I suppose there are things to be afraid of in the Adirondack wilderness. Once a generation there’s a murderer on the loose. I hear people tell of their fear of hearing coyotes howl, but when was the last time you heard of a coyote attacking a human? The only victim of an Adirondack ...

I remember the Metz family for a number of reasons. First, Stan Metz and his sons Andrew and Matt joined me in the early 1970s on a couple of one-week canoe trips and a one-week backpacking trip sponsored by the Malone Campus of North Country Community College. Second, they were a great ...

I made a pilgrimage of sorts a couple of weeks ago. As we passed through Lander, Wyoming on our way to Grand Teton National Park, I stopped at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) headquarters and got my photo taken with the statue of Paul Petzoldt. Paul was a world-renowned ...

For three straight years our family camped at my great aunt’s tent platform on Lower Saranac Lake. It’s where campsite 37 is now, arguably one of the finest spots on the lake. It was pretty simple as far as platform camps went. In fact, we didn’t even sleep in it. We kept our food and ...

Of all the outdoor technical skills taught at North Country Community College, perhaps the most valuable is navigation. On the 33-day expeditions I led, we practiced navigation every day. Students learned how to read maps, take and follow compass bearings, account for the variation between true ...

I spent over 20 years training outdoor leaders. The thing I learned above all else: It doesn’t matter if it’s in the outdoors, the military or the corporate boardroom; the principles of leadership are always the same. On my trips there was a predictability of what the students learned ...