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The Birth of a Wilderness Program

11/22/2022

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     By 1972 I had completed my bachelor’s degree in Recreation Education from SUNY Cortland, and had two transformative experiences – taking a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) wilderness leadership course, and climbing Denali. A couple of years later I completed the NOLS Instructor’s Course. Those four events told me one thing – I wanted a career where I could educate folks about the outdoors and how to be outdoor leaders.

     Maybe I could work for NOLS? Nah, I didn’t want to live in Wyoming. 

     Maybe I could become an outdoor guide? Again, nah. In 1972 there was no demand.

     Maybe I could work for one of the new wilderness programs for “at risk” youth? Well, I did that for two seasons but realized I was becoming an ersatz therapist, not an outdoor leader.

     Finally, I thought maybe I could run a college-level wilderness leadership program. And that’s what I pursued.

     I made an appointment to meet with Bill Rutherford, the Dean of Forestry at Paul Smith’s College. I thought that with their variety of forestry programs, and the college's namesake’s history of hiring guides, it would be a natural place to have a wilderness leadership program.

     I gave him a brief description of my vision and he immediately lectured me on why such a program was NOT something Paul Smith’s College would ever offer. 

     “Recreation is what students learn on their own free time,” he said, “It’s not something to teach.” 
It was the only time I’d been verbally thrown out of an office, and I slunk away to lick my wounds. 

     I had no luck generating any interest in my vision until I met Doug Kelley, Director of the Malone Campus of North Country Community College (NCCC). He immediately offered me a one week-canoe trip and a one-week backpacking trip to teach that summer. His support also triggered similar course offerings at the Saranac Lake Campus.

     I gained some wonderful teaching experience, was honing my craft, and earned just enough money to stay below the poverty line. 

     In 1977 Doug offered me a one-year job as a jack of all trades at the Malone Campus. It was located in an old bank building on Main Street, where my office was the vault. Assisting Doug every way I could I did everything but wash the windows. But best of all I taught a hiking class and a three-credit Outdoor Leadership class. 

     That December I got word that Paul Petzoldt was traveling the Northeast promoting a new organization called the Wilderness Education Association, a nonprofit affiliating with colleges to train outdoor leaders. I thought if I could get him to visit the North Country it might help me get a wilderness program going.

     So who was Paul Petzoldt? Petzoldt had an outdoor resume longer than Rapunzel’s hair. In 1924, at age 16, he ascended the Grand Teton wearing cowboy boots. He told folks the only reason he didn’t die of hypothermia was that the word hadn’t been invented yet.

     Amazingly, he did a double ascent of the Matterhorn in one day. Why the double ascent? Because once he traversed it, the hut he was to stay at in Italy was so dirty he and his companion decided to climb back over the mountain to Switzerland.

     In 1938 Paul was a member of the first American team to attempt to climb K2, arguably the world’s most challenging mountain. Although the group was unsuccessful in summiting, Paul set a record at the time for the longest stay above 20,000 feet, over two weeks.  

     His early climbs of the Grand Teton led to his creation of a guide service and eventually to partnering with Glenn Exum to create Petzoldt-Exum Mountain Guides.  

     In 1962 he became the chief instructor for the first American Outward Bound School in Colorado. His work with Outward Bound convinced him that you could find great rock climbers, great fishermen, and great campers, but rarely great outdoor leaders. That caused him to start the National Outdoor Leadership School in 1965.

     After forty years the plain-speaking, rough-and-tumble mountain man had become the ultimate outdoorsman.  He was even featured on the quiz show “To Tell The Truth,” where a panel tried to guess which of the three contestants was the “real” mountaineer. No one guessed Paul.

     In 1969 while I was attending the University of Wyoming I saw a big barrel-chested man with bushy-white eyebrows eating at our cafeteria. I didn’t recognize him but someone mentioned that he was the famous mountaineer, Paul Petzoldt. It turned out that at the age of sixty-one, having recently started NOLS and giving lots of presentations, he decided to take some public speaking classes. A few months later I heard him speak about his new school in Lander, WY. 

