Byline: DAN FAGIN Newsday
LOON HOLLOW POND -- Cotton-ball clouds shimmer in the ripples of this hidden lake, 23 miles from the nearest road, as the thwack-thwacking of an approaching helicopter disturbs its mirrored surface.
The helicopter touches down, and Dale Bath unlatches a door and steps onto a pontoon float, uncoiling a rope and lowering a plastic container into the crystal-clear water with the practiced choreography that comes with 14 years of testing Adirondack waters.
In two minutes the water samples are collected, and Bath slams the door shut. The Bell 212 thwack-thwacks toward the next lake, and a curtain of silence again falls over Loon Hollow Pond. By all appearances, all signs of human presence vanish with the fading whine of the 30-year-old helicopter's twin engines.
But in the remote high plateau of the southwestern Adirondack Mountains, appearances are misleading. The water samples Bath collected at Loon Hollow Pond show the lake's pH level is an unnaturally low 4.77, about five times as acidic as clean water and too low for most fish to survive. A lake that is a day's hike from any paved surface is all but dead, a victim of a type of pollution that many Americans don't think about very much anymore: acid rain.
Almost halfway into a 20-year federal program to deeply cut emissions …
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