Adirondacks

I just spent a few days in the northern Adirondack Mts. of upstate New York. I was with the family, so could spend only two nights in the forest. It is normal to see hardly any mammals in boreal forests in winter, especially if you don’t have time for proper snow tracking, but I hoped that having a thermal scope would make things a lot easier. Turned out, not much. Despite below-freezing temperatures and a few inches of snow on the ground, I ended up seeing more amphibians than mammals (not counting deer along suburban roads): there were frogs sleeping on the bottom of springs and mudpuppies in streams. Good locations:
1. Bloomingdale Bog hiking trail (trailhead at 44.3632N 74.1510W): very long and easy trail through a variety of good habitats; lots of snowshoe hare tracks and a few mink and fisher tracks. I walked only 3 km in and saw just one snowshoe hare which was across a non-frozen stream and too far to photograph.
2. Silverlake Bog trail (trailhead at 44.5123N 73.883W): a half-mile boardwalk across a bog, continuing as an upland trail. A few snowshoe hare tracks, and just before the end of the boardwalk I briefly saw a southern bog lemming. Watch for spruce grouse.
3. Owen Pond trail (trailhead at 44.3256N 73.911W): a short trail with small elevation gain at the beginning; had weasel tracks on the shore of the pond and lots of rodent tracks; the latter mostly looked like deer mice and southern red-backed voles, but one belonged to a larger rodent, almost certainly a rock vole.
4. High Falls Gorge (parking at 44.3475N 73.8768W), a short boardwalk that was closed for the winter but accessible. I saw shrew tracks with very long tailprints there, likely of a long-tailed shrew.
5. Peninsula Trails (trailhead at 44.2989N 73.9946W), a network of short trails in Lake Placid, had tracks of a marten and a mink (the latter in hemlock forest below Lake Placid Dam); I also briefly saw a northern flying squirrel there, also near the dam. Watch for boreal chickadees in mixed flocks.