     “How do you deal with all the discomforts of the outdoors?” someone in the audience asked, “When I think of being outdoors I think of being cold, wet, getting blisters, and being miserable.”

     He answered, “We believe if you’re uncomfortable, you’re not doing it right.” 

     That answer made a life-long impression on me and made me want to learn how to do it right.

     Fast forward a decade. When I heard he’d be in the Northeast, I called and invited him to the Adirondacks – he eagerly accepted. After Paul arrived in Saranac Lake I kept him busy for four days with a talk at the NYSDEC Region 5 Headquarters, a presentation to the Rotary Club, an evening lecture at Paul Smith’s College, and a couple of presentations at NCCC. 

     The most important event, however, was a breakfast to which I’d invited a group of NCCC faculty and administrators.. Upon finishing breakfast, Paul stood up and in his booming voice said, “The Adirondacks is the perfect place for a wilderness leadership program.” Then to my complete surprise he said, “I think NCCC should start such a program, and Jack Drury is the perfect person to lead it. I want him to come to Wyoming this summer and help me teach one of our new Wilderness Education Association courses.”

     I was beyond pleased because Paul barely knew me. We’d crossed paths only a few times during my NOLS experiences, but the previous few days that I’d spent with him must have made an impression.

     That summer I went out and participated in one of the first WEA courses and made a half-dozen lifelong friends, including Petzoldt.
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The first Wilderness Education Course participants-1978 in the Jedediah Smith Wilderness of Wyoming-I'm in the top row second from left
 At the end of the summer I returned, and as I was sitting in the old bank vault one day, I got a call from Paul’s assistant, Sandy Braun. “Paul wants NCCC to offer a WEA course next summer,” she said,  “He wants to know what dates you could do it.”

     I told her I’d have to get back to her because I had no idea whether the college would support it. Feeling that this might be my big break I immediately called Larry Poole, the college's Academic Dean. 

      “Larry, remember that wilderness fellow we had breakfast with last April, Paul Petzoldt?” 

     “Sure,” he said, “A very interesting and charismatic guy,” 

      “Well, I said, “His secretary just called.”

     “Yeah?” Larry said.

     “She told me Paul would love for NCCC to offer a 33-day wilderness leadership course that’d be certified by the Wilderness Education Association.”

     Larry said, “Really?”

     “She asked me if I could give her dates for next summer.”

     “Well,” he said, “Did you give them to her?”

     So after seven years of knocking on the door, NCCC had at last let me in. The College’s Wilderness Recreation Leadership Program ran its first 33-day wilderness practicum in the summer of 1979 and accepted students into the A.S. degree program that fall. When I left NCCC in 1995 the program was bursting at the seams with nearly seventy matriculated students. 

     I thought NCCC and the Wilderness Recreation Leadership program was a great place for students to learn wilderness leadership skills. And I still do.
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1979 - NCCC's Wilderness Recreation Leadership Program First Summer Practicum
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The Breaks of the Game - My First Overnight Canoe Trip

11/8/2022

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     In 1961 when I was twelve, Tom Cantwell, patriarch of the Cantwell family, invited me to go on a four-day canoe trip along with a platoon of Cantwell kids. It was memorable for a lot of reasons, not all of them good.

     The trip was into what today we know as the St. Regis Canoe Area, a canoe wilderness with no motorized vehicles allowed, a place of wild character, where people love to paddle, fish, hike, and hunt. But in 1961 it had platform camps, snowmobile trails, small motorboats, and even the occasional seaplane landing on the larger ponds. 

     We started from the landing on Upper St. Regis Lake and paddled and portaged our way to St. Regis Pond. The portages were all relatively short and perfect for us kids. 

