Breaking Trail: How Saratoga’s Very First Community Forest Came to Be
When you walk—or run or snowshoe or mountain bike—through Saratoga County’s new Graphite Range Community Forest, it seems like the trail system has been there forever. That’s because Steve Ovitt designed it that way.
Ovitt, a retired DEC forest ranger living in Warren County, is the owner of outdoor recreation development firm Wilderness Property Management (WPM), which plans, designs and constructs trail systems all across the region. His latest project—Graphite Range—is a mixed-use network of mountain biking and hiking trails located just past Nové Italian Restaurant on Route 9 in Wilton that will eventually connect to Daniels Road State Forest. While Graphite Range opened to the public in December, you’d never know it’s brand new, given the lack of felled trees and disturbed wilderness you’d expect to see around a recently constructed trail…read more
5 Saratoga County Hikes to Take on National Hiking Day
A couple of months ago, my boyfriend and I had a revelation: We don’t have to wait for the weekend to go on a hike. The thought came when Pete saw an Instagram photo of a couple celebrating their anniversary with a sunset hike in the Adirondack High Peaks. Our anniversary just so happened to be approaching, and rather than go out to eat at Familiar Creature for the 100th time, we opted to take a different approach to celebrating. On a Thursday after work, we laced up our hiking boots, packed a bottle of wine in a water bottle, grabbed our headlamps, and headed to Spruce Mountain…read more
Pitney Meadows Community Farm Is Saratoga’s Natural Treasure
It’s a hot July evening at Pitney Meadows Community Farm. The westward-facing vegetables in the field and individual plots of the Community Garden are soaking up the final hour of blazing daylight. The staff have gone home for the day, but CSA members arrive sporadically to pick ready-to-eat lettuce, root vegetables, and other delights in the fields. Shoppers trickle into the white clapboard Farm Stand, and emerge with bags of produce, artisanal cheeses, and farm-fresh eggs. A man still clad in his suit-and-tie work attire uncoils a hose and begins to spritz the ripening tomato vines in his vegetable plot. A few rows down, a couple is harvesting basil and marveling at how profuse it is this year…read more
Why Saratoga’s Urban Forest Matters
Over lunch at the Cantina bar, I offhandedly asked my companion, 35-year Saratoga resident Max Oswald, if he had any tree stories. “Tree stories?” he asked, perplexed, as if that was the first time he’d been lobbed that question. (I’m sure it was.) I nodded, and he took a sip of his Crimson Berry Hard Tea. “Well, there was this spooky old tree…”
It’s not so much a story as a memory—when Max’s son, Jake, was little, the two would walk from their house on East Ave to East Side Rec, usually to play baseball. On the way home, they’d take Lake Ave and have to pass the “spooky old tree,” which they named after a favorite Berenstain Bears book. Whenever they got close to it, they’d sprint past, so as not to be spooked by its knotty trunk and scraggly limbs, slowing to a walk only after they were sure they were safe…read more
7 Adirondack Hikes for Any Occasion
For me, this week was all about ringing in the Saratoga season with drinks at Familiar Creature on Wednesday, New York City Ballet’s Coppélia at SPAC on Thursday, and opening weekend at the track later today. But in what seems like another life—one in which my knees still had most of their cartilage and I didn’t know the difference between a trifecta and a superfecta—early July marked the start of a different season for me: hiking season. By July, the snow had melted at even the highest of elevations, the swarms of black flies had subsided, and volleyball season (which occupied my weekends and ultimately wrecked my knees) was over…read more
