Adirondack Peeks Summer 2024

be outdoors while giving back to the local community. We want newcomers to take care of our mountains and our trails and our local communities when they visit. So, we welcome them, and we want them to continue to visit in the future. I think in the end a lot of good came from it. SR: Is there a program or event that has advanced the organization during your time as president that you are most proud of? LR: We have several organizations ask us for funds. Dur ing my term, one of the things that we did was to formalize the donation process, and now we have a system in place with specific guidelines for requesting funds. Guidelines related to the time of year these requests need to be submitted, as well as other criteria related to the use of the funds. This helps us to budget and choose organiza tions that are aligned with our values. We have a fantastic board of directors, and this is all done as a team. It is not just me. This was the first year we used the process, and it worked quite well. SR: What would you say as president are your biggest challenges today? LR: I think our biggest challenge is trying to get more vol unteers. If everybody would think about their skill set and what they might do to help in some way, we could double, triple, quadruple the number of volunteers that we have. People think that to work with the trail crew, you must be able to manhandle logs or a two-man crosscut saw, but you don’t! Do you like to bake? If so, then meet the trail crew in the parking lot and give them cookies! It all helps. I believe that overcoming this [type of misperception] is the biggest challenge we need to work on. SR: I remember there was a time that people were dis cussing making volunteering part of the requirement for becoming a 46er. Does that topic come up anymore? LR: Yes, it does come up from time to time and there are a couple of things that make it difficult. One problem is the more volunteers you have, the more volunteers you need to organize them. For example, we have 100 trail head stewards, and a volunteer currently spends their time scheduling these 100 volunteers for roughly 40 weeks a year. Last year we had over 800 finishers. If we require each finisher to volunteer, then our volunteers would have to manage all of that and that would be a hu mongous task. That's one side of the coin; the other is that we’ve been very fortunate and completely blessed by having volunteers who want to do what they're doing. They step forward happily with an open heart and mind. We don't want to have volunteers that come to a trail crew outing unhappy and complaining they had to be here to get the patch. They could pull down the whole group and ruin all the fun.

Grandchildren Payton and Damon on Summit of Panther Peak in the Catskills

the guidance provided by the New York State Depart ment of Health, which recommended people go outside, saying it was a safe place and a healthy thing to do. Nor mally we follow the New York State Department of Envi ronmental Conservation (DEC) guidance. So, when DEC says the trails are muddy, you shouldn't be out there, then we say the trails are muddy, you shouldn’t be out there. However, during the pandemic the DEC followed what the New York State Department of Health said, and no one expected to see the record number of people we saw that year in the Adirondacks and local stores. So, then the guidance became “recreate outside close to home.” Well, what does close to home mean? To you it may mean down the street where you can walk to it, but to another per son it may mean within a day's drive, and that created a bit of contention. The question was asked if we should stop counting people's hikes during the pandemic. There was internal discussion about that and, in the end, we felt like we had to do what New York State was saying to do. If New York State hadn’t closed the trails and they were saying go outdoors, we couldn't change that. It was dur ing this period we realized, as did other organizations, that there was a huge need for more outdoor education to teach how to recreate outdoors safely and responsi bly. We didn’t have our trail crews or trailhead stewards out there at first. We didn't know if we could keep them safe. There were a lot of things happening and we weren’t meeting for our dinners, annual gatherings, or even hav ing board meetings. That was when we started meeting on Zoom. We'd never had virtual meetings before. SR: You became Zoom experts! LR: Oh, yeah! In the end, we realized how important it is to welcome and educate people visiting the Adirondacks. It started some more programs like Adopt-a-Highway, which also presented another opportunity for people to

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