Contemporary humans love to confer honorifics. We make personal Top Ten lists in all sorts of categories, allow Top 40 stations to guide our musical browsing, use Oscar wins to pursue our cinematic education. We seek out books that won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards or Newbery Medals. We admire people in many fields who won Nobels or MacArthur “genius grants.” We care about which athletes won Olympic gold, the World Series or the Super Bowl.
Some might say that this tendency is a remnant of atavistic competitive urges that helped our Stone Age ancestors stay alive long enough to reproduce. Or maybe it’s just a handy way of organizing our thoughts and values: prioritization as an executive function of the human brain.
For those of us who care about preserving the Shawangunk Ridge, a watershed was certainly reached in 1991 when the Nature Conservancy added the Gunks to its official list of the Earth’s Last Great Places. The largely symbolic designation served to raise public awareness of the rarity and fragility of the area’s high-altitude pine barren ecosystem, and the label is regularly cited by organizations advocating for environmental protection measures or promoting ecotourism in Ulster County.
Now there’s a new honorary title to add to the Ridge’s crown: Leave No Trace Gold Standard Site, which was just awarded to the Mohonk Preserve. The designation was the first of its kind in New York State, and the second in the Northeast, shared only with Acadia National Park in Maine. A ceremony conferring the distinction was held on Saturday, August 17 at the Mohonk Preserve Ceremonial Gateway.
This particular honor is more than merely a label, good for boosting public relations. To qualify as a Gold Standard Site, a location must demonstrate successful implementation of Leave No Trace outdoor skills and ethics into managing, programming, outreach and education efforts at the site; formally train staff and community partners in Leave No Trace outdoor ethics; and include Leave No Trace language and messaging on signs at trailheads, as well as in pamphlets and other distributed materials for visitors. The status is only active for five years, requiring monitoring for recertification.
Boulder, Colorado-based Leave No Trace, Inc., was incorporated in 1994 with a mission of heightening public awareness of “Leave No Trace Land Ethics” for wilderness and backcountry travel, as encoded in the late 1980s by the US Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. Based on these principles, the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) developed a program of hands-on, science-based minimum impact education training for nonmotorized recreational activities. In 1993, an Outdoor Recreation Summit with land management agencies, NGOs and members of the outdoor industry convened in Washington, DC to form an independent Leave No Trace organization.
The small staff of the not-for-profit Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics focuses its efforts on scientific research, training stewards of outdoor resources and developing and distributing educational materials. It takes the view that educating people is a more effective and less resource-intensive solution to land protection than costly restoration programs or access restrictions. Much of its financial support comes in the form of corporate contributions from the outdoor products industry, and the Subaru Corporation underwrites a “traveling team” of Leave No Trace trainers.
The Gold Standard designation – previously conferred primarily on well-funded entities such as national and state parks –recognizes that a site has made a serious commitment to implementing and promoting Leave No Trace land use ethics, including staff trainings and trail signage. The “Seven Principles” of Leave No Trace provide an easily understood framework of minimum-impact practices for anyone visiting the outdoors. Broadly summarized, they include: 1) plan ahead and prepare; 2) travel and camp on durable surfaces; 3) dispose of waste properly; 4) leave what you find; 5) minimize campfire impacts; 6) respect wildlife; and 7) be considerate of others.
Obviously, in a location like the Mohonk Preserve that does not allow overnight camping or campfires, some of these guidelines are more pertinent than others. The principles include specific recommendations within each category, some of which – carry-in/carry-out for trash, keeping dogs leashed on trails and listening to music in the wilderness only through headphones, for example – have long been official policy on the Preserve. Others have yet to be fully enforced, as attested by the lingering presence in some places (a boulder near the foot of Bonticou Crag comes to mind) of stacked stones that are artistic expressions rather than official trail-marker cairns.
Some rules allow a degree of flexibility. For example, foraging of wild berries and mushrooms is treated as allowable if done sparingly, with care not to overpick any one spot. “It’s impossible to leave absolutely no trace of your visit to the outdoors,” notes the Leave No Trace website. “Leave No Trace is not intended to be taken literally. Rather, it is a philosophy that guides us while we enjoy any outdoor pursuit…. We view Leave No Trace as a spectrum – on one end there are many impacts, on the other end there are few…. The primary goal of Leave No Trace is to prevent the avoidable impacts and to minimize the unavoidable impacts. By doing so we can protect and preserve both natural resources and the quality of recreational experiences.”
