Chair

Jul 1, 2026

Tom Wheeler
adk3356@gmail.com

Mourning Adirondac

I believe it was former ADK magazine editor the late Barbara McMartin who said that you can tell the financial condition of the Adirondack Mountain Club by the size of its magazine.

We have had an announcement that there will be just one annual issue of Adirondac.

I believe that this is most unfortunate. I regret the diminution of this periodical. Since the founding of the club a regular publication has provided its members with steady contact with ADK, discussed important issues, told stories of adventure and misadventure, educated about nature, and developed the membership as advocates for the Forest Preserve.

I confess that when I became club president in 2003, owing to a financial crisis one of the methods we used to meet the budget deficit was a reduction in the number of pages in the magazine. I recognized that it was the single most important contact that the general membership had with the main club, and for that reason resisted proposals to eliminate it.

The club’s very modest presence on the internet is yet a poor substitute for this loss. So I am saddened to see the regular magazine go down this route. To honor it, I provide….

A short history of ADK magazines

In 1922, the year the Adirondack Mountain Club was founded, it began to print its first magazine, High Spots. Initially it was only four pages. Over the succeeding years the magazine expanded in frequency and quality such that by the early 1930s it was a quarterly of 32 pages. It contained articles on Adirondack history and important early Adirondack guides. It featured articles by such Adirondack luminaries as Paul Schaefer, Robert Marshall, and Russell Carson.

And there were debates discussing the conflict between recreational use and protection of the wilderness. Indeed, in Laura and Guy Waterman’s important work Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains, the authors recount how the issue of recreation versus preservation was debated in the Adirondack Mountain Club long before it was an issue elsewhere: “Be it noted that what was a peculiarly New York issue in the 1930s was destined to become a central concern of … environmentalists in the Northeast--and indeed throughout the nation--but not until a full generation later.” (p.399).

Two quotes from this period show the divide: “This club … needs to become trail-conscious again -- a mountain club that does not climb mountains has no excuse for being alive.” – A.T. Shorey

“The more that’s done for hikers in the forests, woods, and mountains, [to that extent] they fail to get the most out of it.… We must retain the challenging character of the Wilderness.” – Walter Collins O’Kane

The birth of Adirondac

By the end of the 1930s the Great Depression and the Second World War had devastated club finances such that High Spots became an annual, with its final issue in 1944. But things improved at the end of the war, and in 1945 Adirondac was launched. For its first 27 years, it was a modest black-and-white publication, just 5½ inches by 8½ inches of 24 pages. Yet it contained important articles about issues affecting the Adirondacks, the controversies about the formation of the Adirondack Park Agency, and the development of environmental ethics.

Eventually, the page size grew, and in 1982 the format changed into the more substantial magazine that is familiar to most of you. Edited for many years by our own Chapter member Neal Burdick, it was filled with timely articles and illustrated with beautiful color photographs. A vivid connection to the club for the average member, it helped create a real connection to the Adirondacks, something that the proposed substitute communications will have difficulty matching.

I mourn its passing.

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