The Timber, The Iron, and The Taxonomist

The Debt of the Slope

In the Adirondacks, gravity is a force to be managed, or it will break you. My great-grandfather, Alfred 'Fred' LeBoeuf, understood this as a matter of survival. As a Woods Superintendent, he didn't just move wood; he was the primary accountant for an industry that treated the forest as a ledger of extraction. Today, I walk the same slopes, auditing the material debt his generation left behind.

According to his 1944 obituary, Fred was a cornerstone of an industry that treated the forest as a ledger. His job involved the violent task of "snubbing"—using heavy ropes and the friction of hemlock bark to scream-drag massive logs down 45-degree slopes.

While his work was centered on the western slopes of the High Peaks, the industrial fever of that era was absolute. Just over the mountain pass at Henderson Lake, the same story was being written in iron and wood.

While Fred was snubbing logs into the Raquette River system, the blast furnaces at the Hudson’s headwaters were inhaling the hillsides for both ore and charcoal. To feed the fires, the surrounding forests were stripped as surely as the timber tracts to the west. The geography was different, but the debt was the same: a "highway" of extraction that left our shorelines pinned under a thick, anaerobic carpet of bark and silt.

The Glass Witness

I remember the child's feverish anticipation of hunting through the duff for fragments of slag glass. These aren't the large boulders of waste seen in museums, but thin, brittle shards the size of a thumbnail—the vitrified residue of that marriage between wood-fire and stone-melt.

To a kid with a set of Lincoln logs, these were jewels. To the taxonomist I became, they are the only permanent residents. The trees were merely fuel, transient and replaceable, but this slag is a frozen scar. These shards will remain sharp and unyielding in the soil long after the current forest has rotted back into the earth.

The Benthic Pulse

Today, my focus has moved from trundling stones to observing the life struggling within the sediment. As a benthic taxonomist, I look at my watershed not as a bank vault, but as a slow-motion recovery.

I use the high-speed lens of AI not to distance myself from the muck, but to find the patterns of resilience that the human eye might miss—mapping the way a single species of sponge begins to anchor itself over the legacy of the bark.

The lineage of the Santa Clara Lumber Company is the foundation of my history here, but I am now in a more deliberate season of life. I am watching the recovery, identifying the small, overlooked organisms that anchor this system, and seeing if the land can finally outpace the legacy of the snubbing rope and the blast furnace.