Every fall, students across St. Lawrence’s campus gear up to enjoy the beautiful fall weather and sublimity of the Adirondacks & North Country. One of the primary resources that SLU students have at their disposal to experience outdoor recreation on and off campus, is the school’s Outing Club (OC).
St. Lawrence proudly markets the OC. They present it to prospective students and parents as a positive resource for students to responsibly enjoy the bounty of protected wilderness that is just a short drive from the school.
One of the signature OC events that the school aggressively highlights is “Peak Weekend”. Every fall, OC members lead their peers on hiking trips across the Adirondacks with the goal of having students on every High-Peak during “Peak Weekend”. The event attracts hundreds of St. Lawrence students and is inevitably, the OC’s most visible fall event.
In the fall of 2017, St. Lawrence’s official Instagram (@stlawrenceu) posted a video highlighting student participation in “Peak Weekend”. St. Lawrence captioned the post, “Last weekend, more than 300 miles and 88,000 vertical feet were hiked, more than 15 gallons of trail mix were consumed, and all of the Adirondack high peaks had Laurentians at the top of them. Why? It’s Tradition!”
That Instagram post rhetorically asks why we as a St. Lawrence community would continue to support “Peak Weekend”; Does the school’s answer “tradition” justify our participation and support of the event as a campus community?
While “Peak Weekend” may be beneficial to members of the OC and students who take part in the program, it is problematic for the ecological integrity and the recreational environment of the Adirondack High Peaks Region. Consequently, while “Peak Weekend” may be a great marketing tool for SLU to recruit students, and an event that is good for the OC, its existence is detrimental to the land and communities of the Adirondacks.
Furthermore, It is telling that one student who chose to be quoted anonymously said that when he participated in Peak Weekend during the fall of 2016 “We were told to avoid wearing SLU apparel because the DEC (New York State Department of Environmental Conservation) didn’t like the event”. Peak Weekend is an extremely visible example of overuse in the high peaks.
Over the phone, Seth Jones , education director for the Adirondack Mountain Club, told me that currently official DEC land management policy encourages the dispersal of recreational use outside of the high peaks region. The Adirondack Council says that “The DEC still lacks… a comprehensive plan, resources and staff needed to address the negative impacts of overuse on visitor safety, natural resources, and the visitor’s wilderness experience.”
Additionally, Jones said that “with high use comes increased recreational impact”. It follows that, by injecting hundreds of hikers with varied levels of experience hiking into the High Peaks region during the already busy foliage season the OC has a tangible negative environmental impact on the Adirondacks.
Additionally, the 2019 State of the Park published annually by the Adirondack Council highlights why this fall would be an especially inopportune time to send large groups of hikers into the High Peaks Wilderness. The publication aptly titled Challenged by Success lays out the problem that overuse brings to high trafficked areas, saying “The Adirondack Park is so popular that overuse is harming wilderness and communities”.
In my opinion, a lack of enforced government regulation doesn’t justify ignoring the duty that OC and the St. Lawrence community as a whole has to be responsible recreators. It’s true when the OC runs Peak Weekend, they’re running an event that is good for St. Lawrence students. For many, it is an opportunity to experience hiking in the Adirondacks for the first time or a good excuse to lace up their boots and spend some time away from campus in some of the Northeast’s most stunning locales.
In reality, if you choose to take part in Peak Weekend, you’ll probably have a good time and on an individual basis, have a marginal impact on the degradation of the Adirondack Park. However, participating in Peak Weekend explicitly endorses an event that pumps hundreds of people into an extremely delicate habitat that already has extensive systemic overuse issues while facing the threat of climate change. Additionally, large groups of hikers are a nuisance to other people who are trying to use trails.
Ultimately, the reasons why Peak Weekend brings notoriety to the OC and St. Lawrence are founded in some truth. Before choosing to participate, we should ask ourselves if “tradition” and “having a fun weekend” are worth contributing in a substantial way to key issues that the Adirondacks face. We are privileged to be able to have an event like Peak Weekend on our campus. It is essential that we don’t allow our privilege to justify unethical recreation.
If you want to go hiking in the Adirondacks that is fine. One of the reasons New York State protects the high peaks wilderness is so that people can experience and enjoy wild lands. We are so lucky that these mountains and all the recreational opportunities they supply are so close to our school and are accessible to everyone. We have a responsibility to ensure that our use of that land doesn’t damage that privilege. As an organization that represents our school and introduces so many SLU students to the Adirondacks, the OC and its events need to be held to the highest standard. I believe, Peak Weekend doesn’t meet that standard.
Above all, we should question whether our justifications for participating in Peak Weekend lines up with our values regarding the protection of wild places. The OC should question whether they should make changes to an event that currently plays into many of the issues that the Adirondack Mountains face now and will continue to face in the future.