Photograph by Jamie West McGiver
There was a moment when Kelley Tucker realized, quite to her horror, that she had been absolutely right.
It was the afternoon of August 28th, 2011. Rain had been falling steadily all day long—nothing unusual for a socked-in, Adirondack summer day. But as the hours went by the weather started to feel somehow bigger than your average downpour. A tropical depression had been pummeling town after town as it inched its way up the East Coast. Finally, when the slow-moving storm parked itself above the Adirondacks, all Tucker could do was stand along the East Branch of the Ausable River next to a friend and offer a running commentary on what floated by.
“What’s that over there? Is it—yep, that’s the neighbor’s barn. What about that thing, what’s that? Oh no, that’s the neighbor’s tractor.”
What she was witnessing was something that her highly trained eye had perceived as an inevitability. As an ecological anthropologist who grew up around the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers, Tucker knew a flood-vulnerable river when she saw one. She knew how eroded banks, slipshod road building and poorly managed hydraulics could triple down into a full-fledged disaster. She didn’t want to be some kind of environmental Cassandra, shouting hysterically about make-believe catastrophes. She wanted to be wrong. But she wasn’t.
By the time Tropical Storm Irene moved on, the Ausable River’s rage had washed away portions of Au Sable Forks, Jay, Upper Jay, Keene and other hamlets. Roads and homes, businesses and roadside attractions, including the actual Land of Makebelieve, a former theme park in Upper Jay, were swamped. A total of $25 million in damages sat on the ledgers of hamlets whose combined annual budgets were a mere $4 million. Eventually Tucker decided that she could no longer be a passive onlooker.
The executive director job at the Ausable River Association—now called the Ausable Freshwater Center—became available in 2014. Though she’d been looking forward to flying her four-seater airplane and easing toward a semi-retirement, she did the opposite. She sold her plane and took up the reins of an organization that had been tasked with reining in a monster.
While Kelley Tucker was right about the potential disaster the Ausable could wreak, the extent of the damage came as a surprise to many in the Adirondacks, because for centuries we’ve been getting things so wrong when it comes to rivers. Rivers in general and the Ausable in particular have historically borne the brunt of abuse when humans decide they want to “develop” a wilderness. In the Ausable’s case, that development was marked by successive years of logging right down to the water’s edge. During this period the Ausable was transformed into a giant flume with ramrods of scouring logs busting through cobble and boulder until reaching Lake Champlain. To a large degree the whole of the Ausable watershed is still in recovery from this mass denuding. In 2023 the region marked the 100th anniversary of the very last log float down the East Branch.
But it wasn’t just the underwater part of the river that was affected during the region’s industrial period. What suffered perhaps even more was the zone of transitional land between bank and up-slope known in ecological parlance as the “riparian.” Like the rest of the forestland that sheltered the Ausable watershed, the riparian zones were logged too, and with the added velocity of the scoured river, they started to melt away. In a pristine ecosystem, riparians are complex, interwoven networks of highly diverse vegetation. Their above-ground complexity is matched by a web of roots that holds riverbanks in place and sequesters excess water in times of flood. In drought periods riparian communities hoard moisture and help plants and animals make the bridge to the next rainy period. As a riparian matures through generations of forest succession, a leafy canopy establishes itself, further locking in banks and providing shade cover, helping cold-water fish like native brook trout survive in hot, high summer.
A secure and healthy river should have a wending, riffling riverbed accompanied by a rich, diverse riparian.
By 2011 much of the Ausable River had neither.
“I’m old, so I’m gonna butt-scoot,” Tucker said as she inched her way down to the stretch of the Ausable known as the “Dream Mile” because of its plentiful trout. The process of fixing the Ausable has been a slow one that’s involved a good deal of testing and tabulating. It’s for this reason Tucker often refers to the river as the Ausable Freshwater Center’s “laboratory.” What works theoretically on paper has to be fine-tuned on a living river that’s in the habit of laying waste to the best laid plans.
Here at the Dream Mile, where the local landowner had requested one of the Center’s free assessments back in 2016, things seem to be holding.
“Where you’re standing right now, before we put all this in, the water would be two feet over your head,” Tucker said, taking in the view with satisfaction. Looking out over what is such productive trout water that its fishing rights are leased by Wilmington’s Hungry Trout Resort, I could see the fruits of the Center’s labor. A continuous constructed “bench” of bank runs 1,200 feet up the river, marking a human-secured graduation from streamside to upslope. Unseen is an underlaying netting of coconut coir the Center put down to hold the new shoulder in place while young seedlings take hold. The Center’s Kiana French noted the vegetation that seemed, so far, to be doing its job.
