Top Stories from NCPR News

The Nature Conservancy completes a 90,000-acre land deal in the Adirondacks... The city of Ogdensburg takes over a kosher cheese plant that failed to pay taxes... Saranac Lake settles a school-construction lawsuit from 2003... And we hear the Fort Ticonderoga Fife and Drum corps recreated music from the 1700s.

Governor Paterson and legislative leaders say they’ve taken a major step towards reducing the state’s deficit, after a rare mid-summer budget cutting session. Karen DeWitt reports.

Years of litigation and expense for the Saranac Lake School District came to an end last night when the school board voted to approve a settlement offer from contractors blamed for problems with a capital building project. The agreement settles a lawsuit the district filed against three different contractors in 2003. As Chris Knight reports, school officials say the settlement means the district’s taxpayers will be paid back for the cost of fixing the school buildings.

If you go to Fort Ticonderoga this summer, you’ll find centuries-old stone walls and a new education center. But you’ll also find music and pageantry. For more than three decades the Fort’s Fife and Drum Corps has been researching and recreating the traditional military and folk music of the 1700s. The musicians are all paid professionals, who spend years in apprenticeship learning their art. But as Brian Mann reports, they’re also high school students recruited from bands in nearby towns and villages.

Students are filtering back to the North Country’s campuses. At St. Lawrence University, one small group is heading out, away from campus on a backpacking trip into the Adirondack High Peaks.
The dozen students and two leaders of the Adirondack Semester will split into groups to meet trip size limits in the wilderness area. They’ll end up at the college’s remote yurt village at the Massawepie Boy Scout camp. They’ll spend the semester there, off the grid…and off the world wide web.
Each carries a big pack — half to three-quarters of his or her body weight — for the seven day trip in. Martha Foley caught assistant director Marianne Dawson giving a lesson on the ABC’s of loading up.

The 27th annual Adirondacks National Exhibition of American Watercolors opens at the Arts Center Old Forge this weekend. It features watercolor paintings from across the U.S., Canada and Hawaii. Todd Moe spoke with curator Miriam Kashiwa about the lure of watercolors.

This week, Martha Foley and Dr. Curt Stager continue their discussion about eggs, exploring the color and shape of birds' eggshells, from green, white and brown to pointy and ovoid.