Adirondack Peeks Summer 2025

Sherry Roulston (SR): Hi, Tony! Tell us about your time in Norway. Tony Goodwin (TG): We started in Trondheim, which is on the coast about 100 miles north of Oslo, and that’s where the World Nordic Championships were being held. My daughter, Liza, and her sister-in-law, who lives in Trondheim met us there. After the games, we took the bus to Lillehammer and then a bus out to the east to a resort where we stayed last year, which is in the town of Sjusjøen and is surrounded by about 300 kilometers of groomed cross country ski trails. After Sjusjoen, we traveled back to Oslo, got on a plane and flew an hour and 40 minutes north to where our daughter lives above the Arctic circle. TG: Liza skipped a grade in elementary school, so we suggested she take a gap year after high school. A teammate on my son, Morgan’s cross country ski team at Williams College, recommended that she go to a ski academy that he was familiar with in Norway. She was looking to improve her cross-country skiing so that’s what she did; She spent that winter sponsored by American Field Service with a host family. She spent a second winter in the same town. Then after her freshman year at Montana State University, she got on a plane and flew right back to Norway and got herself into the university there. And today she and her husband Sven are the parents of two children, 5 and 3 years old. SR: What brought your daughter to Norway?

TG: Yes, and bikers too! Rob is an avid gravel biker. They’ve got lots of gravel roads in Vermont. He’s also the proud father of a five-week-old! Morgan is a road biker as well as a top cross-country skier. He deferred college for two years while trying to make the US National Team in Nordic Combined, which includes ski jumping and cross-country. He’s currently the senior director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club. SR: Your wife, Bunny, #2397, and your three children, Morgan, #3922; Rob, who never registered; and Liza, #5055, all climbed the 46 high peaks. Did you hike as a family? TG: Hiking was just something we did growing up. Our family and others we associated with were always hiking. When I was directing ATIS, my children did a lot of their peaks with ATIS groups and not necessarily with me. Hiking with these groups was fun. Liza ended up needing Cliff and Santanoni at the end, so dear old Dad went out and climbed Cliff for her forty-fifth, and we finished on Santanoni together. At that time the summit sign on Santanoni was spelled wrong: it had two “n’s”; we have a picture of Liza pointing at the sign with the classic, twelve-year-old’s expression, can’t grown-ups ever do anything right . By the time Bunny became a 46er we were married with two kids. There was a surprise write-up about her final hike in the personal column of our local newspaper. Connie Miller wrote, “Last weekend Bunny Goodwin and three other women struck a blow for women’s liberation when they left the fathers behind with the children and climbed Mount

SR: Your family is made of avid hikers and skiers.

Esther—the only peak named for a woman—so that Bunny Goodwin could finish her 46!” I carried the then one-year-old up Marble Mountain. My father was with us, and with a little boosting we managed to get my other son up. We didn’t make it to the summit of Esther, but we had a party part way down. TG: We met on the summit of Colden. I knew her younger sister, but I hadn’t met Bunny yet. I was thirty-one years old and leading a group of ATIS hikers on a two-week residential program. I had been dealing with young teenagers for the past ten days when here comes this lone woman on top of Colden. I went over to talk to her; she says SR: When did you meet Bunny?

Tony’s father at the sign, recognizing that he had constructed the trail to Little Porter in 1924 at the age of 14.

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