- Hot summer day, ice cold drink.

It's one of life's simple pleasures.

But what did we do before refrigerators and freezers?

Well, in the dead of winter, people used to go out on frozen lakes and rivers and literally saw giant blocks of ice, put them in storehouses just to keep year round.

Sounds wild, right?

And a little bit exhausting.

But this was a huge industry on the Hudson River.

And on this episode of "Rolling Thru", we're going to find out how the Hudson changed the way we live.

Also on this episode, we're getting up close with some experimental farming and how it helps these little guys, then we'll end the day with some unforgettable views, after a couple of annoyances.

That's all up next, stick around.

This is "Rolling Thru", a bicycle travel show.

After slogging through the weather yesterday, Greg and I don't mind the climb as we start making our way into the rolling countryside outside Hudson.

As long as the sun's out and the skies blue, we're not asking for much more.

One thing becomes pretty clear out here.

There's no shortage of farms, and there's a reason for that.

This whole region sits on what used to be a massive prehistoric lake, Lake Albany.

When the glaciers melted, everything here was underwater.

And when that lake eventually drained, it left behind incredibly rich soil, which is why this valley has been primo farmland for generations.

But as the climate shifts and things get a little less predictable, farmers are being forced to adapt and fast.

So what do you do when the land you've relied on for generations is changing?

Well, that's where science comes in.

Dr.

Jen Phillips is a Professor at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, helping train the next generation to take on climate challenges like this.

She's also out here doing the work herself, as a scientist and a farmer, and a lot of it starts with getting experimental.

What does it take to farm in a changing climate?

That's a question that affects all of us.

So I'm at a farm that's experimenting in new approaches in climate resilience.

- Some of the things I'm doing here, quite novel for the area.

I'm also trying to experiment with how to really push the envelope on integrating trees into a farming system.

Classic sort of silvopasture would be just rows of trees that create shade, and ideally, you'd double duty so they'd be fruit trees, or nut trees, or something so that you're getting more bang for the buck out of the land.

But one of the things that I'm doing here that's more unique is I've planted trees that can be eaten by the livestock.

So we add in a whole 'nother level there.

These are fast-growing trees that the livestock can munch the leaves down two or three times a year through a rotational grazing system.

So they would come in, have a day to eat, and then leave.

So all of those trees will withstand that and grow back nicely.

And you let some of them get tall so that you provide habitat for birds.

And quite resilient because trees are deep rooted and they tend to be more drought-tolerant.

So even in a hot dry summer when the pasture is really starting to slow down, you can bring 'em in here and they've got plenty of forage to eat.

So it's a climate resilient strategy as well.

- And that's something that is at the forefront of most of your practices?

- Part of my interest is to sort of figure out management 'cause nobody knows how to manage these systems.

So how often do you cut the trees down?

How do you deal with deer pressure?

How closely spaced should they be?

Things like that, so there's an experimental element there too.

- What are you finding out so far in your experimentation?

- I mean, just the addition of trees is so critical the hotter it gets.

Animals need access to shade wherever they are.

They never are in a field where they don't have access to shade.

So when I first came to this farm, I initially just planted rows of black locust, which grows super fast everywhere.

So that I have that situation and it didn't take very many years to get to the point where I had shade everywhere.

But beyond that, thinking about diversification of the pastures is also important so that you've got plants that can withstand both hot and dry conditions and cool and wet because, you know, as we know, one of the things we're understanding better and better about climate change is that weather won't just kind of slowly get hotter, there's going to be extremes in both directions that, you know, and the extreme events are getting more extreme as we move on that trajectory.

- So climate change is here.

As a farmer, what are you going through?

What are you seeing?

- The trend for the Northeast is that it is going to get overall wetter, but we definitely see droughts because the distribution of rain is not what you really need.

The ideal is when you have rainfall distributed, you know, through time, and even if our annual total is a high number, if you have a month or a month and a half of low rainfall, it really has an impact.

In terms of long-term management, some of the trees I've planted are ones that we're at the very northern edge of its native range, but I know that, you know, 50 years from now, we'll be in the middle of it.

So I'm purposely choosing trees that can withstand hotter weather in terms of long-term management.

I'm a scientist by training, I think in terms of, I have questions and how do I answer those questions?

Let's run an experiment and find out.

Though I do think farmers in general tend to be experimentalists.

You know, they try out a new crop each year.