At an August 17 ceremony at the Testimonial Gateway trailhead, Erin Collier, senior manager of education programs for the Leave No Trace Center, handed over a wooden plaque – likely destined to hang on the wall at the Visitors’ Center – to Mohonk Preserve president/CEO Kevin Case, director of visitor experience Andrew Bajardi and director of marketing and communications Gretchen Reed. “The Gold Standard is our highest form of recognition,” Collier said. “This achievement is not easy. It typically takes years of dedicated work, of collaboration. Mohonk had a pretty quick turnaround time, which is a testament to how many people care about this place. You’ve been putting Leave No Trace into everything that you do.”
Collier also acknowledged the increased pressure that the Mohonk Preserve and other refuges of preserved wilderness have been undergoing since the COVID-19 pandemic. “Outdoor areas are experiencing record use. You’ve become part of the solution,” she said. “We’re really excited to welcome the Mohonk Preserve to our Gold Standard family.”
The Preserve’s Bajardi agreed that the Gunks’ biggest recent challenge had been “being loved too much, especially since the summer of 2020. We witnessed visitation double almost overnight. That led to the beginning of our partnership with Leave No Trace. Since 2021, 25 of our staff and seven volunteers have received training in the Seven Principles.” He noted that the Preserve had been awarded the intermediate Leave No Trace Spotlight status in 2023.
Dignitaries who spoke at the event included Ulster County executive Jen Metzger and Daniel Torres, deputy chief of staff for congressman Pat Ryan. Both officials expressed their personal attachment to the Mohonk Preserve due to many years of happy use of its trail system and opportunities for outdoor recreation, and both also cited the place’s significant role in environmental education for local schoolchildren. Metzger announced that the county was studying usage data from this year’s new Nature Bus program of free transportation to outdoor recreation sites, with an eye toward making the Mohonk Preserve one of the destinations in 2025. She presented a Certificate of Excellence from Ulster County to Preserve president Kevin Case, and Case read a statement of congratulations sent by US senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
Also on hand at the award ceremony were many Mohonk Preserve board members and volunteers, along with local officials including Marbletown supervisor Rich Parete and New Paltz town supervisor Amanda Gotti and village mayor Tim Rogers. Environmental agency representatives in attendance included New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Region 3 director Kelly Turturro and Wallkill Valley Land Trust director Christie DeBoer.
The event started with a song from the children’s choir of the Woodcrest Bruderhof and wrapped up with refreshments donated by local farmstands. The Mohonk Preserve’s research director emeritus Paul Huth then led a guided walk through the Pin Oak Allée on Lenape Lane, sharing photographs of the views from the site a century or more in the past. Huth called attention to how much the landscape had changed over time, from mostly cleared farm fields that supplied the Mohonk Mountain House kitchens to being heavily reforested today.
He and Gretchen Reed discussed the status of the 115-year-old pin oaks lining the road, planted by the first generation of the Smiley family and now nearing the end of their natural lifespan. “You don’t have to be an arborist to see the decline,” said Huth, noting broken limbs and center rot on some of the trees. Diseases, deer browsing and climate change have all taken their toll. “We’re seriously considering how to bring diversity to the allée,” Reed said. “It’s unlikely that we can sustain the pin oaks.”
Huth’s nearly half-century career as chief steward of Mohonk Preserve lands has given him a longitudinal perspective that balances the values of pristine nature with legitimate, historical human use. “What if we proposed today, if there were no stone tower, that we build one?” he asked, gesturing towards Sky Top. “It wouldn’t get very far.” While invasive species are an ongoing concern, some have become naturalized over time to the point where they now supply valuable wildlife habitat, he said. “Everybody hates phragmites; everybody wants it out. But now there are a lot of birds and insects that use that phragmites.”
“You have to be really careful. You have to know your resources. That’s where Mohonk really excels,” Huth concluded. “Land management is not for the faint of heart.”
To learn more about the Seven Principles of Leave No Trace land use ethics and specific ways you can apply them, visit https://lnt.org/why/7-principles.
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