CHAMPLAIN VALLEY, NEW YORK

With a warming climate and dwindling habitats for threatened animals, wildlife corridors provide opportunities for migration and adaptation for animals and plants.

The Split Rock Wildway provides habitat connectivity from Lake Champlain to the Adirondack High Peaks and Canada. It also offers open space for residents and visitors to connect with each other and the ecosystem and, in this way, form truly sustainable natural and human communities.

Split Rock Wildway

A wildlife corridor connecting Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains.

The Champlain Valley was the last section added to New York’s Adirondack Park and, consequently, it has limited state-owned public lands. One unique exception is NYDEC’s. Split Rock Wild Forest, which comprises 3,700 acres on the western shore of Lake Champlain. It is the largest expanse of protected and undeveloped shoreline along Lake Champlain in New York. A monumental landmark rising out of the lake, Split Rock is a protected home for a variety of wildlife, including bears, bobcats, mink, eagles, falcons, and timber rattlesnakes. The biodiversity of this region is considered one of the highest in the state.

Split Rock Wild Forest is connected to the Adirondack Mountains by a corridor of mixed forest and farmland called the “Split Rock Wildway.” It allows for bobcats, bears, and other wide-ranging animals to travel between the low-elevation forest and the higher elevation mountains. Because this land is mostly unprotected private land where landowner actions could sever the forested connections, Split Rock Wild Forest is threatened with becoming an island of state land separated from the Adirondack Mountains, resulting in loss of habitat connectivity, limited gene flow, and restricting climate-change initiated migration. To remedy this, a number of organizations, including the Eddy Foundation, have been working to preserve the Wildway as envisioned by an early collaboration with John Davis, Gary Randorf, Kathleen Fitzgerald,Tom Butler and Jamie Phillips.

CURRENT EDDY LANDS PROTECTED

PARCH POND

800+ acres. Includes its serene namesake, Parch Pond, plus beaver flows and brooks against a dramatic backdrop of the 200+ foot tall Broughton Ledges, where Peregrine Falcon nest. Climbers consider the ledges one of the Northeast’s greatest “undeveloped” crag systems.

BEAVER BROOK

~100 acres, featuring waterfalls, hemlock-shaded pools, beaver meadows, Black Ash swamp, mossy ledges, mature hardwood/hemlock forest, and a Champlain Area Trails (CATs) trail.

BOQUET MOUNTAIN

500+ acres. Panoramic views north, east, and south, and adjacent to Northeast Wilderness Trust lands. Several CATS trails to explore rock outcrops with prime habitat for bobcats and other basking mammals and reptiles. Look for beech trees with bear claw marks and interior forest songbirds.