If we're going to really try to be innovative and push the envelope forward in terms of new approaches to sustainable farming, we need to be running experiments like this all over the place.

So I feel lucky to be able to be involved in that, and hopefully, I can support other farmers in trying out new things too.

- [Pat] Spend enough time out here and it seems to come back to the same thing, trees.

If they can help improve yield, make farms more resilient, and give animals a break, because let's be honest, they don't exactly have air conditioning, so maybe it's time to start designing farms more holistically.

Better for the flora, the fauna, and the farmer.

With the climate crisis at our front door, this is something we have to figure out with all of us in mind.

It's not a long ride to our next stop, and I'll take all the coasting I can get.

It's about 10 miles down the trail, but it builds on what we were just talking about.

Spoiler, it's trees again.

Not planting new ones, but protecting the ones that have been here a long time, and learning from them.

It's also where Jen teaches.

We're stopping to talk with one of her colleagues, Erik Kiviat.

He's a Research Associate at Bard and Executive Director and Co-Founder of Hudsonia, a research institute focused on environmental science.

And he has an uncanny superpower.

- Who does that is black birch.

This is not black birch, I'll find one.

(laughs) I have to smell it to make sure.

- Most of America's forests are surprisingly young, but old growth forests are a different story.

The rare, valuable, and a vital part of the climate solution.

So I'm here with Erik Kiviat of Hudsonia at an old growth forest, the Southwoods at Bard College.

- This is a 300-year-old forest.

We know that from tree cores and actually counting growth rings in some of the older trees.

The assumption is that it was cleared, logged sometime before 300 years, sometime in the, probably the late 1600s, and then protected and allowed to grow, essentially undisturbed since then.

And this is very unusual in the northeast.

We don't have a lot of forests that are this old, that are growing on deep fertile lowland soil.

It's special not only culturally, which I certainly acknowledge, but also as a research area because we have so few examples of what happens in a forest if it's not intensively managed in one way or another.

The story here that's really interesting to me as an ecologist is that in the 1970s, the trees here were two-thirds hemlock, eastern hemlock.

And the hemlocks have mostly been killed or at least badly injured by two species of non-native insects.

The one that's best known and familiar sounding is the hemlock woolly adelgid.

So that's the cause of the open areas in the tree canopy and all the dead wood that you see on the ground and standing.

There's some ecological features of a forest like this that are very interesting and important.

One, obviously, is that there's a lot of carbon that's sequestered and stored in the living and dead plant material and also in the soil.

And it's been learned relatively recently that as forests get old, you know, 100, 200, 300 years, for example, they continue to, in many cases, to sequester and store carbon at fairly high rates.

The carbon storages is in the trees, both living and dead.

It's in the downwood and other fallen material leaf litter and so on, but it's especially in the soils.

And this is something that the average forest doesn't have as much of because the soils are disturbed by logging and other activities.

Let me see if I can... These are oak seedlings here, at least.

- What would you say is the biggest threat that these forests are facing?

- Land use change.

- Yeah.

- Of agricultural development, and development for housing, and other things that people need.

I hope that it remains relatively undisturbed for another 300 years and much beyond that, and that people like me continue to study it.

In spite of what the colleges often say, we're not very good at predicting the future because there are too many unknowns and interacting variables.

That's one of the ways we learn to try to predict is by studying how things change when we're not monkeying with them.

- [Pat] Well, I do hope that people can get out into woods like this just to experience it.

You kind of have to be in it to get it.

- Yeah, we wouldn't be killing each other as much- Yeah.

- If we could spend more time walking around.

There's a lot of very interesting research findings in environmental psychology about how nature is beneficial.

- Yeah.

- For people.

There's a spiritual aspect, especially- - Yeah.

- In a place like this where you have an opportunity to see trees that are 300 years old.

- I had a long ride this morning and I already feel like, just like lighter in here.

- Oh, good.

- I'm just more at peace.

These ancient trees are powerful carbon sinks.

They're a living testament to the power of nature and an urgent reminder of what we need to protect.

Rejuvenated from a walk through the forest and an offscreen breakfast burrito, we roll further south.

And we're making good time, for the most part.

Thinking back to this morning, it's hard not to appreciate just how lush this stretch is.

The shade from the trees, the breeze coming up the valley, it's the kind of place you want to hold onto.

We spent the last couple days on the east side of the Hudson, but this afternoon, we're heading over to the west.

