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One of the focal points in the newly acquired Wm C. Whitney area located only 14 miles from this village is a section known as the Burn Road. Although this road is relatively new, the fact that it was built and used intensively by local residents and that it follows in places the former road bed of a long ago railroad line built and utilized by the Oval Wood Dish Corp., makes it historically interesting.

Under the present interim custody plan, Burn Road has been designated as a hiking trail. Only the International Paper Co., which has a short-term easement, Whitney Industries, which has access to Frenchman’s Mine (sand and gravel), and D.E.C administrative vehicles will be allowed motorized access. Bicycles are also forbidden until a final classification is completed.
The Tupper Lake and Long Lake town boards have passed resolutions that this classification should be “Wild Forest,” which will allow a broader range of recreational use. In the meantime, if you are not fussy about what constitutes a hiking trail, you can walk along this wide gravel road to Rock Pond — distance 8 miles, or to Lily Pad Pond — distance 8.2 miles. You can also walk to Camp Bliss, located on the Little Tupper shore, but hurry because the buildings there are scheduled for removal this month — distance 5.7 miles.

It is worth noting that the Whitney acquisition has 11 ponds lying in two major watersheds. Four of these ponds, which lie in the Raquette River watershed (Little Tupper, Rock Pond, Burn Pond and Louie Pond) as well as four which lie in the Black River watershed (Hardigan Pond, Frank Pond, Little Salmon Pond and Lily Pad Pond), are accessible by hiking the Burn Road. Despite the hype, even if you know the spring holes, most of these ponds have low density trout populations. The destruction of traditional fish barriers, such as existed at Touhey Falls and Nehasane Lake, have allowed undesirable migrates such as perch-bass to infiltrate these formerly trout-only waters (Adk. Lake Survey Corp., 1985). Gill lice have been found to be present on trout in both Little Tupper and Rock Lake, where netting surveys also revealed low or fair abundance and only “limited significance as a fish lake” Beatty (1950) DEC Trapnetting (1991).

Shingle Shanty Brook, which as late as 1985 was a marvelous trout stream, is now dominated by small mouth bass (Potter Family, Brandeth). These are drastic fish community changes which many who knew these waters at an earlier time will find hard to believe. It is expected the D.E.C. will initiate reclamations and fish barrier efforts.

As the name implies, Burn Road got its name because it passes through large areas of burned-over land. You’ll find fields of tall grasses, the regenerative powers in the soil that could produce trees having been lost to the searing heat of fire. Also seen will be exposed rock summits on low hills, its once accumulated mat of organic matter burned away and revegetation only slowly returning. Many fires have occurred here, and Mr. Whitney put observation towers on Salmon Pond Mountain and on Buck Mountain. Towers are still standing but these are unmanned due to more effective aerial surveillance.

One such fire in 1913 started near DuMoulin’s Banking Grounds in the ruins of an old lumber camp on Brandeth Park just southwest of the Burn Road. The old camp buildings and other debris provided perfect tinder for a conflagration that, aided by strong winds, devastated the surrounding forest for miles. It was thought that carelessness on the part of a nomadic lumberjack, who had slept in one of the buildings overnight, or, perhaps, the sun’s rays through broken glass were responsible for the resulting fire.

As Pauline Brandeth (pen name, Paul Brandeth) has written in Memories of Albany Mountain (The Enchanted Stream): “This graveyard of a forest, once beautiful and gracious, lay about us and the sickly odor of charred woods only served to intensify the realization of irreparable loss.”
Ms. Brandeth went on to say that “thanks to the faithful work of the hundreds of lumberjacks who had been toiling without permission for 24 hours, acres of forest were saved from going up in smoke.”

Many of these lumberjacks were members of this community, working in camps run at the time by local jobbers Bill McCarthy, George Bushey and Alec Decheine. The boarding house at one of the camps was run by Paul LaPorte and wife. Incidentally, those lumbering operations were a great financial success. A reported price of $750,000 was paid for the softwood stumpage (in nine years they took out 350,000 cords of pulpwood) and prices rose during WW I from $5 to as much as $30 a cord.

If you walk along the sections of this Burn Road today, keep your eyes peeled for railroad spikes and old ties and rails. When local jobbers built this road (North, Giroud, Lizotte) they followed in some places the old railroad grade built and used by the Oval Wood Dish in 1935 to transport the first-growth hardwood they cut in the vicinity of Rock Pond (see accompanying map.

Here again local jobbers were in charge of this operation, two of the contractors being Cornelius Buckley and Bert Franks.

The O.W.D paid $3 per MBF for the hardwood stumpage which they highgraded, taking only 16-foot logs. The manager of Whitney park at the time was Fred A. Potter, grandson of Dr. Benjamin Brandeth.

I have found that the people that I have spoken with in town are very well informed and hold strong opinions concerning the Wm C. Whitney area. They are aware that the area is flush with potential, but they also know its blemishes and its shortcomings. “It’s been hammered,” one knowledgeable lumberman told me. It would seem the majority of local opinion is that there needs to be more honesty in what determines a wilderness classification. Many people point out that Lake Lila, which is classified “primitive/wilderness,” has been “beyond capacity” a number of times this summer. “It has become a miniature Rollins Pond,” one fellow told me. “It is hardly a wilderness!”

Little Tupper, with its proposal for 80 waterfront campsites on what is effectively a 3.5-mile lake, will not be far behind in joining this characterization.
Note: It is 4.5 miles from headquarters launch to the head of the lake. It is not 8 or 10 miles as the spin doctors would have the public believe.

Since there are specific restrictions that campsites cannot be built within the unobstructed naked-eye view of the private inholdings (Camp Francis and Camp on the Point), you have — ergo — approximately 3.5 miles.

Little Tupper could become something of a petri dish in the ongoing experiment that has become known as the Adirondack Conflict. Let’s hope it doesn’t self-destruct.

Copyright William C. Frenette Collection