ABSTRACT
The Whiteface Mountain Ski Center plays its role in this Park regime as a public recreational facility charged with providing public recreation, youth development programs, international competition and community development in a fiscally responsible manner. Ecology in the Adirondack Park is largely protected today by stringent precautionary principles imposed on state-owned lands late in the nineteenth century, and augmented and extended with state and private land use plans in the early 1970s. The popular perception is that the 'forever wild' status of most of the upper elevations of the Park provides ecological protection for those elements of the landscape, at least from local and regional development pressures. The state plan provides relatively few constraints on the new development within the hamlet centers of each community, but relatively tight regulation of the new land use and development in the open forested areas not under public ownership.
