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Amazing Grace
91-year-old Adirondack Forty-Sixer still finds her strength in the hills around her
PAUL GRONDAHL
Staff writerSCHROON LAKE Determination is written into the furrows that crease her face as deeply as the lines on an Adirondack topographic map.
Even now, five months shy of her 92nd birthday, with an electric space heater aglow in the living room to ward off fall's chill descending upon this rustic Adirondack camp, Grace Hudowalski must reach the summit.
Looping a cane over her right wrist while refusing assistance, Hudowalski gripped a cedar branch handrail and inched upward along the wall of a steep, narrow stairway to the second-floor bedrooms.
Her cat, a Himalayan named K2 after the fabled peak, watched indifferently from the landing. Her visitors and the cabin itself seemed to hold their breath as Hudowalski willed her way to the top, step by step, a dozen in all, as her atrophied left leg dragged behind her like a dead stump.
The useless limb is a cruelly ironic malady for the woman who is associated with climbing the Adirondack High Peaks more deeply than any other person.
Hudowalski has climbed all 46 peaks in New York state that are 4,000 feet or higher at least twice, many of the High Peaks a half-dozen times, and the highest one, Mount Marcy, on dozens of occasions. Ask her about a favorite Adirondack peak and she'll say that's like asking a parent to name a favorite child.
Spiritual legend
As much as she might like to downplay it, Hudowalski is a legend in Adirondack hiking circles. She became an Adirondack Forty-Sixer and the first woman to do so in 1937, and its first president. Her fabled checked hiking shorts with the ADK 46-R patch on a pocket are on display behind glass at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake.
"There is something spiritual in it,'' Hudowalski said about the hikes. "The mountains mean something different and special to each person,'' she said. They are what connect us as a group. But the journey is an inward one, learning about yourself.''
Through all the accolades and recognitions for her longevity and commitment to the mountains, Hudowalski has remained as humble as the $5 Montgomery Ward shoes she wore to climb many of the peaks during the early years. Then, she carried a little World War I musette bag over her shoulder, containing a homemade first aid kit, an orange, a thermos of tea and a sandwich with cream cheese and sliced stuffed olives.
Each summer, Hudowalski continues to leave behind her home in Albany where she said she feels her age, is afraid to drive in city traffic, and is defeated by being forced to exist like a frail shut-in and comes here to the North Country.
This is the 44th consecutive summer that Hudowalski has come to the camp.
Hudowalski's camp is known as The Boulders, so named for the ancient glacial till that lend this lakefront slope its feel of permanence. From the gravel roadway you can't see the cabin, cloaked in a perpetual piney gloaming that seeps into your pores, cool and moist and mossy, as soon as you step out of the car.
The cabin is made of sturdy cedar logs long ago floated down the Schroon River into Schroon Lake and beached on a spit of sand halfway up the lake's eastern shore. The log beams anchor the framework for a gable-roofed structure that has survived fire, flood and the snows of 87 winters. It was built by a minister, a Reverend Birdsall, and Hudowalski, who finds spirituality and mystery in her beloved mountains, believes that has made all the difference.
It is a place of quietude and solace. Years ago, Hudowalski unplugged the TV. She does not turn on the radio. No newspapers are delivered. She figures there's enough news in Time magazine to keep her up on current affairs, and she gets the local gossip along with provisions during a weekly one-mile drive to the general store in the hamlet of Adirondack at the southern end of Schroon Lake.
Driving for the food run is a concern for her friends, but Hudowalski points the nose of a white Plymouth due south and puts the rest in God's hands. Weekday traffic is minimal on the backcountry road that feeds a stretch of summer camps.