“Look, here’s a willow,” French said. “That one made it.” In fact quite a bit was making it along the bank as a thick, brushy understory of grasses and young shrubs had taken what was hopefully permanent residence in the newly stabilized bank. The change to the banks on the Dream Mile were matched by structural changes the Center had made in the river itself.
“Those boulders there, those are all ours,” Tucker said, indicating carefully calibrated points where rocks had been laid down to slow, bend and diversify the river’s current. These were not pell-mell insertions. Each spot along the Dream Mile had been gauged beforehand and a new gradient for the section had been established. The changes to both bank and riverbed are measured to the nearest tenth of a foot. A miscalculation could result in water going in the wrong direction. Now, though, Tucker wrinkled her nose at one spot where she felt the rock structure was “unnaturally straight,” but she seemed pleased with the work. And even though the Center’s mission is clearly linked to climate change, Tucker has found it’s best to present the work as “flood-relief.” She’s quick to point out what they’ve done to improve the human/river interface.
“The road here was getting undercut and starting to fail. Now it’s stabilized.”
Sure, I thought. But there’s a lot of road out there.
Of all the things humans got wrong about river management over the centuries, perhaps one of the hardest to make right is the impact of roads. That impact is everywhere. Next time you’re on Google Maps, zoom into the major rivers of the Adirondacks and follow the water courses within the Blue Line; whether it’s the Upper Hudson or the Raquette, the Oswegatchie or the Black, the Saranac, Sacandaga or Schroon, all of them, for large portions of their routes, find themselves in a forced marriage with a road. Early roadbuilders followed the path of least effort when they extracted timber and ore from the Adirondacks’ interior; places with the least amount of slope and pitch. Where do you find that? Smack dab in the riparian zone.
“Roads are why we’re never going to restore the Ausable to its pristine state,” Tucker said. “The roads aren’t going anywhere. So we have to figure out how to work with them.”
Part of the problem with roads is the way they interrupt the natural floodplain, inserting into what was the natural flow of water between high elevations and streambed an impermeable slab that has no capacity to absorb floodwaters. Wherever they can, the Center’s projects work to maximize the potential of remaining riparian buffer and reestablish some of the absorptive quality. But there is another aspect to the unhappy union of roadbed and streambed that Tucker showed me, where the Land of Makebelieve once stood.
“People are always telling me to stop talking about culverts,” Tucker said as she made her way down to another bank while whacking away a hedge of invasive crown vetch. “But I think culverts are the sexiest thing around.”
Take your car for a 20-minute drive on any country lane in the Adirondacks. Inevitably you’ll cross a handful of brooks, streams and draws. Yet somehow the wheels of your car will stay dry. That’s because all the waterways along your journey have been routed through buried tubes called culverts. Like roads, culverts are everywhere. Most culverts in the Adirondacks were built in haste—corrugated steel pipes thrown down in ditches with gravel and dirt piled on top.
I’d always known that culverts were usually too narrow for flood periods, and that their bare metal bottoms often created a barrier to fish nearly as impassable as a dam. But I never understood how that could be different until I saw one of the Center’s sexy culverts. Instead of an ugly jutting pipe, the gracefully arched half oval below Otis Brook looked like an inviting tunnel of ecological love. Instead of a raw, life-hostile metal base, the designers had created a bed lined with spawning gravel. Riparian vegetation wrapped the tunnel in a maze of greenery that gave the structure a made-by-nature quality.
“When there’s a storm,” Tucker said, “the highway department never checks our crossings because they know ours will be fine.” Most culverts are just a couple of feet wide and blow out every few years when water gets high. Meanwhile, Tucker’s culverts can be up to 20 feet wide and good for three quarters of a century.
The Center has rebuilt eight culverts throughout the Ausable’s drainage and advised on another dozen. Hundreds still need to be upgraded. It’s the sheer scale of it that led the Center to what may be its most ambitious project of all.
