Bob Marshall’s booklet online

Bob Marshall was one of the original Adirondack Forty-Sixers, but he thought he was born too late. He would have preferred to have lived in the nineteenth century, before the Adirondacks were overrun by civilization.

Bob Marshall

Well, Bob is now part of the twenty-first century.

John Warren, the guy behind the Adirondack Almanack, reports in his blog that a number of old Adirondack books have been digitized and put online. Among them is Marshall’s 1922 booklet The High Peaks of the Adirondacks. It can be read online or downloaded for free.

Marshall wrote the booklet after he and his younger brother, George, and their guide, Herb Clark, climbed all the peaks in the Adirondacks that surpass four thousand feet–or so they thought. At the time, they believed there were forty-two such peaks, but they later discovered they had missed four and climbed them as well. Subsequent surveys revealed that four of these forty-six peaks are less than four thousand feet, but peak-baggers still adhere to the traditional list established by the Marshalls and Clark.

Marshall’s booklet was the first publication of the fledgling Adirondack Mountain Club and, in effect, its first guidebook. In it, he briefly describes how they climbed each mountain, and he rates the view from each. His favorite view was from Mount Haystack: “It’s a great thing these days to leave civilization for a while and return to nature. From Haystack  you can look over thousands and thousands of acres, unblemished by the works of man, perfect as made by nature.”

The Marshalls and Clark were hiking at a time when the scars from logging and  forest fires were a common sight in the High Peaks, and these influenced his ratings. He complained about the slash and burned territory on Rocky Peak Ridge and proclaimed the view “hardly worth the trouble to obtain.” Today, the hike to this summit from New Russia is thought by some to be one of the best in the Adirondack Park.

Physical copies of The High Peaks of the Adirondacks are rare today, but it was reprinted in Bob Marshall in the Adirondacks: Writings of a Pioneering Peak-Bagger, Pond-Hopper and Wilderness Preservationist, which I edited and published in 2006.

Marshall was a student at the New York State College of Forestry when he wrote his booklet. He went on to work for the U.S. Forest Service, explore arctic Alaska, and help found the Wilderness Society. He died in 1939 at age thirty-eight. The following year, the federal government established the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana in his honor. One of the Adirondack High Peaks, Mount Marshall, is also named after him.

‘Wild Times’ is here

We at the Explorer just received copies of our new book, Wild Times, a full-color anthology of 120 hiking and paddling adventures from the past ten years of our newsmagazine.

Softcover, 132 pages, $14.95

This is news you can use, whether you’re looking to paddle a quiet river, spend time on an uncrowded summit, visit a fire tower, or jump in a lake. As in the Explorer, most of the stories are personal accounts of trips, accompanied by hand-drawn maps and color photographs.

Our writers, photographers, and artists made this publication possible. A lot of credit also goes to Susan Bibeau, our designer, who laid out the book.

Wild Times sells for $14.95 (or $13.95 if ordered from our Web site). That works out to about 12 cents an adventure. Not a bad deal.

You can find a few samples from Wild Times on our main Web site. The book can be ordered online and soon will be in stores.

To order from our home page, click on “Order Now” in the Wild Times box on the right side of the screen. That will bring you to the sample pages from the book. Click on “Order Now” again to get to the order form. Or you can simple click here to get to the form.

Top trails for your top dog

Cooling off on Ampersand Mountain. Photo by Nancie Battaglia.

If you read the Adirondack Explorer, you’re familiar with the work of Susan Bibeau. She designs our publication, and that’s lucky for us.

In recent months, Sue has been designing another publication: Dog Hikes in the Adirondacks: 20 Trails to Enjoy with Your Best Friend, a compilation of canine hikes by a variety of regional writers.

We just received a copy, and it looks great. The book includes more than twenty black-and-white photos of dogs lolling on mountaintops, splashing in ponds, and doing other doggy things. Most were taken by Nancie Battaglia. One of my favorites is of a dog soaking in a puddle on top of Ampersand Mountain.

Nancie did not get paid. Nor did Sue. Everyone worked for free on this project. For each book sold, $5 will be donated to animal shelters and humane organizations in the Adirondack Park.

 The names of at least three of the writers should be familiar to readers of the Explorer: Neal Burdick, Mary Thill, and Joanne Kennedy, all of whom have written for us. Other contributors to the book include Elizabeth Folwell and Annie Stoltie of Adirondack Life.

The destinations of the twenty hikes are typically small peaks, such as Sawyer Mountain near Indian Lake or Dewey Mountain near Saranac Lake, or a water body, such as Crane Pond or the Raquette River. In addition to the hike descriptions, the book contains tips on hiking with dogs. 

Dog Hikes in the Adirondacks was the brainchild of Libby Treadwell, the publisher, who operates Shaggy Dog Press in Westport.

It’s a slim softcover book, just sixty-four pages, that sells for $12.95.  It can be purchased online at Shaggy Dog Press. You also can obtain a copy by writing to Shaggy Dog Press at P.O. Box 318, Westport, NY 12993. There are plans to distribute it to bookstores as well.