Another Adirondack pioneer, Edwin Ketchledge, passes
Updated: With a link to Mike Lynch’s obituary in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.
A friend emailed yesterday to say that Edwin Ketchledge — known widely as “Ketch” — passed away this week at the age of 85.
He was, according to my correspondent, “a hugely important figure in founding the summit steward program and conservation of alpine vegetation in the Adirondacks and throughout Northeast .”
I just rang Neil Woodworth, head of the Adirondack Mountain Club, who remembered Ketch as an avid outdoorsman, and a decorated veteran of the 10th Mountain Division’s Italian campaign.
According to the Watertown Daily Times, he’ll be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Ketch was also an author and a scientists — and one of the creators of the now ubiquitous “if you carry it in, carry it out” slogan that has helped reduce the trash load in the North Country woods.
I only met Ketch once, on top of Whiteface Mountain, where he was talking with visitors and working — if I remember correctly — with a new class of summit stewards.
By coincidence, I was up on Poke-O-Moonshine yesterday, talking with one of the young folks who have helped keep that program alive.
We’ll have a brief remembrance of Ketch on Monday during the 8 o’clock hour, and you can read a nice obituary here at the Adirondack Almanack website and a more detailed remembrance in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.
Outdoors reporter Mike Lynch wrote a more in-depth obit in today’s Adirondack Daily Enterprise, where I work. It includes insightful comments from the next generation of Adirondack botanists who learned from Mr. Ketchledge, and it also includes interesting stories about him as a bobsledder and as a wounded soldier in WWII. The medic who saved his life on a European battlefield was killed immediately afterward, an event which reportedly had a deep and lasting effect on Mr. Ketchledge.
I met Ketch in about 1967 at Marcy Dam, where he accused me of stealing and drinking a Utica Club he had left to chill in Avalanche Brook and that I had assumed had been forgotten. I was an 18-year old wannabe writer and camp counselor and he a true mountaineer and veteran of the Italian campaign. His natural authority and knowledge of our shared place of choice made clear who was in charge. Later I bought his summit vegetation book, carried it with me everywhere, followed his career and consulted him (without reminding him that I was the kid who stole his beer) often on stories. He was the real thing, up there with Greenleaf Chase and other pioneers of the 50s-60s transition from a purely sporting concept of conservation to one more broadly defined and that survives in so many important ways today. We owe him a lot.