The Summit Stewardship Program: Leading the Way in Visitor Use Management 

In the 1990s, the summit stewards working on Mount Marcy had a problem.

The Summit Stewardship Program, a partnership between ADK, the Adirondack Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), had been founded a few years before by Dr. Edwin Ketchledge and Kathy Regan in response to growing damage to alpine ecosystems caused by hikers who were trampling sensitive plants and contributing to destructive erosion. Summit stewards were in place on Marcy’s summit on busy weekends, educating hikers, encouraging the “rock walk,” conducting research, and performing trail maintenance—all of it to prevent further damage and help fragile alpine plant communities to recover. In order to measure progress, the program had established photopoint monitoring, a simple but effective protocol in which pictures are taken from the same vantage point over time, allowing comparative analysis of the extent and condition of alpine flora. The monitoring showed that despite the best efforts of stewards, damage to the meadow on the north side of the summit was increasing. In order to achieve the desired conditions of the program, namely a recovering and sustainable natural alpine environment, they needed to do something different.

First, stewards added scree walls, small chunks of loose rock that lined desired routes (and which are now a familiar sight to hikers on many Adirondack summits). However, weekly visual observations over a five-year period showed that scree walls weren’t enough: too many people were still stepping past them and harming delicate plant communities. As a result, the program decided to add string fencing to the meadow. This was successful. Weekly visual observations showed that hikers were violating the string lines far less frequently than the scree walls, and photopoint monitoring conducted in the early 2010s proved that recovery was faster where string fencing was present.

At the same time, string fencing was recognized as obtrusive to visitors, affecting the perception of a wilderness experience, thus it was used sparingly. For example, there is no string fencing on Algonquin. Taken together, these steps and considerations encompassed all the dimensions of the environment atop Marcy: the physical characteristics of the summit, the ecology of plant communities, and the behavior and perceptions of visitors.

The set of management strategies employed by the Summit Stewardship Program has proven to be an unqualified success: every summit where stewards have worked has shown recovery, even Cascade Mountain, the poster child for heavy visitation. To a long-time High Peaks hiker like myself, the difference in the ecological condition of a peak like Mount Marcy in 2025 versus thirty years ago is nothing less than stunning. The Adirondack Summit Stewardship Program is a world-class example of the effectiveness of adaptive management in protecting wilderness.

A Dynamic Environment

In order to appreciate the importance of this program, it helps to understand what we mean by adaptive management. The problems that most threaten the wild character and ecological health of the Adirondacks are fundamentally dynamic in nature. An invasive species can suddenly be introduced by a new vector with an exponential effect; climate change is producing increasingly unpredictable weather; even the severity of blackfly season in a given year is anyone’s guess! Conditions in the Adirondacks are changing all the time, and this goes for visitor use, too.

To be sure, visitation in the High Peaks has increased, but with many ups and downs. At a more granular level, visitor use is very hard to predict, characterized not so much by steady increases as by massive usage spikes, which are often but not exclusively driven by weather. If visitor use is hard to predict, its impact is doubly so: we are still learning a great deal about the true nature of visitor impacts. All this fluidity means that traditional “top-down” management strategies, based upon comprehensive plans that can take years to develop, are too static and inflexible to respond to the challenges of rapidly changing conditions on the ground.

Adaptive management is designed to meet the dynamic nature of wilderness management challenges with a model that is fast on its feet, responsive, and resource-smart. By identifying specific and high-priority issues, establishing desired conditions to mitigate or eliminate them, implementing strategies to achieve those desired conditions, monitoring the conditions, and responding with new strategies when condition thresholds are being exceeded, adaptive management addresses problems with a highly flexible, iterative approach that is driven by science, data, and experience. If this cycle of measurement and response sounds familiar, it should: it’s exactly what summit stewards did on Mount Marcy.

A Dynamic Response

New York State has recognized the need for more dynamic management of the High Peaks Wilderness for years. In 2019, the DEC convened the High Peaks Advisory Group (HPAG), which in its final report led with a recommendation to implement adaptive management in the Adirondack Park (full disclosure, I served on the HPAG and wrote the draft language on adaptive management). Specifically, the HPAG recommended that the state adopt visitor use management (VUM) as its adaptive management strategy.

