ATHLETE PROFILE: Barbara McMartin

Home: Canada Lake, NY Age: 70 Family: Husband, W. Alec Reid; children: 3 (Barbara), 2 (Alec); 4 grandchildren Occupation: Writer Primary Sports: Hiking, Canoeing

Discovery and writing go hand in hand

by Mimi Wacholder

With 22 published books on the terrain of the Adirondacks and athletic laurels that include 100 hikes per year for a minimum of 15 years of her life, Barbara McMartin modestly says, "Oh, I'm not an athlete, I just like hiking and walking."

"I like hiking" is putting it mildly, extremely mildly, for a woman who has made this sport her passion and vocation for the last 35 years and is likely one of the most well-known experts on both Adirondack exploration and history.

McMartin's passion for the outdoors and the Adirondack region was nurtured from a very young age. Having summered at a family camp in Canada Lake in the southern Adirondacks, she began fishing and hiking with her dad as early as she can remember. "We always took walks together and I definitely remember my first bushwhack (a term referring to hiking in the woods without a trail). I was about 8 and dad and I were looking for an old fishing trail when I stepped on a yellow jacket's nest," recalls McMartin. Undeterred by this unpleasant experience and encouraged to continue hiking and exploring, the young McMartin so began a lifetime of discovery.

After spending summers on Canada Lake for all of her childhood years, exploring surrounding terrain by foot, or sailing or canoeing the lake, it would be several years before McMartin found her way back to the childhood passions that define her today. She attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie and settled for many years in Kansas City, Mo.

After nearly a decade, McMartin made her way back east to New York state's Westchester County where she spent years working toward a master's degree from Hunter College and a Ph.D. in mathematics from City University of New York. During this time McMartin also was busy raising three children. After completing her Ph.D. in 1970, she began to rekindle her love affair with hiking in the Adirondacks and again started to spend summers in the Canada Lake area — this time exploring with her own children.

After teaching in her field of study for a few years, McMartin explains, "My summer activities started taking over. I started making notes on the hikes that I would take … at the time there was no kind of a guidebook for any of the region outside of the High Peaks." It wasn't long before these notes materialized into McMartin's first book, Walks and Waterways (today re-titled and revised as Discover the Southern Adirondacks and one of an 11-part Discover series), originally published in 1972.

What sets McMartin's writing style apart from other guidebooks is her interest in both history and natural history such as the flora and fauna. "Most of the time you are hiking, you aren't on top of the mountain," describes McMartin. "There is a lot of time in the woods and it helps to give your mind another focus."

"My guidebooks are a little different; I don't just tell you where to take your feet, I tell you where to take your head," continues McMartin. She remembers always being interested in the plants and made it a point to bring along a good book on identification.

By the mid-'70s McMartin was hiking four to five days a week. Her observations in the natural areas spawned additional interests, such as involvement in environment-related groups. She worked on the High Peaks Advisory Committee of the state Department of Environmental Conservation and was vice president of the Adirondack Mountain Club. Additionally, it was around this time that she wrote her first book on Adirondack history, one of a current collection of a half dozen. Her interest in history was born of insatiable passion to discover or uncover something new.

Wanting to determine old growth areas of the Adirondacks inspired one of her most popular historical books, The Great Forest of the Adirondacks. She describes her motivation, "I knew there were areas of old growth out there; they couldn't have logged the whole park. But in order to discover what wasn't logged, I had to research what had been logged." After 15 years of research pursuing the mysteries of these stone foundations, McMartin's book reveals the history of more than 100 local tanneries that tanned sole leather from hides using Adirondack hemlock bark.

Her passion for both hiking and writing is cyclical: Hiking discoveries inspire more writing and writing requires more hiking — she discovered this during the late 1970s and early '80s. Says McMartin, "It was during this time I was really hiking a lot. I'd go out with a little tape recorder and my cameras and go home and write the books.

"It wasn't unusual to be doing 20-mile hikes," adds McMartin, "but I'm not a great hiker — I go slow on mountains — but I get there. I guess I have stamina."

In 1983 she discovered she had another mountain to climb: a fight against breast cancer. After a mastectomy and six months of chemotherapy, McMartin was anxious to get back to hiking and the comfort she found in nature. "I was amazed at how weak I had become, a half-mile hike to see a pond was literally exhausting," recalls McMartin. "What really amazed me though, was after doing just a little each day, I was hiking Niagara and Nippletop mountains only six weeks later." McMartin says her enjoyment of nature and ability to look outside herself to something greater was a large part of her recovery.

Today McMartin is 70 years young. She laments about being able to only do 5-mile to 7-mile hikes — an admirable distance for any age or ability. But she says she feels very fortunate to have found co-author Bill Ingersoll. "His new and stronger legs make it possible to keep revising the guidebooks," says McMartin. "An added bonus is that he shares my philosophy of hiking and writing."

McMartin's 22 books have sold more than 220,000 copies, but she is not content to ride on this accomplishment. She continues to write, revise and research. When asked, almost rhetorically, if she was an Adirondack 46er (a hiker who has climbed the summits of the 46 major peaks of the Adirondacks), McMartin sarcastically replies, "Oh no, I don't believe in hiking a mountain that I know doesn't have a view."

Certainly McMartin's accomplishments have been about the journey — not content to follow the guidebooks, but to write new ones. Her answer to the pressing question "So what is your very favorite hike?" was not surprising: "I would have to say that my favorite hike is the one I haven't done yet."

Mimi Wacholder (wacholder@adelphia.net) resides in Lake Placid, where she works as a freelance writer and marketing consultant with Juniper Promotions. She is a yoga instructor and enjoys hiking, climbing and skiing in the Adirondacks.