Places We Go:

The Champlain Valley, New York

As-built and preconstruction work on new contracts is in full swing this spring. One really interesting project we’ve added is the Champlain-Hudson Power Express, a clean energy project and a massive part of New York State’s net-zero solution.

To get renewable power from Quebec to Queens, power will travel through cables buried under Lake Champlain, the Hudson and Harlem Rivers. In total, 192 miles of submarine and subterranean cable will be laid for the Champlain Hudson Power Express Project.

Allman Environmental Services Photography contracted with Caldwell Marine International to provide photo and video (including aerial) documentation for their HDD work on this project.

The Champlain Valley in way-north New York is one of the most beautiful areas of the state, and I was happy to be spending time along the shoreline of that peaceful lake.

And if there’s world-class hiking along the way, I’m in. En route to the start of the project, I stopped off at Hurricane Mountain, in the High Peaks region of the Keene Valley, in the Adirondacks.

The timing was perfect: still just a little chilly, a couple weeks before black fly season, with the promise of few hikers on the trails and abundant opportunities for utter solitude and silence in the mountains.

The Adirondack Mountains are like “home waters” for me; as a kid, we spent entire summers in an old timber cabin on Mountain Lake, in Bleeker. A constantly-slamming screen door on a rain-softened porch opened up to a shimmering hemlock forest overlooking Mountain Lake. We swam, fished, hiked, probably set things on fire, and fended off mosquitos during long nights on that porch.

But the hemlocks. Those trees give the Adirondacks their special mossy feel. Centuries of duff underfoot make the forest floor sound almost hollow. Nothing ever dries out there; it just hosts more moss, more fern, more mushrooms.

So it’s a little wrenching to see the injury caused to whole forests of standing hemlock by the wooly adelgid.

Wooly adelgid-infested, dead hemlocks on Hurricane Mountain, in the High Peaks Wilderness Area of the Adirondacks.

This was the scene along the south approach to the top of Hurricane Mountain; in four directions, a ghostly monument to a once-green forest.

Even in late April, I was caught in the spindrift of a spring snowstorm at the summit. I didn’t spend long there. An hour or so later, I set out from Route 9 to Round Pond, where spring had returned.

Round Pond in the Adirondacks.

From there, off to Lake Champlain.

These are just some of the other projects we’re working on this month:

• Renovation at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design in Manhattan;
• Continued work on two Catskill Mountain dam projects: one at Shawangunk Reservoir, the other at Honk Lake in Wawarsing;
• Videography at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County;
• Aerial photography and videography at Wellesley Island State Park, in the Thousand Islands.