicized success of the Yellowstone reintroduction program, now nearly 2 years old.Nine packs totaling 40 free-ranging wolves have become established in and around Yellowstone and are breeding so successfully that Mike Phillips, a National Park Service biologist who directs the program, says the endangered gray wolf is beginning "to flirt with recovery," well ahead of schedule, in his part of the country.

You missed Salt Lake, and the weak dollar puts Turin, Italy, out of your price range next year. What's a Winter Olympics fan to do? Go to Lake Placid, N.Y., next month and relive the magic of 1980. The village of 2,600 tucked in the Adirondack Mountains is having a festival Feb. 12-27 to mark the silver anniversary of the 1980 Winter Games that includes activities at all of the original venues. Skate the outdoors rink where Eric Heiden won all five speed skating events. Cheer in the arena where a hockey "miracle" happened.

ALBANY, N.Y. - For a century, some of the finest whitewater canoeing and trout-fishing rivers in the state have been off-limits to the public because they coursed through Adirondack hardwood forests owned by a succession of timber companies, most recently Champion International Corp.But last week, Champion announced plans to sell all of its 144,000 acres of North Country forest land - the largest block of New York state land to be offered for sale since the state started keeping such records three decades ago, state officials said.

TROY, N.Y. - A study of 30 Adirondack lakes by scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has revealed that some lakes within the 6,000,000-acre park are responding to a decade of cuts in the air pollution that causes acid rain. Researchers found that pH - the concentration of acid in water - improved from 1994 to 2000 in 18 of 30 lakes that had been most heavily affected by acid rain. The reduction in acid levels caused increases in the diversity of microscopic plants and other wildlife.

LONG LAKE, N.Y. - The water in Little Tupper Lake is clear as gin, the spot isolated except for pairs of loons. It is the largest lake owned by a single person in all of New York. And it is for sale.Long Lake Hotel owner Art Young recalls fishing Little Tupper in the early 1980s, catching several 20- and 22-inch brook trout prized as a rare, genetically undiluted strain."It's so pure and beautiful back in there, it's amazing," said Young, pouring draft beer for patrons at his bar. "But 'forever wild's' a crock.

SARANAC LAKE, N.Y. -- The Grand Canyon may receive letters and packages by pack mule, parts of Alaska by propeller plane. But here in the lake-speckled Adirondack Mountains, a fortunate few have their mail delivered right to their docks. And in this upscale community, where people call a lakefront mansion a "camp" the way Newport swells use the understated "cottage," one man gets to deliver it. He is Dion Neese, 45, who seems more comfortable in front of the tiller of an outboard motor than behind the wheel of a car. Neese is not a postal employee.

WASHINGTON -- A landmark air-pollution law enacted a decade ago to reduce acid rain has failed to slow the acidification of lakes and streams in the Adirondacks, many of which are rapidly losing the ability to sustain life, according to a new federal report. The study by the General Accounting Office, a nonpartisan research agency for Congress, raises sharp questions about the effectiveness of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, which set tough restrictions on smokestack emissions of sulfur and nitrogen, the two components of acid rain.

ALBANY, N.Y. - Deep within the New York State Museum sits an ordinary gray cabinet, a sort of botanical time capsule storing fragments of life from the Adirondack High Peaks of 150 years ago. Inside, 40 shoebox-sized cases stacked top to bottom contain the mosses and liverworts that clung to the tips of New York's tallest mountains in the middle of the 19th century. A century later, it is these specimens - brown and brittle and on the verge of crumbling into dust - that may hold the clues to the future of the 300- square-mile High Peaks Wilderness Area in upstate New York.

TUPPER LAKE, N.Y. - The 1964 murder of Andrew Goodman in Mississippi prompted an aggressive investigation of the Ku Klux Klan and, decades later, inspired the movie Mississippi Burning. The killings of Goodman and two other young volunteers who were registering blacks to vote is viewed as a turning point in the civil rights movement. But Bill Frenette, the village historian here in Franklin County, fretted that even though Goodman's place in American history was secure, his ties to the northern Adirondacks could easily be forgotten.