Guiding spirit
Hudowalski speaks in a folksy idiom, referring to men as "chaps'' and streams as "cricks.'' She drinks what her hiking pals dub "bastard daiquiris'' with dark rum and a dash of bottled mix. She chortles at her own jokes, a husky laugh that reduces her round eyes to slits, a joyous sound that seems to begin in her toes and builds to a rumble before floating out her mop of curly gray hair. For decades, the mountain climbers have written to Hudowalski as a grandmotherly sage and as a confessor. Ostensibly the journey was about the mountains, but the letters spoke as much about personal transformation. The mountains merely provided the canvas upon which the sojourners painted the story of their lives.
In those thousands of pages of handwritten and heartfelt correspondence, stories were told about couples who married and divorced, children who were born and parents who died, careers that were built and friends who moved away.
In return, she has personally answered as many as 1,600 letters each year from a membership that numbers more than 4,000 people, from children to senior citizens. In recent years, other club members have helped Hudowalski with the mounds of letter-writing. Even so, she still finds it hard to pull herself away from writing replies to letters from kids.
"She's so warm and welcoming that people just want to spill their guts to Grace,'' said George Sloan, club president, who works as a mechanical engineer in Saratoga Springs and took two decades to complete his 46er circuit, becoming member No. 2651 in 1989. The 46ers are given a number in chronological order as they achieve the goal. Single digits, like Hudowalski, signal the earliest club members.
Hudowalski spoke of her role as the heart and soul of the club with typical matter-of-factness.
"I just happened to have the time to answer the letters and I was willing to listen,'' she said. Hudowalski signed her reply letters with, "Good Climbing! Grace.''
"There was so much emotion in those letters that I decided to save them all,'' she said. "The children write such moving things. And I'm still touched by the men with big titles and big jobs who write to me and say they broke down and cried like a baby when they reached the summit of their 46th mountain.''
Other club members, it's clear, are touched by Hudowalski.
"We call her amazing Grace,'' said L. John Van Norden, a Schenectady attorney, who is director of the board for the Adirondack Forty-Sixers. Van Norden named a daughter, Margaret Grace, in Hudowalski's honor. The girl turns 5 in November and already has reached the summit of three of the 46 High Peaks (those 4,000 feet or higher) that gives the club its raison d'etre.
Hudowalski makes a ritual out of everything, friends say, even cleaning the porch. Visitors to the camp receive the house special, a grilled cheese sandwich made just so white bread buttered on all sides, three slices of yellow American cheese along with a smear of Dijon mustard and cooked to golden brown perfection on an old-fashioned Hotpoint electric griddle.
"We've all learned from Grace's rituals and lessons,'' Van Norden said. "I'll never eat macaroni from a box or over-grill a steak or stack my plates too high.''
Early peaks
"Nobody ever told me I couldn't do something, beginning with my father,'' Hudowalski said.
Her dad, James C. Leach, was an expert hunter and angler and skippered a steamboat on Lake George. She grew up in Ticonderoga at the northern end of the lake.
Hudowalski was the youngest of six children, whose mother died when Grace was 11. When she was 15, Hudowalski prevailed upon her father to let her join some college students on a climb of Mount Marcy. That was 1922, when the state's highest peak was an arduous three-day journey through wild mountainous terrain without benefit of today's well-worn trail.
Hudowalski recalled it was early August and the black flies were murderous. It rained. Fog socked in the hikers. Several of the college students turned back.
Hudowalski hung in, though, her strong legs churning beneath heavy, soaked gym bloomers. She wore inexpensive black oxfords whose soles blew out along the rocky trail. The resourceful teen repaired the shoes with twine and hiked on. She reached the summit on all fours, crawling like a dog, feeling her way through the soupy fog.
Atop Marcy, a 5,344-foot summit few had reached in 1922, the fog lifted for one shining moment. Hudowalski said she saw Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, the source of the Hudson River, glinting like a sapphire a mile below.
Hudowalski grew silent as she recounted that climb and seemed to get choked up in describing the apparition as a kind of religious experience. "It touched me deeply and I'll never forget it,'' she said.