And just when it feels like we might actually be ahead of schedule, fate steps in.

We got a tip that we could be fined a lot of money for riding on this path, so we don't.

♪ Swallow the shame ♪ ♪ But keep it tight ♪ We're crossing the Hudson.

We're going to cross this today and we're going to cross it tomorrow.

Well, this is one gap in the trail that I wish did not exist.

It's a little unsafe because they make you take the bikes on the unprotected bike lane along the roadway there.

But you have cars screaming past 55 miles an hour while you're over this several hundred foot bridge.

They do have a protected walkway, but you're not allowed to bring bikes on it.

So one would think they could forsake the shoulders on the bridge.

They just widen this path to make it multi-use for pedestrian and bicyclists.

But I guess not everything can be perfect.

Once we're in the clear, it's back to pushing the pace, trying to make up lost time.

And I've got a feeling I'll be able to catch my breath when we get there, because our next stop is built for exactly that.

We're in Sojourner Truth State Park, which opened in 2022, and already, they've got big plans.

Soon, this park will include a public swimming area, expanded trails, and new places for the community to come together.

What happens when you name a state park after an icon of justice?

I'm at the Sojourner Truth State Park to find out how land can connect us to legacy and a deeper history.

And the Empire State Trail runs right through it.

- Absolutely.

(laughs) So we have great access by bicycle.

The Empire State Trail connects to the Kingston Green Line Trail, so you can ride here from the city of Kingston without taking a vehicle or another vehicle.

- Can you tell me a bit about what this was before it became a state park?

- You can't talk about this land without talking about Lenape ancestral lands.

They lived here in the 17th and 18th centuries until they were eventually removed.

And then this became a quarry in a brick building center for... A lot of the bricks here were used on the buildings in New York City.

In the late '70s, it stopped functioning as a brick making facility, was just basically abandoned and used by the local citizens as the same thing we're using it for, recreation, basically, 'cause it is so beautiful here.

Eventually, the land was bought by developers and the grassroots efforts stopped that, and that led to this becoming a state park.

And we're sitting here in this riverfront pavilion that's been established and built here.

It's just amazing river views with eagles and giant boats going by.

It's very peaceful.

We'll have trails down to a babbling brook where you can have a peaceful moment, and all throughout the property there'll be trails along the river where you can just take in nature and relax.

And we know that nature reduces blood pressure and helps you sleep better, you know, puts a smile on your face.

So that's really what we want to inspire here.

- Naming it after Sojourner Truth, can you tell me about the decision to name this park after her?

- Well, absolutely, Sojourner Truth grew up in this area not far from the park where it is.

And she walked from where she lived, on the outskirts of Kingston, and took a five mile walk with her youngest child, Sophia, to free her illegally enslaved son.

So she walked to the Kingston Courthouse, the five or six miles that it was right here in Kingston.

And, you know, she made history by freeing her son and she made history by continuing her efforts to be a freedom fighter.

- [Pat] By securing the freedom of her son, Peter, it was one of the first times a black woman successfully challenged a white man in court in the United States.

She went on to become a powerful voice for justice, traveling the country and speaking out against slavery and for women's rights.

And this region remained home.

She built a life here and would return home between those travels.

So naming a place like this after her, a place where people can spend time with the land and the river and can reflect, it feels like a fitting tribute.

- We really wanted to honor her legacy with a new park in this area.

She was the obvious choice.

- Yeah.

- And since this place, this land has history with indigenous people, and Sojourner Truth, and Industry, we kind of wanted to make interpretation and educational resources available so everybody could kind of understand all that took place here and honor and respect that and reflect on it.

- And what's your hope for people when they come visit this park?

- Well, I just hope that they're just awe-inspired and also rejuvenated and relaxed and see that we also bring these beautiful spaces and save these beautiful spaces and create these beautiful spaces.

I think that the rock formations here are amazing.

I don't, you know, it's been quarried, but there's so many rock formations left here and there's a lot of quartz and calcite, so it's pretty amazing to walk around and see quartz on the ground, like out in the wild.

It's something you usually see at a gem store.

So I really think besides things that other parks have to offer, like swimming facility and hiking trails, we have these just wonderful geological formations that are awe-inspiring and amazing.

And I really hope people come just for that and enjoy everything else while they're here.

- All right, Jeff, thank you so much.

- My pleasure.

- It was great talking to you.

