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Table
of Contents
Acknowledgments
Adirondacks to Alaska
By George Marshall
Bob Marshall Chronology
Adirondack Writings of Bob Marshall
I. PEAK-BAGGER
The High Peaks of the Adirondacks
The Adirondack Mountain Club’s first publication.
Whiteface Mountain
Bob bags his first High Peak but isn’t overly impressed
by the view.
Mount Marcy
“I congratulate you for being the highest man in this great
state.”
Herbert Peak
The Marshall brothers name a rarely visited mountain after their
trusty guide.
A Day on the Gothics
A Herculean hike in the Great Range.
Mountaineering in the Adirondacks
The Marshalls and Herb Clark bag eighteen peaks in thirteen days.
A Winter Ascent of MacIntyre
The only track encountered is that of a panther.
Adirondack Peaks
Back from Alaska, Bob climbs fourteen mountains in a single day.
Night Trip on Ampersand Mountain
Sunrise and sunset from a favorite summit.
Wilmington Walk
Two young brothers stroll sixty miles around Whiteface Mountain.
II. POND-HOPPER
Week-End Hikes in the Cranberry
Lake Region
The forestry student visits ninety-four ponds and ten summits
in the
summer of 1922.
The Hikes:
1. Horseshoe Circle
2. Bog River
3. Tupper Lake
4. Grass Pond Mountain Expedition
5. Heath Pond
6. Nicks Pond
7. Star Lake
8. Hornet Pond
9. Five Ponds
10. East Mountain
11. Nehasane
Origin of Names in the Region
The pond-hopper explores the history of Cranberry Lake toponyms.
Dawn in the Woods
Verse inspired by Adirondack ramblings.
History of Cranberry Lake
Tribute to Fide Scott, Reuben Wood, Verplanck Colvin and other
worthies.
Why I Want to Become a Forester
in the Future
The high-school boy is father to the man.
III. PRESERVATIONIST
Recreational Limitations to Silviculture
in the Adirondacks
The budding conservationist makes his polemical debut.
The Perilous Plight of the Adirondack
Wilderness
Entering the fray over building cabins in the state Forest Preserve.
Zoning the Forest Preserve
Why some lands should be left pristine, with not even a trail.
Comments on Commission’s
Truck Trail Policy
The seasoned preservationist takes on the state’s conservation
commissioner.
Calkins Creek
Road to ruin in the Cold River country.
Largest Roadless Areas in U.S.
The Adirondack Park is home to three of the largest wild tracts
in the East.
The Problem of the Wilderness
Marshall’s classic apology for the preservation of wild
lands.
IV. PORTRAIT ARTIST
Herb Clark
“The fastest man I have ever known in the pathless woods.”
Mills Blake—Adirondack Explorer
A tribute to Verplanck Colvin’s right-hand man.
Mills Blake: Obituary
The celebrated Adirondack surveyor dies in 1930.
An Evening with Professor Einstein
The renowned physicist pays a visit to the Marshall camp.
V. NOVELIST
An Island in Oblivion
Adirondack passages from an unpublished novel.
Supplementary Material
Related Articles
Contribution to the Life History
of the Northwestern Lumberjack
By Bob Marshall
Approach to the Mountains
By George Marshall
Lost Pond
By George Marshall
Bob Marshall, Mount Marcy—and
the Wilderness
By Paul Schaefer
The Strange History of the Names
of an Adirondack High Peak
By Philip G. Terrie
A Short History of Adirondack
Peak-Bagging
By Phil Brown
Forty-Six—But Who’s
Counting?
By Bill McKibben
Bibliographical Information
1. Sources of Articles
2. Other Works Cited
Bob Marshall Great Wilderness
The big idea for the western Adirondacks.
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Editor’s
Preface
It was a cool, clear morning
in September. On a day like this you can see forever from a mountaintop.