The Native-American name for Marcy is Tahawus ("cloud-splitter'') and it provides an epigraph for the club from a poem by early 46er Orra A. Phelps (46er No. 47): "Great Tahawus, we salute thee, Mighty Cleaver of the sky. Of the summits, of the forests, Thine the crown that towers most high.''
Hudowalski took a hiatus from climbing until she moved to Troy to live with an older sister, attended Troy High School and met her eventual husband, an engineering student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The couple began their love affair with the High Peaks in earnest in the mid-1930s and never looked back. Hudowalski completed her 46th peak, Mount Esther, on August 26, 1937, earning her the No. 9 46er patch.
Family of mountains
Hudowalski's modest cabin on Schroon Lake has an outsize blacktop parking lot, as if she were expecting a crowd. She has built it, this club with its rituals and connectedness and human spirit as profound as any church, and they do come.
"We are her children and the mountains are her family, her true love,'' said Sloan, who frequently drops by with his wife, Suzanne Lance (No. 1,802), daughter of early member Bill Lance.
Hudowalski's knowledge of 46er lore is encyclopedic. Toss out a name and she is off and running with a biography of that club member, offering some nugget of information that marks a life as special and important.
There are currently 4,052 individuals who wear the coveted club patch "ADK 46-R'' in a circle with green and yellow lettering, an outline of a mountain and a red border designed by Edward Hudowalski (No. 6), Hudowalski's late husband. He climbed Mount Marcy in 1932, helped form the Troy Forty-Sixers, the Adirondack club's precursor, and died in 1966. The couple had no children. She never remarried.
Widowhood only strengthened Hudowalski's commitment to the club. A retired state employee for the tourism department, she converted her Cardinal Avenue home into club archives. A few years back, Hudowalski passed on boxes stretching more than 10 yards to archivists at the State Library. The extensive correspondence and manuscripts pertaining to the club's history are housed in the State Museum building.
Club members document the intricacies and arcane details of their group and its history to a remarkable degree. The club has a Web site (www.adk46r.org), a quarterly magazine called Adirondack Peeks and has published a book, "Of the Summits, of the Forests.''
New peaks
Although the years are beginning to weigh down on Hudowalski, she keeps reaching for summits. It is revealing that she struggles to get upstairs each night, but did not bother the entire summer to negotiate the 100 feet or so down a steep hill studded with boulders to see the water's edge of Schroon Lake.
On Aug. 26, Hudowalski was joined by dozens of club members in an event that captured the spirit of the group and honored its matriarch.
Members set out in the morning, one or two headed for each of the 46 High Peaks. Hudowalski was driven by car up near the top of 4,865-foot Whiteface Mountain. The final 500 feet or so between the end of the road and the summit is a steep, craggy peak with steps cut into the rock.
With club members encouraging her with words and song and the occasional pull from above or push from behind, Hudowalski reached the Whiteface summit exactly 60 years after she became a 46er on Aug. 26, 1937, atop Mount Esther.
Atop Whiteface, Hudowalski sat down to rest on the summit, a cane across her knees, and sipped tea from her trusty old thermos Earl Grey this time, a special blend to celebrate the occasion. She wore her club sweat shirt and paused to savor the view before taking an elevator in the Whiteface observatory back down to the car.
That night, as the hikers returned from their far-flung peaks, The Boulders sang with raucous laughter and stories of that day's climb and of climbs past. The dozens of club members who participated bestowed upon Hudowalski snapshots, banners, certificates, a T-shirt they all signed and other simple homemade gifts. Hudowalski's tea was replaced with the "bastard daiquiris'' her friends know how to make so well.
And the words that rang in the ears of amazing Grace were those of her father from eight decades ago when a teenage girl reached the top of Marcy against long odds.
"It doesn't matter if you get to the top or not,'' her father said. "It matters how you climb the mountain.''
First published on Sunday, October 12, 1997
Copyright 1997, Times Union, Albany, N.Y.