Walt McLaughlin may be the least known prolific and versatile Adirondacks-oriented writer ever. He’s the author of 48 (and counting) books — almost one a year since 1980, including six reprints.

He’s written poetry, short fiction, philosophy/religion, essays, narratives of camping trips, field journals, anthropology, science and nature, many under his own imprint, Wood Thrush Books. His output ranges from 17 pages (“Wild Lilies,” a 1995 essay) to 208 (“Nature and the Absolute,” a philosophy tract from 2023). Titles run the gamut from “Shadows Dancing” (poetry, 1985) through “Stalking the Sacred” (essays, 2002) and “The Allure of Deep Woods” (hiking/camping narratives, 2013) to “Wildness and Being Human” (2021, identified in his lengthy personal bibliography as “anthropology/philosophy”).

He’s published another two dozen books, including “several anthologies of nature writing, reprints of 19th-century nature writers and nature-related books by several other authors.”

So just who is this guy?

McLaughlin, an Ohio native, spent his younger adult years ricocheting between the East and the Pacific Northwest, working in bookstores, studying philosophy, dabbling in fiction and running a used bookstore in Burlington, Vermont. In 1985, he launched Wood Thrush Books and started writing hiking chronicles “after spending time alone in the Green Mountains.”

He self-published his first paperback book, “Tracks across the Forest Floor,” in 1990.

“It sold well while I worked as a guide for Vermont Hiking Holidays (VHH),” he says.

The guiding grew. McLaughlin acquired his New York state guide’s license in 1989 and “especially enjoyed leading tours for VHH in the Adirondacks,” he recalls. Summer 1992 found him soloing in Alaska because he “wanted to experience REAL wilderness.”

After that, McLaughlin “gravitated more to the Adirondacks because I feel like I can roam free there for the rest of my life.”

He is especially partial to the nearly trackless, 169,000-acre West Canada Lakes Wilderness Area in the south-central Adirondacks.

Odd jobs — an outfitting store, motel front desks, a UPS store — filled the hours until he plunged full-time into writing, publishing and “starting my own online bookselling business that I still run.”

Meanwhile, his wife, Judy, was the district director of the Health Department in Franklin County, Vermont, in the northwest corner of that state, which explains why he has lived in St. Albans and Swanton since 2000. (Now retired, she is a certified end-of-life doula, helping people navigate their last days.)

McLaughlin “hiked the Northville-Placid Trail end-to-end in 2006, upon turning 50. “Loved the big woods feel,” he says.

But in 2013, he stopped hiking in the High Peaks: “too many people.” He’s thankful that so much of the Adirondacks is protected, unlike much of northern New England’s mountains and forests. “I love the Adirondacks because they are forever wild, as I am,” he avows.

McLaughlin says he writes “to share my thoughts and experiences with like-minded others, and to open pathways to wild places and wild thoughts that most people haven’t considered.”

As to why he also publishes, “because I’m a control freak,” he admits. “I like having complete control over production, promotion and distribution. The only downside is that some people think self-publishing is for those who aren’t good enough for ‘real’ publishers, but that attitude has been changing.”

To encounter Walt’s work in chronological order is to perceive how his relationship to the extremes of the natural world has evolved, expanded, deepened.

“All the philosophical questions I’ve been asking since I was a teenager are answered only by wild nature,” he explains. “Sometimes the answer is only a great wild silence, but that, I believe now, is how God/Nature speaks to us. We don’t know what its agenda is, or what nature is all about. Yet we experience it in deep woods, feeling it in our gut, reveling in the wonder and beauty of it all … and somehow that is enough.”