Thirty-two of these steel structures remain on summits within the Blue Line. Most railroad activity is confined to the park’s edges and short excursion trains the remaining tracks that pierced remote woods are destined to become a trail for bikers, hikers and snowmobilers. Our landscape is mostly healed, healthy mature forest replacing burned-over terrain. It’s hard to grasp just how much we lost during those infernos, but today it’s easier to see what we gained. Whitney Wilderness Area-is unrecognizable. The bare Nehasane Park backdrop-part of today’s William C. In the Adirondack Museum’s archives there’s a 1908 photograph of a firefighter, pack basket on his back, surrounded by a black-and-white wasteland, bony shards of trees poking haphazardly from the earth. Add in 72 days of drought, like in 1903 that year more than 600,000 acres burned. In some cases little fires that sprang up along the tracks joined together, leaving giant swaths of charred mess. Piles of debris were easily ignited by spark-spitting steam-powered locomotives. Sloppy, widespread logging was partly to blame. In the beginning of the 20th century that’s what happened here. Consider the devastation to our landscape and its wild inhabitants, the ashes blanketing our little Adirondack settlements, the thick smoke clogging the sky, settling in a mustard haze as far away as Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia. What if a million acres of Adirondack forestland caught fire? That’s about the size of Franklin County and more square miles than three Lake Champlains.
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