Mark Wilson, a member of the Lake Placid Shore Owners’ Association, drives his boat on Lake Placid on Sept. 24 as he prepares to test water quality and clarity on the lake. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

LAKE PLACID — A cool wind whipped around Mark Wilson on Saturday, Sept. 24, as he leaned over the side of his boat and reeled in a water clarity-testing tool from the middle of Lake Placid, his eyes squinted and eyebrows furrowed as he stared into the water with concern.

Wilson is a former president and current member of the Lake Placid Shore Owners’ Association, and he’s been collecting data as a citizen scientist to test the lake’s water quality for the past 27 years. In the last few years, he’s noticed a new, “cautionary” trend appearing in his data sets: Lake Placid’s “legendary” water clarity has shown long-term deterioration. This year’s data hasn’t been fully processed yet, Wilson said, but he’s noticed that the new clarity readings are even worse than last year’s. He calls this trend “the crossing of an unhappy threshold.”

“(There’s) no indication that the trend is changing,” Wilson said.

Lake Placid’s water quality and clarity are important, Wilson said, and not just to the community pride that’s accompanied the lake’s reputation for clarity. The lake is the source of the village’s drinking water.

“There’s always the Adirondack credo of, ‘leave a place better than when you found it,'” Wilson said, “and we’re clearly failing in that regard.”

Mark Wilson tests the clarity of Lake Placid’s water with a Secchi disk on Sept. 24. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

Though the Lake Placid Shore Owners’ Association has worked to encourage healthy vegetative buffers and environmentally sound practices on the lake, the association doesn’t have the power to enforce these practices. Wilson thinks that maintaining Lake Placid’s water quality is everyone’s responsibility — including local governments that could implement more regulations on the lake.

“It’s a problem that should be of concern to the entire community,” he said. “Over the years, people who are privileged to be on the lake have urged more protections from the village, and that waxes and wanes.”

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Culprits

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On Sept. 24, Wilson gathered a few supplies — water jugs, a Secchi disk, some forms on a clipboard, a steaming mug of coffee — and climbed into his small motor boat at his dock on Lake Placid. He was on his way to collect water quality and clarity data from Lake Placid for the eighth and last time of the season. It was a classic autumn morning in the Adirondacks, evidenced by the cold motor of Wilson’s boat that refused to start several times before finally warming and shuddering to life. But nearby, an unusual sight floated in the bay: A large swath of Northern Pipewort.

Pipewort itself isn’t harmful, Wilson said. It’s a native plant that grows in Adirondack marshes and bays. But over the last few years, its presence has grown in the lake. Wilson said he’s never seen this much of it before. He thinks the increase in pipewort is not only a symptom of increasing phosphorus and nitrogen levels in the lake — which can be caused by excess water runoff, sewage and chemical fertilizers, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation — but that it could also be one cause of Lake Placid’s decreasing water clarity.

But Wilson said that one of the biggest culprits for decreasing water clarity in Lake Placid — and in any lake — is shoreline development. He said there’s been a lot of turnover in shoreline properties on Lake Placid over the last four to five years, and some people have cleared their land all the way up to the shoreline. Heavy rainfalls there can create excess stormwater runoff that can wash dirt and sediment into the lake as well as increase its nitrogen and phosphorus levels.

“People come in, you know, with their own kind of ideas of how they want their place to look,” Wilson said. “And a lot of it’s kind of imported notions from places that don’t have the same environment (as the Adirondacks),” he said. “A lot of it involves clear lawns right down to the water’s edge. That lack of a vegetative buffer just increases the type of runoff that’s most likely to both increase the nutrients in the lake but also increase the sediments in the lake.”

Heavy boat traffic is another big contributor to decreasing water quality, Wilson said. He thought that there was growing popularity in wakeboarding on the lake, with boats weighed down in the back to create as much wake as possible. On a lake known for its placidity, the manmade wake stirs up more organic matter than is usually present in Lake Placid.

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Citizen science

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Citizen science efforts to track Lake Placid’s water quality and clarity started in 1991. The data is compiled through the DEC’s Citizens’ Statewide Lake Assessment Program — CSLAP — with samples and physical data gathered eight times a year from June to September. Each year, Wilson collects surface water samples and deep water samples, as well as water clarity measurements with a Secchi disk, for the program.

A Secchi disk is a flat disk used to test water clarity. Measuring clarity with the disk isn’t a perfect science, Wilson said, because the measuring process relies heavily on the human eye. But Wilson doesn’t think his eyes are deceiving him when it comes to decreasing water quality.

On his last sampling foray this September, Wilson lowered the disk into the lake by a measuring tape attached to its center. As soon as the disk disappeared out of his sight, he measured how far the disk was from the water’s surface. Then, he raised the disk and measured the distance to the point at which it reappeared. The Secchi measurement is the average of those two numbers. Usually — and in perfect conditions, according to Wilson — Lake Placid’s Secchi measurement is somewhere between eight and nine meters. Wilson said that’s been dropping to between six and seven meters in recent years as the water’s clarity decreases. On Sept. 24, the final measurement was 6.7 meters.

People can view Lake Placid’s CSLAP data on the DEC’s website at tinyurl.com/2yebub4z.