- Yeah, enjoy the rest of your ride.

- Another theme of today, we're running a little short on time.

And that's not meant to be a climate change joke, but if you want one, there's a freebie.

It turns out our next stop closes earlier than we thought.

So Greg and I are back to hustling.

(bright music) The Hudson comes in and out of view as we ride just glimpses of its shimmering through the trees.

(bright music continues) And even when we lose sight of it, it's nice knowing it's still there.

It's been a lifeblood to this region for generations.

People have relied on it in all kinds of ways, fishing, sailing, and harvesting.

So for our last stop of the day, we make our way to Kingston and the Hudson River Maritime Museum.

The Hudson River used to be a large highway for commerce, from ice harvesting to steamboats.

So I'm at the Hudson River Maritime Museum to learn about its wild past and its green future.

And a lot of people made their living on this river like you're saying.

- Yeah.

- Like fishermen and the ice harvesters.

- So this is the way that people, you know, preserve their food and chill their beverages is by ice from the river.

So as soon as it got to a certain thickness, they would send out these teams of horses with these giant saws and they would cut them into squares and bring them with the horses to these ice houses, which were massive.

- Yeah.

- They were huge wooden structures lined with straw and with many floors that were like not full floors, you know, and they would stack the ice in there and pack in the straw, and they would then ship it via boat or, you know, canal boat or, not canal boat, barges and railroads to the city's Albany in New York and all the cities in between.

- And then people could have ice in their drinks.

- They could have ice in their drinks.

- In July.

- Exactly, exactly.

And, you know, it was as dangerous as it looks.

Like they, you know, they lost horses, they lost men.

And it looks, you know, to us, it looks like insanity, you know, but this is what... This is how it went.

And now, because of climate change, the river doesn't even really freeze over, hardly at all anymore.

- Well, speaking of that, can we also- - Yeah.

- Go to- - Absolutely.

- The display that I saw.

- Sure.

(bright music) So it's very obvious to us who do our work here, right on the waterfront of the river.

The river's only about a half a mile out there.

And it's very obvious to us that climate change is real and so is the rising waters, it's happening.

We have more floods here than we ever have had before.

They're more frequent, they're higher, and it's definitely getting worse.

You know, the rainstorms are worse, everything is changing in those two.

You know, the floods are higher, the floods are more frequent, and the rains are hugely hard for the storm drains to handle.

That's the truth with all the cities along this river, and probably in New York state.

The, you know, these older towns have very antiquated storm drain construction and they can't handle this kind of tropical flooding.

We feel like we decided years ago, a few years ago, that this was one of the biggest stories that we needed to tell about the history of the river because it's going to change everything about the river.

The chemistry of the river, the salinity of the river, the temperature of the river, the wildlife in the river, the borders, you know, the actual shorelines, and the towns, and the people, and the businesses, everything's going to change.

And it's going to happen, I think, relatively slowly, but it's going to get faster and faster as it starts to get worse because of what's happening up north.

I think I would want a young person to know the incredible history of the river, what happened on the river, and the biggest message I'd like to give to young people is that water connects the entire world.

You literally can go anywhere on the water, anywhere.

And what I like to say to kids is, "Yeah, you can go out in your boat or on Solaris, and when you get to the lighthouse, you can turn right and go to New York City, and you can turn left and go to Albany, or you could even go to Buffalo, or you can even go to Detroit," you know?

And they're like, "What?"

They don't think of water as a transportation, a mode of transportation.

They just, you know, so that would be, I think the biggest thing that just kind of blows their minds when you say it to them.

- And that's why we got to protect it.

It's a nice thought, water connecting all of us.

And it goes beyond that.

Water is a vital part of our world, just like the land, and we depend on it.

We can take a moment by it to reflect or to learn.

As we follow the Hudson and ride through places like this, you start to see how all of it is connected.

If we rely on it this much, the way it shapes the places we live and the lives we build, then it's something worth caring for.

On the next episode of "Rolling Thru", we get closer than ever to the end of our journey.

But before that, we find purpose in repurposing.

♪ And the shadows learn to swim ♪ ("Unawake" by Bear Grass plays) ♪ I'm unawake, I'm unawake, I'm unaware ♪ ♪ Are the pieces hanging there ♪ ♪ And would I grab them if I cared ♪ ♪ Instead I sleep ♪ ♪ Pretend to dream ♪ ♪ Pretend that all my thoughts ♪