Quotes about Adirondack Wilderness

The beauty and wildness of the Adirondacks have inspired the people who spend time among the mountains and the valleys, along the pristine lakes and rushing rivers for as long as we know. 

Many artists, writers, leaders, activists, and scientists write about their time in the Adirondacks. Below we share a few experts that illustrate the wonder of the wild Adirondack Park. 

“Not all people feel they need to have wilderness, but I do. If things go bad and everything seems to go wrong, the best place to go is right into the remote wilderness, and everything's in balance there.” 

Clarence Petty

 “It isn't important if you reach the summit… what matters is how you make the climb. We were never lost, but there were lots of times when we didn't know where we were.”

Grace Hudowalski – first woman to become an Adirondack 46'er

"There is just one hope for repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every inch on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom and preservation of the wilderness."

Bob Marshall

“How I wish to fly with the geese away from dreary November days, the "freeze-up," and cruel winter. Away from loneliness, isolation, and anxiety bred by blizzards. Most every local person I've talked to grudgingly admits to an autumn apprehension. It is part and parcel of an Adirondacker's psychological makeup. The geese contaminate us with this strange depression on their southbound fligt and cure us with their northbound. In between, we try to tolerate winter, each in his or her own way.”

Anne LaBastille, Woodswoman I: Living Alone in the Adirondack Wilderness

The Adirondack forest itself has experienced dramatic change. Of its six-million acres, perhaps no more than 20% escaped the blades of the plow and ax at the peak of clearing. Yet today, nearly three-million acres are returning to old-growth conditions under the protection of the Forest Preserve. 

"More than 90% of all wildlife species found in the northeastern United States now call this forest home.  Among them are many that had once nearly or completely disappeared, including moose, marten fisher, beaver, peregrine falcon, and bald eagle.  And perhaps the cougar too."

Bill Weber, forward to the Adirondack Atlas by Jerry Jenkins

"This Park is different from any other in the nation, a place where epiphany has some hope of lasting and not disappearing on one’s return to the workaday world.  Here epiphany and routine commingle, balance rules, and human history makes a dent in the landscape, but not a hole."

Bill McKibben, forward to The Adirondacks: Wild Island of Hope by Gary Randorf

"It is now or never for the Adirondacks if we are to preserve forever that which is its most priceless and rarest quality – wildness.  We are well into the second century of the Adirondack Park.  What better time to act than now to make this the true park it has the potential to be, to ensure that the Adirondacks will forever be a wild island of hope for New Yorkers and the world, and to serve as a global model for integrated land use and conservation."

Gary Randorf  in The Adirondacks: Wild Island of Hope

"…[T]he magnificence of the Adirondacks is ours to behold primarily because a group of New Yorkers had the foresight a century ago to take special measures to protect it.  Those ecological pioneers joined together in 1895 and declared with simple eloquence that these lands be “forever wild.” They wrote into law the simple truth that we could no longer hope to survive if we went on destroying the natural surroundings that support us all."

Gov. Mario Cuomo, forward to 100 Views of the Adirondacks, by Nathan Farb

Photography generously contributed by Carl Heilman II.