Evelyn Greene, long-time Adirondack Park environmental advocate and naturalist, and a founding Director of Protect the Adirondacks, passed away on May 27, 2025. The first thing to say about Evelyn is that everybody loved Evelyn.
For 50 years, Evelyn lived in Johnsburg, with her husband Don Greene, who died in 2019, and where they raised their son David. In 1976, they all moved to an old farm on the west side of Crane Mountain, which they all trekked around and over again and again. In the early 1980s, they moved to North Creek, though they continued to own the old farmstead. Evelyn was a botanist who explored the wild areas of the Forest Preserve. She hunted for rare orchids, botanized the ice meadows on the Hudson River in Thurman, catalogued moss (there are hundreds of different types in the Adirondacks), and she visited remote ponds, often carrying one of her fleet of Hornbeck canoes. When a customer showed up at his shop in Olmstedville, especially a woman, Pete Hornbeck would ask them how they heard about his boats, and many simply said “Evelyn.” Pete always joked that he should pay Evelyn a commission as she was his best sales rep. She took many people out to explore the Forest Preserve and paddle.
In the winter, Evelyn charted frazil ice on the Hudson River, the disk like crystals of ice that look like floating slush that form in the river’s rapids on cold bitter nights and are carried downriver for miles and gazillions of them form massive ice fields many feet thick and miles in length, with ice blocks the size of RVs. For years Evelyn wrote about the natural wonders of the Adirondacks in a regular column in The North Creek News Enterprise.
Evelyn had grown up in the Forest Preserve and watched through the decades as it was expanded and enhanced. She saw the wildlands of the Forest Preserve as a great gift to New Yorkers and the world. To her, the Forest Preserve had a vital public purpose. She believed firmly that people needed wild spaces. In Adirondack Voices, a publication of Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, in the 1990s, she wrote: “The mothers and children of tomorrow will need more wild places to challenge and satisfy them, and to know the world as it once was.”
Evelyn grew up with Adirondack conservation. She is the daughter of legendary conservationist Paul Schaefer. But it was Evelyn’s mother Carolyn, an intrepid hiker herself, who led expeditions to the High Peaks with Evelyn and her siblings. Carolyn’s goal was for her children to become 46ers. Evelyn’s first High Peak was Mount Marcy at age 10 in August 1950. She became 46er number 110 in 1956 as a 16 year old. Carolyn Schaefer and Alice Zahniser, the wife of wilderness advocate Howard Zahniser, who owned a cabin in Bakers Mills, took their families on many camping trips. Many of Evelyn’s early adventures, with her family and the Zahniser family, led by the two mothers, are chronicled in Schaefer Expeditions.
Evelyn Greene (right) with Claudia Braymer, PROTECT Executive Director.
Evelyn talked about hiking in the High Peaks as a kid after the great blowdown in November 1950, a devastating storm sometimes referred to as a “land hurricane.” She and other kids would make their way through acres of toppled trees in places, with the family dog following their progress on the ground ten feet below. When the kids grew older, they were turned loose on their own. Evelyn wrote: “We were usually dropped off at a trailhead on Sunday afternoon. We ate what we carried, caught, picked, found – or scrounged from friendly people” and were picked up a week later. Carolyn Schaefer ran “Ma Schaefer’s Skyline Outfitters” in the 1970s and early 1980s, an outdoor equipment store in the building known as “the Castle” in downtown Keene, a store that was an adventure in itself.
In 1990, Evelyn banded together with others to form the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks (RCPA) to push for stronger environmental protections for the Adirondack Park and she never stopped. She served on the RCPA Board year after year through its merger with the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks in 2009 to form Protect the Adirondacks, where she continued to serve on the Board until her death. Evelyn was a quiet, firm, persuasive force on the Conservation Advocacy Committee, arguing against motors in the Forest Preserve, standing up for Wilderness, arguing for science. She took a strong stand against building hundreds of miles of extra-wide snowmobile trails in the Forest Preserve and pushed the RCPA and PROTECT to stand up for the wildness of the Forest Preserve. For twenty years, Evelyn took water quality samples each summer on Austin Pond in North Creek, as part of the Adirondack Lake Assessment Program. She also monitored the growth of invasive plants and helped with surveys for New York’s breeding bird atlas.
Evelyn out in the field assessing impacts of extra-wide snowmobile trails as part of PROTECT’s successful lawsuit to defend and uphold the forever wild clause in the NYS Constitution.
But Wilderness was everything to Evelyn. She prized wild spaces where wild nature could exist largely unfettered, with people as visitors with the lightest of impacts. During the debate over the classification of Boreas Ponds in 2016, Evelyn wrote a piece in the Adirondack Almanack, about a trip she made to carry her canoe several miles to visit the ponds. At that point, Evelyn was in her mid-seventies and her partner that day, and on many other excursions, was Bonnie Vicki, who was in her mid-sixties. The two drove to the inner parking lot and carried their boats 2.5 miles to LaBier Flow, paddled the flow, and then carried to the Boreas Ponds. At that point, Boreas Ponds was open to the public, with limited road access, but had not been formally classified. Evelyn wrote: “We two women were glad to be among the first paddlers on the motor-free mostly-wild Boreas Ponds, since we New Yorkers bought the property. Now we all need to make sure the management of this tract increases its wildness, not diminishes it by letting motor vehicles come too close to the water.”
At the end of her article, Evelyn wrote: “All New Yorkers should be proud to own such an outstanding piece of the natural world. We should also be ready to study proposed management plans, comment on them and join others to advocate for iron-clad protections that will make the Boreas Ponds one with the High Peaks Wilderness. This will create a huge area native plants and animals can use to survive our changing climate and one our children’s children (and maybe their grandparents!) will use to create their own challenging adventures.”
For Evelyn, that says it all.
Evelyn hiking Goodnow Mountain Trail in summer of 2024
