Bushwhack Jack's Tracts

Last week as I was cleaning up my excuse for an office (a tiny corner of our bedroom) I came across the obituary of my grandfather Kenyon...

Forty-one years ago this week, my colleague Doug Fitzgerald, and I started NCCC’s first Winter Practicum. It was a student-planned...

I spent my first eleven years on the north shore of Long Island. But my formative years were spent in the northern Finger Lakes after my...

In the fall of 1977, at the tender age of 28 and struggling to convince NCCC to start a wilderness program, I was asked by the Associate...

I didn’t give decision making a lot of thought until I started leading wilderness trips and realized that quality decision making was the...

I graduated from SUNY Cortland in January of 1972 and soon had to deal with the reality of having to make a living. Working construction...

I first visited Lower Saranac Lake in August 1956 at the tender age of seven. Given the circumstances it’s a miracle I ever wanted to...

I just got off the phone with my good buddy Jeff Olson, former Executive Director of Camp Confidence in Minnesota, a year-round outdoor...

Do you remember your first jackknife? I do mine - it was a souvenir beauty from Niagara Falls. It had a scene of the falls with a rainbow...

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...

I remember the Metz family for a number of reasons. First, Stan Metz and his sons Andrew and Matt joined me in the early seventies on a...

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...

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,...

​ Of all the outdoor technical skills taught at NCCC, perhaps the most valuable is navigation. On the thirty-three-day expeditions I...

I spent over twenty years training outdoor leaders. The thing I learned above all else: It doesn’t matter if it’s in the outdoors, the...

I had a colleague at North Country Community College who loved a lot of things about the Wilderness Recreation Leadership Program. He...

A couple of weeks ago there was a meeting in the Harrietstown Hall. Its purpose was to solicit public input on issues regarding the High...

My dad was a devout Episcopalian and a dedicated church goer who rarely missed a Sunday. While my mother was spiritual in her own right...

It was July 2010 and we were preparing to load our gear into the de Havilland Twin Otter seaplane, the workhorse of the northern Canada...

I thought I knew Doug Kelley. And while in some ways I did, in many ways I didn’t. I met Doug at a meeting at Paul Smith’s College one...