Adirondack Peeks Summer 2025

Jackrabbit was a part of Lake Placid life. Born in Norway and involved in selling construction and mining equipment in New York and Canada, he decided he had enough of city life. He established his family at the Lake Placid Club where they lived for four years while he commuted from Montreal on weekends. Jackrabbit was instrumental in bringing a Norwegian as the Club’s first winter sports director. Jackrabbit concentrated on taking people out into the wilderness. One of his most famous clients, whose name was unknown to him but was a household name to most Americans, was the actor Tom Mix. F orty-sixers know Bob Marshall for his record-setting peak-bagging. We probably also know him as one of our nation’s most influential advocates for wilderness preservation. Perhaps a fewer number of us are familiar with Marshall’s main argument for wilderness protection, premised on the human need for adventure. Emulating Bob’s big hike got me thinking about the activity of adventure and how it relates to the wilderness experience. WILDERNESS PHILOSOPHY Most people, Marshall claims, have a deep psychological need for adventure that the ordinary institutions of civilization cannot satisfy. Life without a chance for adventure, he says, would be “a dreary game, scarcely bearable in its horrible banality” (Marshall, The problem , 1930, p. 143). Our need for adventure, Marshall explains, is why many people are enthusiastic about war (p. 144). Writing in the spirit of the American pragmatist William James, Marshall’s suggestion

Jackrabbit was involved in establishing a 25-mile ski race on Washington’s birthday in Lake Placid. Johannsen finished third in the race after colliding with a dog and having to carry his broken ski the final distance downhill. All the other racers were college students, while he was 48 years old. After returning to Montreal, he came back to Lake Placid as coach of the Canadian ski team for the 1932 Olympics. So, summing up my story, these have been golden years, meeting some iconic people and savoring the richness of the Adirondacks in many ways and places. follows: “a region which contains no permanent inhabitants, possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means and is sufficiently spacious that a person in crossing it must have the experience of sleeping out” (p. 141). Further, wilderness “requires anyone who exists in it to depend exclusively on his own effort for survival” (p. 141). In a wild place, where physical capacity is a vital resource, pursuing adventure, i.e., “extending oneself to the limit of capacity,” may very well put one’s life in jeopardy. It all sounds too intense, perhaps even ridiculously macho. Surely there are other ways to appreciate the wilderness. Nonetheless, Marshall’s wilderness philosophy was, for him, an earnest practice. He quite literally put his own life at risk to satisfy his appetite for adventure. Even a known heart condition did not deter him from pursuing his recreational objectives. Tragically, a trip in the Cascades in 1939 might have contributed to his fatal heart attack two months later (Nash, 1966, p. 20). He died at age 38.

Aaron Vlasak, #8436 Wilderness Adventure and the Bob Marshall Traverse

is that the wilderness offers a “moral equivalent of war” (p. 144). Wilderness, by providing a site for a civil form of high adventure, holds the promise of happiness. For Marshall the term “adventure” is strictly understood: it “implies breaking into unpenetrated ground, venturing beyond the boundary of normal aptitude, extending oneself to the limit of capacity, courageously facing peril” (p. 143). As such, an adventure is an extraordinary undertaking, wherein the limits of human possibility are redefined. If we take Marshall’s vocabulary seriously, wilderness adventure is an extremely risky endeavor. Marshall defines “wilderness” as

“Sunrise on Big Slide”

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