Summit Stewards

With our trip to the Adirondacks coming up, as well as it being 46 Peaks this weekend, I decided to look at an article about hikers in the Adirondacks and how they interact with the area and can help preserve it.

The Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1922 to aid in the preservation of the Adirondack region. The ADK is committed to the protection and recreational use of the Adirondack Park. In addition to conservation work, the ADK also has natural history programs and volunteer opportunities. On their website they give a lot of information about the Adirondacks, including weather conditions, hiking guides and trail conditions.

Summit Stewards are ADK staff members that work at the top of mountains in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks. One of their jobs is to educate hikers on rare plants in the mountains in an attempt to prevent any harm from coming to them from hikers unknowingly trampling them. This program began in 1990 as a way to further protect the regions plants and strive for more protection of the park lands and all the natural life it holds. A recent article on the Adirondack Almanac announced that these Summit Stewards interacted with their 400,000^th hiker last week. Julia Goren, the ADK Education Director said, “We’re absolutely astounded by this milestone number. There is no better way to protect these plants than by being up at the top where we can show people why it’s important to stay on the rocks and enlist their help. These plants wouldn’t exist on our Adirondack alpine summits today without hikers carefully choosing where to place their feet”. Just making people aware of their surroundings does so much to help conserve these plants. Many hikers would not know a rare plant when they saw one. 

As another way to conserve these rare plants, Summit Stewards also build rock walls to help keep the hikers away from the plants. In addition to these efforts, they also educate hikers in other areas, such as how to respond to rapidly changing weather conditions in the mountains. They even provide aid for injured or sick hikers, giving them assistance to get back down the mountain. It’s programs like these that have helped preserve even the smallest parts of the park for so long. 

Citations:

"High Peaks Summit Stewards Mark 400k Interactions -." The Adirondack Almanack. N.p., 24 Sept. 2015. Web. 24 Sept. 2015. <http://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2015/09/high-peaks-summit-stewards-mark-400k-interactions.html>.