Adirondack Peeks Summer 2025

SR: After working for two weeks on the Gothics via Pyramid trail you spent the remainder of the summer as a member of the Johns Brook Lodge (JBL) hut crew. In one account you wrote, I saw the whole range of hikers — both those who stayed at the lodge and those who passed by. As is the case today, there were those who were supremely well prepared and those who had no idea what it meant to hike a mountain trail. Most telling were the hikers who arrived at JBL and asked, “Where’s the top?” TG: I was a hut boy during the summer of 1966 and 1967 and the Hut Master in 1968. Now it’s generically referred to as the hut crew, but we were the hut boys back then. This year is the centennial of the first year that JBL was in operation. I’ve contacted some of the older hut crew members that I know from the years before I was there. The dad of a family that came regularly during the three years that I was there was a hut boy in the 1940s. His daughter and her husband are excited to come back and participate in the celebration. So indirectly we’ll span from the 1940s to the current day. SR: In 1974 you were hired as one of the three ridge runners for the new ADK Ridge Runner Program that was designed to educate the sizable increase of hikers that were flooding into the high peaks. In Adirondack Archangels you write, Modeled after a hiker education program of the same name in the White Mountains, ADK’s effort put three ridge runners out for 10 days at a time to patrol, observe and educate users. This was at a time when no forest rangers regularly patrolled the trails and campsites, and the interior caretakers tended to stay in their “ranger” cabins and then clean up after the campers had left. . . . At the time there was no limit on the size of camping groups, nor were there any restrictions on where one could camp. I and the other ridge runners therefore could only appeal to the better judgment of leaders of camping groups of 40 or those preparing to pitch a tent on the tundra. While the trash can and stone shelter on Marcy were gone by then, there was still trash stuffed into seemingly every little crevice, so a general clean up was in order on each ascent. (p. 140) Your writings indicate that the following year the DEC created the “wilderness ranger” position. These were full forest rangers who had no set ranger district and were expected to hike where there were crowds and educate. Pete Fish was one of the first, and of course the most famous. In 1978 the state funded seasonal “Park Rangers,” now called “Assistant Forest Rangers.” Unlike the ridge runners, they were uniformed with radios and the authority to issue warnings, including those for the newly enacted regulations: no camping above 4,000 feet, and a nine-person camping limit. (After 1978, the ridge runner program was phased out

in favor of more attention to trail maintenance — a division of labor that continues to this day.) Soon after serving as a ridge runner, at the age of 29, you became chief of ADK’s first professional trail crew. How long did you hold this position? Were you attempting to bring the White Mountains’ trail maintenance standard to the Adirondacks? TG: Yes. Definitely. I was the first trail crew chief at ADK for one year. During my first week on the job, we had a member of the AMC trail crew educate us on the AMC standards. He may have been a bit behind the times because he never focused much on rock work. We had crowbars, and we did some work with stepstones, but it was more focused on bog bridges, wooden steps, and wooden water bars. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s when one of the periodic bans on doing any tree cutting in the forest preserve was in effect that ADK brought in a fellow named Tom Parker who had done extensive trail work in both the White Mountains and out west. Tom came in and introduced the heavier rock work techniques to the ADK trail crew. Meanwhile, I had taken over ATIS and the prior supervision of the trail crew had been rather lax for a few Tony’s paternal grandmother on the summit of Marcy in 1909.

SUMMER 2025 | 11