Just because you know you’re right doesn’t necessarily mean you have the wherewithal to fix what’s wrong. And here is where the willow meets the road in accomplishing the Center’s mission of helping the Ausable and the Adirondacks’ other major rivers become more natural and, ultimately, safer for their human neighbors. You can build endless bankfull benches—sloped areas that slow water—lay down all the coconut coir you can drag out of the world’s tropics, and retrofit every culvert from here to the Canadian border, but if what you plant in those riparians keels over and dies during the next flood or freeze, everything you’ve done will be flushed down the rivers, ending up at the bottom of Champlain’s eponymous lake.
Through testing at their seven active restoration sites, Tucker and her plant advisor Kiana French and biodiversity research manager Carrianne Pershyn came to realize that native plants, collected from seed locally and propagated to seedling age, fare better than even the same species grown in a nursery outside the region. The problem? There are no large-scale nurseries in the Adirondacks that grow native plants. Which was why the Ausable Freshwater Center’s Kiana French is stationed away from the river—near John Brown’s farm in Lake Placid—where a meadow stretches on and on.
“This was the potato testing ground for Cornell’s Agricultural Extension,” French told me as she, in an almost Julie Andrews Sound of Music–like gesture, spread her arms wide at the amazement of having so much good ground at her disposal. At above 2,000 feet of elevation, the Uihlein Farm, as it’s sometimes called—donated in the 1960s by Henry and Mid Uihlein—encompasses more than 300 unusually pancake-flat acres, shielded from the wind by the Great Range and blessed with clear High Peaks sunshine. Thanks to a $651,000 grant from the Lake Champlain Basin Program, the Center leases the land and has begun the long, slow process of establishing a kind of riparian maternity ward with enough acreage, water and sunlight to grow up to 600,000 young plants per year by 2030.
French, who previously worked at Vermont’s Intervale incubator for small-scale farmers, welcomes the change and the challenge. “I got a little burned out on farmers’ markets and all that,” she said, “but I still love farming. And this is a chance to do it in a new way.”
Part of the process resembles actual farming. This portion of the Uihlein Farm, where Cornell potatoes once grew in a tuber-topia of testing, is now cover crop that for the next two years will gradually break up the compacted soil. Eventually all that land will be used for growing out the future riparians of multiple rivers in the region. But the part of the property that really makes French’s hazel eyes flash are the two new greenhouses where her collected progeny are making a start in life.
“In the fridge at my house there used to be no room for food—it was all seeds,” she said. Now every time the wild willows, cottonwoods, oaks and maples of the nearby forests start casting down their fluff puffs, helicopters and acorns, French can gather and quickly sow them in tubes that will be protected through winter. Some of the species require a “double dormancy” and up to two years of incubation to get tricked into growing in captivity. But the prospect that what they’re doing could reestablish riparians and also potentially make a self-sustaining business that serves the region is particularly exciting.
“We’re trying to figure out the pricing and scale,” French said as she pointed out how her shelves of red oak seedlings retain their acorns for up to a year as a “snack pack” while they grow through lean times. In effect, the Center has a kind of snack pack in the form of a federal grant—an initial subsidy to establish the nursery. The demand for native seed and plants is on a regional level but also exists nationwide. Without enough native plants, landowners often turn to nonnative species that can, in turn, propagate in the wild and further displace native plants. This has ill effects for the economy and the river. Invasive species quite often are “opportunistic,” have shallow roots and don’t do the kind of bank-holding stabilization that a truly native riparian can accomplish down the line.
The idea, then, is to build a business where small and large landowners across the Adirondacks can purchase the Ausable Freshwater Center’s seedlings and saplings in a potentially virtuous cycle. The Center can also buy what it grows, using the plants in more restoration projects along more rivers.
How much river will Kelley Tucker, Kiana French and the rest of the Center’s team be able to restore in the years to come? It’s anybody’s guess. French is contemplating going to business school to improve her commercial chops in helping that virtuous cycle grow wider and wider.
Adirondackers can do their part, too. Those with property abutting a river, brook or stream can call the Center thanks to Stream Wise, an initiative that provides free assessments, recommendations and assistance to create stream buffers. The work could cost you a lot, or maybe just a little bit of elbow grease. You just don’t know until you confront the problem. Rivers are mysterious.
Learn more about Ausable Freshwater Center and its work at www.ausableriver.org.
Paul Greenberg is the bestselling author of Four Fish and writer-in-residence at the Safina Center. This article includes additional reporting from New York University Animal Studies students Allie Abramson and Travis Phulnauth.
