Adirondack Peeks Summer 2025

Tony with Bunny on the summit of Colden in 2020. They had met there in 1981, but had never been on the summit together since then.

she’s from Burlington. “That’s a long drive for a day trip,” I tell her. She says that she’s staying at her family’s cottage in St. Huberts. Right away I knew who she was. During the pandemic, in September, we climbed Colden together for the first time since that first meeting. There happened to be a ranger on top who took our picture. SR: Two branches of Bunny’s family tree were founders of the Ausable Club: William Augustus White and William Alderson. It appears that trail building is a family legacy on both sides of your family. In 1897, Bunny’s great, great grandfather, William A. White, along with S. Burns and Felix Aler, formed ATIS, the first trail maintenance group in the state to ensure regular maintenance and consistent marking of the trails in the St. Huberts and Ausable Lakes area. Your great grandfather, Dr. Charles Alton, owned Undercliff, an Adirondack camp in Lake Placid. In your father’s memoir, And Gladly Guide: Reflections on a Life in the Mountains , he states, He [Charles] had built a summer home, on the northwest shore of the lake, called Undercliff. As time went on, he built more cottages, a dining room, tennis courts, and a casino, for what developed into a summer colony of paying guests.

He built enough trails that he was serving not only his guests but the general population of Lake Placid as well.

Charles also led a volunteer trail building and maintenance program for the Shore Owners’ Association of Lake Placid (SOA). Your presentation titled “From Axe Blazes to Highlines” at the Lake Placid-North Elba Historical Society Winter Speaker Series this January discussed how many of the original trails in the Adirondacks were built by owners of resorts catering to their guests. Was your great grandfather building trails for these reasons? TG: He built enough trails that he was serving not only his guests but the general population of Lake Placid as well. One of his efforts was to cut a trail to Eagle Eyrie, which is a little knob at the north end of Lake Placid. He developed Undercliff as a source of income that would allow him to remain in Lake Placid for about six months of the year so that he wouldn’t have a relapse of his tuberculosis, which is what brought him to the area in the first place.

SUMMER 2025 | 7