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Two Hamilton College students won first and second prize in the Wilderness Writing Contest sponsored by the Adirondack Council this spring.  They were selected based on letters to Gov. Andrew Cuomo in which they expressed reasons why the state should expand the High Peaks Wilderness Area. 

Peter Bauer, executive director of Protect the Adirondacks!, visited Hamilton on Nov. 18 to deliver a lecture on “The Adirondack Park in The Andrew Cuomo Years: Forever Wild Under Assault.”

Peter Bauer, executive director of Protect the Adirondacks, will present a lecture titled “The Adirondack Park in The Andrew Cuomo Years: Forever Wild under Assault” on Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 7:30 p.m., in the Kennedy Auditorium, Taylor Science Center. The lecture is sponsored by the Environmental Studies Department and is free and open to the public.

Fall Break gave the leaders and members of the Hamilton Outing Club a spectacular opportunity to get out and enjoy many different beautiful wilderness areas and outdoor activities. The four-day vacation (Oct. 14-18) saw trips go as far as Virginia’s Shenandoah Mountains and Maine’s Casco Bay, taking advantage of all that the East Coast has to offer in the way of outdoors activities.

Over the past month the officers and experienced leaders of the Hamilton Outing Club (HOC) have taken on the task of giving 35 new leaders the training that they need to lead trips for HOC. Student leaders are the heart of HOC and are responsible for leading almost all of the trips that go out during the school year -- ranging from easy day hikes in the Adirondacks to longer trips further afield during breaks.

Members of Robin Kinnel’s Environmental Studies 220 class, “The Cultural and Natural Histories of the Adirondacks,” took a whirlwind tour of the area they are studying when they visited the Adirondacks the weekend of Sept. 26-27.

For the past two decades, the Hamilton Outing Club has designated one fall weekend as 46 Peaks Weekend. The goal:  to put at least one Hamilton student on the summit of each and every one of the 46 mountains in the Adirondacks that are above 4,000 feet in elevation. This past weekend (Sept. 25-27) HOC succeeded in accomplishing this goal for the second time ever -- marking two years in a row that this achievement has been made.

Each September hundreds of paddlers take to the Adirondacks to paddle in the Adirondack Canoe Classic, also known as “The 90-Miler” or just “The 90.” For the past five years a dedicated group of Hamilton students have joined them and this year saw the College well represented with seven boats of Hamilton students entering into the race. Jillian Donze ’17 and Maggie Smith ’17 came in third in the women’s C2 Stock Class.

Julia Ferguson ’16 is spending her summer learning the ins-and-outs of the broadcasting world in an internship that will continue into the fall at North Country Public Radio. Ferguson, a comparative literature major, is undertaking this internship through Hamilton’s Academic Semester in the Adirondacks, launching this academic year under General Director Janelle Schwartz.

In the age of eReaders and online libraries, the story of books gets lost. Not the story within the book, which is arguably more permanent, but rather the story contained on its faded pages, in its stretched spine, on its battered covers. Hamilton’s Burke Library has an impressive selection of rare books and other special collections; of particular note are the Ezra Pound Archive and the abundance of Adirondack-related acquisitions. Christian Goodwillie, director and curator of Special Collections and Archives, is currently cataloguing a recently procured collection: The John Quinn and Jeanne Robert Foster Library, a generous gift from Jim and Carol McCord.