Out There: Barbara McMartin and the Adirondack Discover Series -The Toast

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“Do you have Barbara?’ I asked my friend Anne. “Let me see what she says about this.”

We were standing in Anne’s kitchen in Syracuse, surrounded by backpacks, bear canisters and socks. It was a broiling July evening and we had a 4:30 am start the next morning. Anne put down the Clif Bars she was counting out to toss me a brown-coloured book. Page 264: Marcy Dam to Mount Colden, 5.15 miles, 4 ½  hours, 2560-foot vertical rise. Hell. At least we had Barbara.

Anne introduced me to the books of Barbara McMartin, author of the Discover the Adirondacks series, the second time we met. “This,” she said, producing a book from her purse, “is Barbara. She’ll tell you everything you need to know.” I took it eagerly: I’d never hiked in the US before but a book seemed the perfect place to start.

“For most of the nineteeth century,” I read, “these peaks were the realm of dreamers and hikers, guides and painters, and mountain men and women seeking adventure, not sport, in the wilds.”

Barbara McMartin, mountain woman, was born in 1931 in Johnston, New York and she spent most of her childhood summers on Cascade Lake in the Adirondacks. She was a math nerd, studying first at Vassar, then Hunter, before finally completing a Ph.D in ‘One Relator Metabelian Groups’ at CUNY in 1972. After that, she returned to the Adirondacks, where she lived and wrote until her death in 2005. She completed a whopping 25 books about the area, including The Adirondack Park, A Wildlands Quilt: Hides, Hemlocks and Adirondack History and The Glove Cities: Perspectives on the Adirondacks.

If it seems like a wild jump from math to writing guidebooks, McMartin’s precision with height, length and speed is clearly the result of a mathematical brain. As Paul Grondhal wrote in her obituary: “If she wrote that a trail crossed a stream at 1.85 miles, that’s where it crossed.” This may seem like a trivial distinction, but when you’re four hours into a stormy afternoon and you think you’ve lost your way, those numbers are fucking essential. She was equally exact about natural phenomena: species of alpine flowers, moss and trees are catalogued exhaustively. She would stop suddenly on a hike to inspect a patch of lichen or a new flower, noting it down with a pen.

McMartin’s prose is tight and informative but it is also wide-eyed and joyous, funny and bold. When McMartin tells you to do something, you get the feeling you’d better do it. That July evening in Syracuse I read:

“Do not just think of these three miles as a way to get to the base of a mountain…This is the most spectacular trail in the High Peaks…Boulders torn from the walls above make a torturous route for the trail along Avalanche Lake and wonderful frames for the unfolding tableau of mountains and reflecting water.”

Avalanche Lake

We were looking for a nice weekend hike, something with a body of water we could swim in, an overnighter with good view in the middle and time enough to get down to the pub.  This is what we’re always looking for.  The next morning we set off first the wrong way, then the right, to Mount Colden. There were six of us. Only four came back. Just kidding! Of course we all came back. Jeez, this is a piece about how great guidebooks are.

The first time Anne and I met, we were wary of each other until the subject of walking came up. Then I told her I was thinking of doing the Coast-to-Coast walk and she nodded. “You should do it,” she said, taking a long sip of beer, “before you get married next year.” It was one of those sharp, clear moments of understanding; the sweet second when you realise you’re going to be good friends with someone. On a walk, as Anne was thinking of it, you don’t end up in the same place you started. Exactly.

Anne is American so actually she doesn’t walk, she Hikes. Her current reason to hike is the bonkers, long-term ambition to climb all 46 High Peaks of the Adirondacks. If you have a job, or if you are not deranged, this undertaking can take years or indeed a lifetime. 46ers, as they call themselves, canoe down rivers, bushwack, camp out for days and snowshoe in freezing weather to achieve their goal.

As a European, my first sight of a wild area on the North American continent affected me almost physically. I nearly cried, embarrassingly, when I first saw Utah. Driving down I-70 to Salt Lake City for the first time, high desert mountains on either side, the view was vaster and emptier than I’d ever imagined a space could be. I felt a gear shift in my body, accommodating this new enormity, and an unfamiliar thought appeared in my brain: I want to go out there.

I know now that that feeling must quickly and carefully be followed by a second one:  How do I go out there? What do I need to take with me?  Do I have enough socks?