     Although my family had been motorboat and car camping for years, I’d never been overnight canoe camping. To have everything in our boats and transporting things from pond to pond was a new and exciting experience. And it was made even better because my canoe partner Franny Cantwell and I were so young, we didn’t have to haul the heaviest gear. We had daypacks with some food, water, and an extra layer. In my case, the layer was my heavy wool cardigan that my mom had knitted. It was beige with a big Newfoundland on the back and Newfie heads on each pocket. She made them for all the kids in our family and they were real works of art. It was a functional and beautiful piece of clothing that served as a coat, jacket, and heavy shirt. I wore it indoors and out, for formal dress and for work. It was my prized possession.

     The trip was memorable for a number of reasons; equipment like Svea cook stoves and lightweight down sleeping bags were fascinating, but more intriguing was the sense of remoteness and primitiveness. We camped at the lean-to on the south end of the pond, but as far as I was concerned, it might as well have been in the far reaches of northern Canada. 

     The last day we headed out to Little Lake Clear, a canoe carry of three-quarters of a mile, the most challenging of the trip. We paddled our red-fiberglass canoe across Little Lake Clear and worked our way over to the north end of Upper Saranac Lake. The trip was to end at Indian Carry, eight miles to the south.

     If you’ve ever paddled down Upper Saranac Lake you know that the winds frequently come from the southwest and can make things miserable for paddlers, especially young, inexperienced ones like me. When I was in the stern I couldn’t keep us in a straight line because I didn’t know how to steer. When I was in the bow I overpowered Franny. As a result, we zig zagged our way down the lake falling farther and farther behind.

     We thought we’d been saved when two teenagers in an aluminum motorboat with a ten-horsepower motor came out to tow our canoe. 

     “Want a ride?” one said. 

     We said “YES”, and in the blink of an eye were in their boat, towing our canoe down the lake. But the wind was so strong and the waves so high that we didn’t go 100 yards before the canoe swamped.

     Our young rescuers pulled the canoe up, emptied it, and I didn’t think twice as the canoe slid back into the water with my sweater and day pack in the bottom of it. They tried again to tow it to Indian Carry. By now the wind was whipping and the waves were as big as ocean rollers. We made it another 100 yards and the canoe swamped again. 

     This time the biggest Adirondack motorboat I’d ever seen came out and offered to take the canoe. For the Saranac Lakes it was huge. It had dual 75 horsepower outboards, the largest outboard motors of the day. The boat’s operator tied off our canoe and roared off. The boat flew down the lake with the canoe bouncing wildly behind it. Then it bounced off one of the rollers four feet into the air. As it came down it turned at an awkward angle and bounced even higher. And then, as if in slow motion, it crashed down onto a white-capped wave and snapped in two sending fiberglass splinters everywhere. 

     I was in shock and too stunned to speak until I suddenly thought about my sweater that I left in the canoe. My pride and joy, my mother’s pride and joy, the only article of clothing I had ever really cared about was waterlogged, out of reach, and slowly sinking. 

     “My sweater!” I yelled as it drifted away – down… down… down… It was too far away to save, and I watched it, helpless, as it sank into the depths of Upper Saranac Lake, where it rests to this day.

     The folks in the big boat picked up the halves of the canoe and deposited them on the shore at Indian Carry and then sped off, never to be seen again. To compound things, it wasn’t even the Cantwell’s canoe – they’d borrowed it.

     Fortunately, the story has a happy ending, at least for Mr. Cantwell. First, his homeowner’s policy reimbursed the owner of the canoe. And second, the larger half of the broken canoe was turned into a dinghy and became the tender for the Cantwell’s family sailboat. 

     But as for me? My sweater, so beloved now and forever rests in the murky depths. I still mourn its loss and wonder how long wool survives in cold Adirondack lakes. Maybe someday I’ll rent some scuba gear, take a dive, and find out. ​
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My sister and I canoeing on Lower Saranac Lake in 1957. Note how I have already mastered the art of not paddling.
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    I contribute a biweekly column for our local newspaper, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. It is called Bushwhack Jack's Tracts. I post them here for your reading pleasure.
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