Ann LaBastille's Woodswoman (1976) is a favorite book of mine - one I discovered directly as a result of this project. Yesterday, my wife and I visited The Adirondack Experience museum in Blue Mountain Lake, NY, in the central Adirondacks. Several years back, the museum moved LaBastille's remote cabin to the museum and rebuilt much of it, indoors, furnished with many of her possessions. The cabin itself was a central figure in the book, and it was truly inspiring to see and touch it (one can't actually go inside, just see through plexiglass). The museum did a nice job, including a short interpretive film with a fair bit of footage and verbiage from Ann herself.
To briefly summarize, LaBastille was a renowned ecologist, with a doctorate in Wildlife Ecology from Cornell where she taught, who authored nearly 200 articles and scientific papers, in addition to over a dozen books. She was amongst the first to document the impact of acid rain on the ecosystems of the northeast US, and did pioneering work in Guatemala as well. She was a passionate and sometimes controversial defender of the Adirondack Park and Preserve, where in the mid-1960's she bought land on a remote lake, inaccessible by car, and built a cabin where she lived on her own, without electricity or running water, for many years.
The exhibit was inspirational to me. And I solidly support any institution that honors and extends LaBastille's legacy. That said, I was disappointed that the cabin was incomplete (no kitchen/sleeping loft), and was hidden in a corner. The interpretive film was in a remote corner of the corner - I was lucky to find it. More generally, I found that the exhibit, like the Wikipedia entry about her (as of this date) focuses 90+ pct on her lifestyle and 10- pct on her ecological and conservation work. It's as if she can't quite get the recognition she deserves as an ecologist and conservationist because it's hard to get past her general badassedness [and you get one guess as to whether Wix, my internet platform, recognizes that as a word :)].
That said, LaBastille herself wrote a popular series of books focused primarily on her own lifestyle...and those books are why she is as generally recognized and celebrated by the public at large. And the exhibit was, after all, her cabin. So I am being a crotchety and contrary old cuss as usual.
I would add that the Adirondack Experience museum as a whole is absolutely wonderful. I recommend it highly! Well-curated, well-maintained, friendly staff, and I noticed a lot of content specifically designed to interest youngsters. I had actually planned to do just a fly-by, only to see the cabin, but we ended up spending several hours there. The new art museum is crazy good. We took a beautiful walk down to the boathouse on a secluded pond, and rowed around in a genuine hundred-year-old wooden Adirondack guide boat - a type of boat that generally does not exist elsewhere. And, unexpectedly, the cafe serves some of the best food I've found in the Adirondacks. Well worth a visit!
P.S. In one corner of the art museum is a small but very creditable painting by Seneca Ray Stoddard of a partial view of Schroon Lake. Stoddard authored the most popular series of Adirondack guidebooks of the second half of the 19th century, and he became an important advocate for conservation in the region. See Guidebooks (1893).
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