Starting down the trail at Heart Lake, I felt a slight regret
that I would not
be going to a bald summit. My destination was Lost Pond, and
I would spend a good part of the day thrashing about in a dense
spruce forest. When I got to the register I met a man heading
for Nye and Street mountains. Neither peak has great views. Like
me, this fellow seemed to be going out of his way to avoid the
inspiring panoramas that could be seen that day from a number
of mountains in the vicinity. How to explain such behavior? After
the trail forked and we parted, the answer struck me: Each of
us was following in the footsteps of Bob Marshall.
Like many Adirondack hikers,
I became interested in Bob Marshall when I started climbing the
forty-six High Peaks. Marshall, along with his younger brother,
George, and their guide, Herb Clark, were the first to ascend
them all, starting with Whiteface Mountain in 1918 and finishing
on Mount Emmons in 1925.1 Bob’s booklet on the High Peaks
(reprinted here) was the first publication of the fledgling Adirondack
Mountain Club. Over the next decade, only two people duplicated
their feat. In time, bagging the forty-six evolved into an Adirondack
tradition. More than five thousand hikers have now done it.
Bob Marshall loved all wilderness,
regardless of its elevation. When he was a forestry student at
Cranberry Lake, he spent his weekends trekking through the wilds
of the northwestern Adirondacks, visiting nearly a hundred ponds
and rating their scenic beauty. His account of these hikes, in
the form of a typewritten manuscript, can be found at the New
York State College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse.
My initial idea for a book was to retrace these hikes and publish
Marshall’s manuscript, supplemented by my own observations.
But soon after undertaking my research, I discovered that Marshall
wrote a good deal more about the Adirondacks, and I decided that
my book could perform a greater service by collecting these writings
in one volume.
Those who know Marshall solely
by his national reputation will discover in these pages the source
of the passion that inspired him to become a leader of the wilderness
movement. Although he grew up in New York City, he spent his
boyhood summers at the family’s camp, Knollwood, on Lower
Saranac Lake. The camp became a base for explorations. At first,
these were limited to walks in the adjacent woods, but as he
grew older, Bob began venturing deeper into the wilderness and
up mountains. By age seventeen, he had decided to go into forestry,
because, as he wrote in a high-school essay, “I love the
woods and solitude.”
His decision must have been influenced
by his father, Louis Marshall, a prominent attorney who helped
found the New York State College of Forestry,2 where Bob
enrolled in 1920. Louis Marshall instilled in all his children
an appreciation of the importance of preserving the natural world.
(Both of Bob’s brothers, George and James, devoted much
of their lives to conservation in the Adirondacks and elsewhere.)
At the New York State constitutional convention of 1894, Louis
Marshall fought successfully for amending the constitution to
declare that the Adirondack Forest Preserve “shall be forever
kept as wild forest lands,” thus making them among the most
protected lands in the world. Writing to Bob in 1927, he recounts
a discussion with a potential developer of his beloved Adirondacks:
I said half jocularly in the
course of my argument that I would continue the fight as long
as I lived, and if I did not succeed in finishing it I would
put a clause in my will in which I would ask my children to continue
the fight. I am quite sure that they would do so whether I asked
them or not.3
By then, of course, Bob had already
joined the fight, and he would go on, in 1935, to organize the
Wilderness Society, which became one of the nation’s leading
preservationist groups. His earliest writings about the Adirondacks
evince a wilderness aesthetic that he stayed true to his entire
life. In The High Peaks of the Adirondacks, written while a sophomore
in college, he rails against the ravages to the forest caused
by logging and fires and longs for vistas that lack any sign
of man. “It’s a great thing these days,” he says,
“to leave civilization for a while and return to nature.”
In “Recreational Limits to Silviculture in the Adirondacks,”
published just after he graduated, Marshall sets forth arguments
for preservation that he would develop and refine in later essays,
culminating in the celebrated “The Problem of the Wilderness.”
Marshall’s work with the
U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs introduced
him to the country’s grandest scenery—in the Rockies,
the Southwest and Alaska—but he never lost his affection
for the Adirondacks. He returned often, and he picked up his
pen whenever he felt compelled to defend the Forest Preserve
against those who would trammel it. In various articles, he opposes
the construction of truck trails and cabins in the Preserve and
argues for leaving large tracts entirely natural, with no trails
or campsites. And when he cataloged the nation’s major roadless
areas in 1936, in order to call for their protection, he remembered
to include his old haunts: the High Peaks and the territory south
of Cranberry Lake.