Developed a decade ago by the National Park Service, the National Forest Service, and other federal land management agencies, VUM is the gold standard for adaptive management of public lands, and it has been implemented successfully in many places across the country. The DEC is currently running two VUM pilot projects in the state, one in the Catskills and one in the High Peaks. There is much yet to learn, but New York State is poised to usher in a new era in Forest Preserve management.

That makes the Summit Stewardship Program even more important in the evolving tapestry of High Peaks Wilderness management. It is not strictly a VUM implementation—it was developed long before the VUM framework existed. However, it is a VUM project in everything but name, having all the elements that make VUM work so well.

Former ​​ADK Interim Executive Director Julia Goren, who ran the Summit Stewardship Program for several years and served on the High Peaks stakeholders working group, knows its value as a model: “I think that the Summit Stewardship Program is pretty good VUM and adaptive management 101. We’ve got a problem that was identified (loss of alpine plants), a desired condition (protected alpine summits where visitors minimize their impact and vegetation is able to regrow), management strategies (education, trail maintenance, regulation changes), and monitoring, including by the stewards themselves.”

The Summit Stewardship Program is an exemplar of VUM not just because it has been so successful, but also because it is complete. A cornerstone of VUM is that it must include all dimensions of a given issue, namely the physical, biological, ecological, and visitor use aspects. Addressing some but not all of these dimensions leaves an incomplete understanding of the problem and the potential steps needed to address it. As we saw on Mount Marcy, the problem stewards faced was not being solved only by education, important as that is. It required consideration of the physical environment (such as location, extent of rock, and positioning of scree walls), the biology of specific alpine plants, the ecology of the entire community, and visitor experiences and perceptions, too. The state’s current High Peaks VUM pilot is measuring only visitor impressions of certain characteristics such as crowding and parking, not physical, biological, or ecological characteristics. Considering all those dimensions in a problem can be a heavier lift, but the Summit Stewardship Program demonstrates its feasibility and effectiveness.

The Summit Stewardship Program can also help alleviate two false concerns that some associate with VUM. The first is that VUM is a heavy resource burden. Any program can be overdone, but an essential underpinning of VUM is a “sliding scale of analysis” that intentionally levels resource use based upon the nature and severity of the problem being addressed. Instead of being a comprehensive solution to all problems, VUM seeks to maximize effectiveness, and with its short cycles of monitoring and adaptation, encourages actions that are targeted and constitute just what is needed. Summit stewards live these kinds of targeted adaptations all the time, from dealing with cairn tampering to increased human waste to drone activity and more.

A second concern one hears is that VUM encourages the maximization of recreation at the cost of protecting the resource. The VUM framework certainly doesn’t do that: it is designed to be completely compatible with traditional measures including carrying capacity and limits of acceptable change. Rather, the level of resource protection has everything to do with chosen desired conditions. The desired conditions aspired to by the Summit Stewardship Program are entirely about protecting the resource. They say nothing about accommodating more visitors. Visitors are coming in any case, and the steward program has proven that limiting access is not the only effective way to protect the resource. That is perhaps the strongest endorsement of a complete VUM approach.

Possibly the greatest feature of VUM is that in considering people’s experiences as part of a larger whole, it embraces the intense humanity of the work to protect wilderness and share its value with others.

ADK Stewardship Manager Liam Ebner, who oversees the Summit Stewardship Program, offers an appropriate last word: “I’m most proud of the incredible community that the Summit Stewardship Program has created. Introducing a steward to the alpine world and watching them learn to love such an incredible place is something I look forward to seeing every season. Watching these stewards who got their start at ADK go on to rediscover lost (but not forgotten!) rare plants, lead environmental organizations, and help shape the future of recreation are just a few of the pieces that contribute to the legacy of the Summit Stewardship Program. I’m excited to watch how the program grows and adapts to the ever-changing needs of the alpine zone.”

This article was written by Pete Nelson and appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Adirondac magazine. Nelson is co-founder and Board Chair of Adirondack Wilderness Advocates and also a co-founder of the Adirondack Diversity Initiative. He is a Trustee of the Adirondack History Museum and writes and lectures frequently on Adirondack history. He and his wife, Amy, own a forty-acre inholding of high-elevation virgin forest in the heart of the High Peaks Wilderness.