The Adirondack High Peaks look gentle from far away. Before you turn your car off to the Adirondack Loj road they bob past you quietly, wisps of cloud surrounding them like petticoats. If you are driving with Anne, though, when she makes that turn she’ll crank the car radio up loudly and blast rock music all the way down to the trailhead. She knows the start you need to the day. The first mountains I ever climbed with her were Wright and Alqonguin and they gave me quite a shock.

Hiking the path to Wright and Algonquin meant scrambling up a dry riverbed, climbing over boulders and scaling slats of bare rock at vertiginous angles. Often we were overtaken by sprightly octogenarian French-Canadian couples who skirted my lumbering trajectory using titanium hiking poles, chatting brightly. On the way down the same couples bounded round us, leaping from rock to rock. They seemed to my dehydrated mind to be an entirely different species: made of a lighter, more durable material than me. I kept McMartin’s book in my pocket, bent open to the right page, and I stopped every now and then to see what she had to say. Afterwards, we struck our tent and drove 4 hours towards Syracuse while Hurricane Irene blattered the mountains we’d just climbed.

Mount Colden was originally called Mount McMartin, after one of Barbara’s ancestors. She likes to remind you of this fact. Colden’s ascent reaches down and hooks you suddenly upwards from a meandering lake path, and towards the top you have to climb a crease in the rock that is just smaller than the width of your boot. On all fours, if you look backwards between your mud-splattered legs, there seems to be no mountain underneath you at all: just air, cloud and, thousands of feet below, forest.

For me, there’s always a point on the way up and the way down a high peak where I think: “This is it. I have literally reached the end of me. I can go no further.” That is the point at which you know there is more than an hour of up or down left to go. Half-way up Colden, people were silent, hungry. Chat had abandoned us way down the trail and was sharing a coffee with fickle comfort. The trees were no shorter. We splatted our hands into bright red bark shavings and knelt in running water; we used our elbows as leverage and we kept going, inch by inch, up the hill. And all the while, I thought of Barbara; I kept her numbers in my head.  0.2 miles, 0.25 miles, here’s a ladder, here’s a clearing, keep going.

Anne on Mount Colden, July 2013

Bill Ingersoll, who is the co-author of many of her updated books and the current custodian of the Discover the Adirondacks series, recalls that when he started working with Barbara, she was printing out the text of her books, pasting them to boards and shipping those boards off to the printer. Ingersoll, a fine-art graduate who first wrote to McMartin as a fan when he was just out of college, now uses a GPS system when he hikes – the landscape changes every day and a major weather event can alter an area completely. Equally important, though, the landscape of writing about a State Park is added to daily. Blogs and forums form layer upon layer of information and anecdote, sediment from which it is difficult to extract what you need. Nowadays a GPS, a compass and a pedometer are the best ways of getting around, but without Barbara McMartin’s work so many trails would never have existed and without her books, you’d miss so very much.

Until her death from breast cancer in 2003 Barbara McMartin was, by all accounts, a force to be reckoned with in the Adirondacks. She did not have a reputation for keeping her opinions to herself. She served on committees, advocated tirelessly for the region and hoped, always, for more money to be freed up so that previously ignored sections of the park could be preserved and uncovered – so that people could love every inch of the place as much as she did. Her favourite place was the Southern Adirondacks, where she hiked as a kid and where she took her own children. Taken together her books are an important and extraordinary collection of American writing; the work of a scientist and an adventurer cataloguing the beautiful details of big places.

When I spoke to Bill Ingersoll, though, he told me something I couldn’t quite believe about her:  in all her years, she never went up the highest mountain in the Adirondacks; she never climbed Marcy. “But why?” I asked. “She had a thing about it,” he said.  For Barbara, the goal was never to be a 46er: it was just to walk, to go out there, to tell you about it.

When we arrived back at the lean-to at Avalanche Lake, bone-tired, torn and covered in mud, we went down to the river. I washed the dirt off my legs and hands, and put my head under the water, then I stepped out and lay down in it. We cooked beans and fell asleep at 9.  After we’d driven home, Anne sent me an email. “I am inexplicably sad today,” she said. “I keep thinking, ‘I miss the mountains.’ I love them. For as terrible as I smelled, slushy as my boots were, and tired as my brain felt, I love being on a mountain, following those trail markers with my friends.” Barbara McMartin, I thought, gave her whole life for our weekends.

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