Marshall’s enthusiasm for
nature turned him into a hiking machine. He thought nothing of
trekking thirty or forty miles through wild country—a habit
he developed as a youth in the Adirondacks. He and George once
walked sixty miles in a day: They left Knollwood at 5:40 a.m.
to circumambulate Whiteface Mountain and straggled back after
midnight. Herb Clark led the young men on numerous big hikes
in the High Peaks, including a traverse of the largely trailless
Dix Range. In 1934, on a trip back to the Adirondacks, Marshall
set a record by climbing fourteen peaks in a single day. In a
remarkable coincidence, he met another ardent conservationist,
Paul Schaefer, on top of Mount Marcy that afternoon. This book
contains both Marshall’s account of his marathon hike and,
in an appendix, Schaefer’s article about their summit meeting.
Those who share Marshall’s
love of the Adirondacks should get a kick out of reading about
his adventures and comparing his experiences with their own.
Anyone who has climbed Haystack or visited the Five Ponds, for
example, will recognize much in his portrayals of these places.
But it’s striking how much has changed since the 1920s—and
for the better. In his wanderings, Marshall often encountered
slash left behind by lumbermen and gazed out over land that had
been burned or clear cut. Time has healed most of the scars.
Overall, the Adirondack Park is a wilder place today, thanks
in part to conservationists like Bob Marshall.
Marshall’s accounts of his
Adirondack adventures and his polemics for preservation take
up the bulk of this book, but we’ve rounded it out with
several others of his pieces, including profiles of Herb Clark
and Mills Blake, the 19th-century surveyor; notes from a dinner
with Albert Einstein, who vacationed in Saranac Lake; excerpts
from an unpublished novel partially set in the Adirondacks, and
“Contribution to the Life History of the Northwestern Lumberjack,”
a humorous article that exhibits one of Marshall’s salient
personality traits, a finely honed sense of the absurd. Though
not about the Adirondacks, it might just as well have been written
about the Adirondack lumberjack.
Like his brother, George Marshall
grew up to become a staunch conservationist and defender of the
Adirondacks. He, too, was a writer. His heartfelt portrait, “Adirondacks
to Alaska: A Biographical Sketch of Bob Marshall,” is the
ideal introduction to this book, for it provides an overview
not only of Bob’s life, but also of Bob’s writings.
At the end of the book, I’ve included two other articles
by George Marshall in which he reminisces about hiking in the
Adirondacks.
Which brings me back to Lost
Pond. In one of those articles, George extols this remote jewel,
located high on a trailless peak. He and Bob bushwhacked to it
more than once. George remarks that Lost Pond, “surrounded
as it is by a splendid forest and with high hills rising from
its steep banks, seemed one of the most beautiful and wildest
spots we had ever seen.” That was enough to get me to go—even
if it meant skipping a panoramic vista. As for the other fellow
on the trail that morning, he completed his High Peaks circuit
that very day on Nye and Street. I imagine he’ll be designated
Forty-Sixer No. 5,601 or whatever. I hope he takes the time to
get to know the first three.
—Phil Brown
NOTES
1 George Marshall, letter to Grace Hudowalski, March 1, 1951.
It was the Marshalls’ intention to climb all the Adirondack
mountains that are four thousand feet or higher. Later surveys
indicated that four of the original forty-six peaks are below
four thou- sand feet and that one not on the list, MacNaughton
Mountain, is in fact four thou- sand feet. In the letter to Hudowalski,
George Marshall notes that the three men climbed MacNaughton
two days after ascending Emmons. Despite the new measure- ments,
Forty-Sixers continue to follow the traditional list.
2 The forerunner of the New York
State College of Environmental Science and
Forestry.
3 Quoted in Glover 1986, p. 86.
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