Virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can affect men’s minds so as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them.
PLUTARCH
ONE OF THE northeastern peakbagging clubs, the Adirondack 46ers, has taken a long, hard look at its own role in the mountains, sensitive to the critics described back in chapter 3. What they have done is an uplifting example of how the new ethic can shape our actions.
In the 1970s, the 46ers held a meeting at which they seriously considered disbanding. Just to hold such a meeting in itself was a serious violation of Parkinson’s law and sound bureaucratic tradition. However, the group decided instead to reorient the focus toward one of responsible action to help preserve the environment of the Adirondacks’ High Peaks. In the years since the meeting, they have moved forward on some major programs that deserve attention and commendation. Critics of peakbagging should consider whether any other group can show such a record of responsible stewardship, as demonstrated in these programs.
The original 46er litter bag program was the brainchild and personal cause célèbre of Glenn Fish, a large authority figure of a man who served a term as president of the 46ers. The objective of the program is to get hikers to carry out all of their own trash, along with any other they may find in the Adirondacks.
After meditating long on the litter problem, Mr. Fish reasoned, “I have a deep conviction that many hikers are induced to ‘litter’ simply because they are unsophisticated enough to leave home without making any provision for carrying out their litter generated while they are in the woods.” Hence, the solution: Give them each a bag and they’ll lug it out.
The original Glenn Fish system was based on a two-bag principle: The outer bag (to be reused) was made of plastic and displayed the 46ers’ emblem; the inner bag was biodegradable paper to be thrown away, with the accumulated litter, at home or in trash baskets at trailheads.
The energetic and exuberant Mr. Fish, who sometimes lurked at trailheads to see how his program was working, reported with pride, “I have witnessed hikers emptying litter from a 46er bag into a trash can, and then carefully folding the outer bag and stuffing it in a pack for reuse.” He then would surface and approach these surprised hikers to thank them “for joining with the 46ers in cleaning up our recreational areas.”
Since this program started there have been a couple of interesting changes. The first outer bags carried a picture of a pot of dinner cooking over a fire of fresh-cut branches. That was a sure-fire (sorry!) way to endorse wood fires in an age when many outdoors people were trying to discourage fires in favor of portable cookstoves. So in 1979 the club issued new outer bags, depicting an innocent scene of mountains and lakes with the message, “If you pack it in, pack it out!” Eventually it was found that the inner bag was unnecessary and was therefore discontinued.
In the ongoing years the 46ers have distributed thousands of litter bags at key points around the Adirondacks. And the club can proudly say that “not one single report was received relative to misuse of the plastic bags. They were not scattered in the woods, stuffed down privies, tucked in corners of lean-tos.”
Because of programs like that the woods are getting cleaned up and staying cleaned up.
In New Hampshire the White Mountain National Forest and the Appalachian Mountain Club have their own “Carry In-Carry Out” programs. They have been going on for many years now, and White Mountain hikers are (we hope) all familiar with the Carry In–Carry Out poster tacked inside shelters, at trailheads, or at the AMC huts. It must be working, for one doesn’t see half as many freeze-dried food packets at campsites or gum wrappers on the trail as before.
A wonderful hiker we knew from Connecticut, Ned Greist, used to speak of a rampant disease he called “hiker’s pocket.” Those afflicted with the disease suffered from an incurable urge to pick up every piece of litter left by others in the woods and jam such litter into one pocket. The afflicted litter picker can bend and scoop up the offending object without even breaking stride. At the end of the hike, the stuffed pocket can then be emptied into trash cans. In this day and age, we realize the problem doesn’t end there: Those trash cans have to go somewhere. But at least the litter is out of the woods and perhaps on its way to the best ultimate disposal site.
Virtue has its own reward. You’d be surprised at what valuable things you find when your subconscious is continuously trained on noticing and seizing shiny objects. We’ve come across two handsome woodsman’s knives, over the years, and even a handful of nickels and dimes (once a quarter!) that winked beguilingly at us just like aluminum foil. Sometimes you find bottles or cans for which a refund is offered at local markets. Reimbursement in the pursuit of a just cause?
We hope the 46ers and others will keep on the pressure. Newcomers are taking to the woods daily, and they need to become initiated litter pickers too. It’s a fine madness that can’t have too many converts. To join the Litter Pickers Society, all a hiker need do is bend down at least once on a woods walk to pick up a candy wrapper, a cigarette, a piece of tinfoil, perchance a dime . . .
A slightly less happy project of the 46ers consisted of a 1984 campaign to cope with the problem of increasing human waste in the backcountry. This program attracted support on the drinking water, some of it infected by improper disposal of human waste. (Animal waste could infect water supplies too, notably that of beavers—hence the popular name for giardiasis: beaver fever.)
At the suggestion of a New York State ranger, and after polling the membership, the 46ers launched a campaign to give all hikers a small, sturdy plastic trowel with a message about digging a small pit for their human waste when you had to go in the woods. In the first year the enthusiastic members passed out 5,000 trowels. That’s a lot of digging power.
Unfortunately, this project was considerably less than an unqualified success. In the first place, many of the trowels managed to get into circulation without the message, so there was some confusion about just what their purpose was. Then a large number of trowels began to show up behind lean-tos in popular camping areas—obviously becoming a not-inconsiderable litter problem.
Furthermore, ideas began to change about what constituted the best way to dispose of human waste. Perhaps too deep a hole (easy to dig with a handy trowel) would inhibit decomposition and actually aggravate the problem. The revised theory is to scrape a very shallow hole with the heel of your boot and cover it with the lightest of forest duff (twigs, bark, moss, light soil). That way the waste will compost more rapidly and soon be harmlessly absorbed into the forest ecosystem—as long as it’s kept away from water supplies during the decomposition process.
