Adirondack Peeks Summer 2025

Looking at maps. Taken by Nancie Battaglia photo to illustrate an article that was written about mapping.

was supposed to be a surprise. I received my copy when my father had just gone into the hospital for what turned out to be his last time. I took the book over to him and it was the last day that he was responsive. It’s unfortunate because here’s a book that he would absolutely love to read, but he could barely turn the pages. The next day he was unresponsive. SR: In reading your father’s memoirs, it becomes evident that Old Mountain Phelps made not only a significant impact on him but also on a number of 46ers insofar as they named their book after him. From Heaven Up-h’isted-ness! : Phelps loved his mountains. He was the discoverer of Marcy, and caused the first trail to be cut to its summit, so that others could enjoy the noble views from its round and rocky top. To him it was, in noble symmetry and beauty, the chief mountain of the globe. To stand on it gave him, as he said, “a feeling of heaven up h’isted-ness.” I’m sure you felt a weight of responsibility writing the introduction. What were some of the challenges? TG: At first, I was intimidated when Suzanne Lance asked me to do the introduction. She wanted me to focus on

some of the earliest history of the Adirondacks that no other authors were going to write about. Thankfully I had plenty of time for revisions. My research sent me back to Steven Sulavik’s Of Indians and Mountains, 1535– 1838 , to look for references to the earliest sightings of the Adirondacks, maybe a description of the mountains by the first explorers coming down Lake Champlain and seeing the mountains off to their right. I didn’t find that, but I did discover information about the Laconia company and details around their efforts to establish a fur trade with the Native People on Lake Champlain, which only later, after writing the introduction for the book, led me to speculate the reason why Darby Field climbed Mount Washington in 1642, which led me to write another article that would be published in Appalachia titled, “Darby Field, 1642 - Searching in Vain for Lake Champlain?” SR: Writing is an adventure! It takes you places you aren’t expecting. There is so much learning in writing, as much as in reading. You wrote the foreword for Forest and Crag ’s thirtieth anniversary edition in 2019 and touched on developments since its initial publication based on your observations. You wrote that the technological revolution of GPS devices and social media has altered our experience of wild places.

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