Brendan Jackson in the Dolly Sods Wilderness in West Virginia. (Provided photo — Sam Prestidge)

SARANAC LAKE — The Adirondack hiking community is mourning the loss of one of its most prolific members. Brendan Jackson, a state Department of Environmental Conservation assistant forest ranger, died while camping at Duck Hole in the High Peaks last month. He was 42.

Among his friends, he was someone who made every hike more enjoyable. Among his co-workers, he was a valuable archive of knowledge. Among the countless people he interacted with in the backcountry, he was a source of education, assistance and comfort. Among the people who knew him from online hiking forums, he was a celebrity.

Jackson, of Saranac Lake, attended Paul Smith’s College and joined the DEC in 2008.

In an official statement from the DEC, the department called Jackson a “remarkable steward.”

“Brendan put the public’s safety above his own when responding to rescues, suppressing fires, patrolling trails and helping maintain backcountry facilities,” the statement reads.

A division of Forest Protection Honor Guard served at his funeral last month.

He worked as an interior caretaker at Marcy Dam and Lake Colden, worked in the West Canada Lakes Wilderness and at Pharaoh Lake and had interned at the DEC’s Five Rivers Environmental Education Center.

AFR is a seasonal job, so he also worked for a service company, hiking in and identifying trees encroaching on power lines around the country. After a hurricane in Florida, he went down to help with the tree cleanup.

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‘Hufflepuff energy’

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Lauren Tarr met Jackson at an environmental camp in 2014. He was an educator, great with kids and was always excited to share information.

“He looks like this big guy with a big beard, but he’s really kind and sweet,” Tarr said.

He had “Hufflepuff energy,” she said.

They attended SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry together and in the decade since have been in a group chat where they talked almost every day.

“I don’t really know if I would be the person I am today without the time I spent with him,” Jackson’s friend Sam Prestidge said.

The two met when they were students at Paul Smith’s College through the formation of the PSC Outing Club around 2005 or 2006.

Jackson encouraged people to spend time in nature, and empowered them to do so.

“He was probably the most experienced person in the room, having guided trips, led trips — already an established trip leader and a natural leader,” Prestidge said. “But in a quiet, ‘Let’s do this,’ kind of way.”

As a kid, Jackson drew maps of the woods behind his house in the Capital Region. He and his father Eric got active in the caving community near Albany.

He was a fan of the comic “Calvin and Hobbes,” and Tarr said he embodied the imagination and playing in the woods of the fictional boy and his tiger friend.

“He was always up for adventure,” Prestidge said. “We would set out and do crazy hikes at the drop of a dime.”

Jackson had a goal to sleep in every public lean-to in the state. According to his posts, there are 392 such lean-tos. Tarr estimated he was around 75% through camping in them.

At times, he camped around 100 nights a year.

After reading Bill McKibben’s book on cross-country skiing the Jackrabbit Trail in one day, he told Prestidge he bet they could hike it in a day.

“Within 24 hours, we were in Keene Valley and we started the Jackrabbit Trail,” Prestidge said. “We finished it from Keene Valley to the VIC in (about) 17 hours, and then we went in and finally got Chinese food, as was tradition on Sunday.”

Jackson and his friends took an annual backcountry trip to Duck Hole. This fall would have been their 21st.

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Excel in the woods

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Jackson also loved video games — he had around 2,000 games on Steam — and would nerd out over Excel spreadsheets.

“Eventually, we ended up living together and he would play video games, and then we’d go on these epic hikes and it’d go back and forth,” Prestidge said. “His comfort living in both of these worlds and really having an understanding and a way to communicate about both of them to anybody.”

It was a juxtaposition of sorts, but Jackson truly loved both. The outdoors gave him freedom to roam, while video games and spreadsheets gave him structures that he was “bound by but got to press against,” Prestidge said.

Jackson had moderated Star Wars video game forums since his teenage years. His screen name “DSettahr” is an approximate anagram of “Death Star.” He got a degree in mechanical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The dichotomy of nature and technology converged on the pages of his spreadsheets.

Jackson kept meticulous notes about everything he and his friends did in the woods and used these notes to create spreadsheets to keep track of all their accomplishments — miles hiked, nights spent in the woods, places visited, elevation change.

“He would talk about his Excel spreadsheets in the woods,” Prestidge said.

He turned these milestones into tokens, filling a Girl Scout sash with bottle caps celebrating achievements on their annual hiking trip.

“Jackson was our historian,” Prestidge said. “He was our archivist. He was our photographer.”

That was all on top of him being a good friend and storyteller.

Friends also described him as a calm leader, extremely prepared for the outdoors.

“If you look at the photos of him, he almost always had his backpack on,” Prestidge said. “Even when we would just go on small hikes, he had his first aid kit, his (source of) communication, his bag of trail mix and two maps and his compass and his phone and his keys. It didn’t matter the situation that we got into when we were outside — he was prepared for it.”

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Generous with knowledge

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Jackson took his experiences in the woods and turned them into tales, resources and companionship for the entire world. Tarr said he was “super generous” with his knowledge. He helped inform Tony Goodwin’s ADK High Peaks map. When someone had a question, he most likely had the answer. After identifying a tree species for a hiker he overheard at Marcy Dam once, he spent 20 minutes fielding questions about tree species from a small crowd who gathered around him.

Whenever he hiked, he created detailed trip reports based on the lengthy notes and hundreds of photos he took. He’d match the photos up with the map and share the information online.

Tarr plans to take some of the trips he reported on as a way to connect with her friend.

“I never got to go on those trips with him, but I feel like I can because he posted them and shared them,” she said.

Reading the hiking forum posts from people leaving tributes and memories of Jackson in the weeks after his death made her truly realize the reach he had. She’s still learning new things about him from these posts. He was so well-known on the forums, Tarr said he was kind of a celebrity in the forest, with star-struck hikers recognizing him from Reddit or adkforum.com.

Prestidge said it’s not as apparent at first to some, but Jackson was an incredible fighter. Not in a violent way, but in the sense that when he put his mind to something, he would work extremely hard, methodically and consistently to make sure it got done. He did not give up.

“He fought for his friends,” Prestidge said. “He would push to maintain a relationship. He would create opportunities for us to cultivate relationships. As a student, he really pushed to make sure his teachers got the most out of a student.”

Prestidge also said Jackson was a thoughtful conservation and environmental advocate, thinking about what’s best environmentally for the collective of humanity into the future while recognizing the fights people in the past fought so they could have these experiences now.

“He fought and pushed and he did it in such a thoughtful, thought-provoking and loving way that you don’t really realize that he’s pushing for stuff, because it’s just what Jackson does,” Prestidge said. “He’s trying to make us grow and trying to help us learn.”

Jackson’s family asks that donations in his memory are made to the Adirondack Mountain Club’s Summit Stewardship Program at tinyurl.com/nnpacs5t.