So the trowel project died an early and merciful death, unlamented.
But all was not lost. The trowel project heightened public awareness of the importance of backcountry sanitation; it helped people see not merely that giardiasis was a problem but also that their own careless actions were part of the cause; and it encouraged people to think about how to change their actions so as to become part of the solution to the problem. Even if the 46ers had to throw in the trowel on their project, they still helped stir public thinking on a vital issue.
The 46ers, being peakbaggers from way back, do a lot of walking on mountain trails that can’t stand heavy foot traffic without showing wear and tear. This means erosion that turns trails into deep gullies, or pitiful widening around wet places that obliterates trailside vegetation.
A very significant program launched by the peakbaggers was one of volunteer trail maintenance. Hordes of 46ers volunteers, having enjoyed the trails so extensively, agreed to “pay back” time spent hiking with time spent fixing up the trails for the next generation of hikers. The state rangers designated trails needing work, and gangs of 46ers began going to work on them.
This project was doubly blessed with leadership. The dean of Adirondack hikers and trailcutters, James A. Goodwin (46er number 24 on a list of more than 3,000), who had hiked and worked on trails for almost 60 years, agreed to be the 46ers’ first “trailmaster.” With his enormous prestige and profound knowledge of trail making, Jim Goodwin got the program off to a flying start during the late 1970s. The second blessing arrived in 1982, when the Behr family took over the leadership from the retiring Goodwin. Chris G. Behr became trailmaster, ably supported by his wife, June T. Behr, and their son, Chris M. Behr, as cochairman in 1986. The Behrs provided dynamic leadership to carry on the Goodwin tradition.
But leadership is just the tip of the iceberg. Scores of eager, energetic, physically indefatigable 46ers have contributed volunteer time to trail work. The club awarded honors to those who contributed 46 hours of hard labor. But in less than 10 years so many members had contributed far more than 46 hours that the club set up two further levels of awards: for 146 hours and for 346 hours of trail work. Many hardworking trail maintainers have won these awards, including the top award for 346 hours, which is the equivalent of just about a whole summer of full-time eight-hour days.
That is putting your muscles where your heart is.
One special facet of trail work emerges where trails rise above treeline into that special world of alpine tundra, so beautiful, so fragile, so precious to the mountain experience.
The impact of hiker traffic is nowhere so damaging as it is on those few summits of the Northeast that are above the treeline. The alpine, tundralike ground cover on these peaks is astonishingly well equipped by nature to withstand the ferocity of arctic cold and hurricane winds. But when a large volume of hikers tramps over, it’s in deep trouble. In the mid 1970s, under the direction of scientist and peakbagger Ed Ketchledge from Syracuse University, an experiment questioned whether humans could reintroduce vegetation in areas where boot traffic had seriously damaged both plant life and soils on above-treeline summits.
The full story of this interesting project and the interesting man who launched it belongs to Chapter 16. Suffice it to mention here that, as alpine restoration began to be taken seriously, the bulk of the human labor to make it work was provided by the 46ers. This has meant not only packing up hundreds of pounds of seed, fertilizer, and lime, but also considerable work in defining a stabilized trail through the tundra so that human visitors can use a single track to the summits, leaving the rest of the alpine area for the native vegetation to enjoy.
Not that the 46ers have lost their original love of climbing mountains. Far from it! They still bag peaks with the best of them and aren’t a bit ashamed of it. As of 2013, 623 have done them all in winter. A number have climbed them all a dozen or more times. Some have done them all via bushwhack routes or by moonlight. Some self-righteous souls swear at this sort of thing as insufficiently sensitive to the mountain environment. We say, let each enjoy the mountains in his or her own way, so long as they are damaging neither the mountains nor the experience of others. As for the 46ers, are any of their critics doing as much for the benefit of the mountains? We love ’em all.
We especially loved the two old-timers who did so much to keep this organization rolling. Grace Hudowalski, first 46er president in 1948, nearly up to her death in 2004, answered all the mail, more than 1,000 letters per year, and sent out the patches, with encouraging notes and responses to a variety of questions. Elder statesman A. G. Dittmar served as executive secretary/treasurer of the group, keeping tabs on the finances. Ditt’s annual dues reminder always took the form of some outrageously funny piece that he’d composed or unearthed somewhere during the past year—followed by his hitting us up for this year’s dues.
And do you know what the dues are? Here is a group that does effective trail work, works on summit restoration, holds workshops and other activities to educate others, and puts out a truly outstanding quarterly publication—and do you want to guess what the dues are? Bear in mind that other northeastern hiking clubs are charging $50 or $60 per year, and one gilt-edged group holds up its membership for something like $75. Do you know what the 46ers dues are? Eight dollars. Well, they ask everyone for another buck or two to cover mailing costs. Here is a group with no hidden agenda, no bureaucracy, no padded costs—just dedication to their beloved mountains and the experience of being among them.
Dr. Ketchledge, who died in 2010, spoke for many of the 46ers when he expressed his own deep-felt sense of stewardship for the High Peak region that gave him and others so much enjoyment: “For 29 years I’ve climbed in this country,” he told one workshop while standing on the very summit of Mount Jo, the panorama of the High Peaks circling around him and his listeners. “In a pantheistic sense, all of this,” he said, sweeping his arm over the breathtaking landscape, “is part of me.” It’s that kind of sense of personal involvement and obligation that has sparked so much good work to help preserve the mountain environment.
Next time you hear someone criticize a peakbagger, think about these men and women in the Adirondacks, tirelessly passing out litter bags, tugging branches around to brush in an eroding trail, toting grass seed and fertilizer up a mountain, or giving up a splendid May weekend to help spread the message of stewardship to others.