What are the Adirondack 46ers?
Forty-six summits in one corner of northern New York, picked off the survey maps of the 1920s by two brothers and their Adirondack guide, and still the list that decides which climbs count. Four of them are not actually 4,000 feet, and nobody has ever fixed it.
Photo: Smt42 — CC BY 4.0
The Adirondack 46ers are two things sharing one name. The first is a list: 46 mountains in the High Peaks region of northern New York that a survey of the 1920s put above 4,000 feet. The second is the people who have climbed all of them and said so. Finish the 46, register the finish with the Adirondack Forty-Sixers, and you get a number. Herb Clark got number one, in 1925. The club's roster is past seventeen thousand.
The list itself is the least interesting part. These are the highest mountains in New York, a five-hour drive from New York City, two hours from Montreal and a day trip from most of New England. Twenty-one of the summits break above the treeline into arctic plant communities that have held on since the last glaciation and grow nowhere else in the state. The rest go up through spruce and balsam so dense that on the trailless peaks you navigate by the smell of it.
And the list is old enough to be strange. It was compiled from the best maps available a century ago, later surveys have contradicted it for decades, and it has never been corrected. Four of the 46 fall short of 4,000 feet. One mountain that clears the bar isn't on it.
Where did the list of 46 come from?
Two brothers and a guide climbed everything they could find above 4,000 feet on the government maps of the day, and the list they left behind hardened into a tradition. Nobody sat down and designed it.
1918
Whiteface, and a plan
On 1 August, Robert and George Marshall climbed Whiteface Mountain with Herbert Clark, the family's guide at their camp on Lower Saranac Lake. It was the first High Peak for all three, and the start of a seven-year project.
1922
Forty-two peaks in print
Bob Marshall published a small booklet, The High Peaks of the Adirondacks, describing the summits he considered to qualify. It counts forty-two of them, and a footnote says the elevations are taken "as given in United States Geological Survey maps". That footnote is why the modern list has holes in it.
1925
Emmons, and forty-six
On 10 June the three of them topped out on Mount Emmons and became the first people to climb all forty-six. Accounts of exactly how the extra four joined Marshall's original forty-two differ; by the time Russell Carson published Peaks and People of the Adirondacks two years later, forty-six was the number.
1937
A Sunday school group, and the first woman to finish
In February a hiking club calling itself the Forty-Sixers of Troy formed out of a church group. On 26 August, Grace Hudowalski finished her own 46 on Esther Mountain, the first woman to do it. In September, C. Howard Nash sent the club written summaries of his climbs, which is where the 46er habit of writing in about your ascents starts.
1948
The club as it exists now
Twenty people met at Adirondak Loj on 30 May and organized the Adirondack Forty-Sixers. Grace Hudowalski, 46er #9, was its first president. She had been keeping the climbers' records since 1937 and did not put the job down until 1996, 59 years of it. The numbered roster starts here, applied backward: Herb Clark #1, George Marshall #2, Bob Marshall #3.
2014
East Dix becomes Grace Peak
East Dix was one of the few of the 46 without a name of its own. After a twelve-year campaign by the club, the US Board on Geographic Names approved the change on 12 June, renaming the peak for Grace Hudowalski, who had answered climbers' letters for six decades.
Which of the 46 are not actually 4,000 feet?
Four peaks on the list fall short of the threshold the list is named for, and one mountain that meets it was never added. These are the elevations the Adirondack Forty-Sixers themselves publish.
| Peak | Elevation the club lists | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
| Blake Peak | 3,960 ft | Forty feet short. On the list since the 1920s. |
| Cliff Mountain | 3,960 ft | Also forty feet short, plus one of the more miserable herd paths of the 46. |
| Nye Mountain | 3,895 ft | A hundred feet short. It counts anyway. |
| Couchsachraga Peak | 3,820 ft | The lowest of the 46, a hundred and eighty feet under the bar, and a long walk in. |
| MacNaughton Mountain | 4,000 ft | Clears the bar on the most recent USGS measurement and is not one of the 46. The club's own page says plainly that 46ers are not required to climb it. |
The list hasn't changed since the 1920s. It's a historical document, not a survey result, and the club treats it as one.
Who decides what counts as one of the 46?
The Adirondack Forty-Sixers do, and their authority is entirely traditional. They're a volunteer club, not a land manager. They don't own the mountains, they can't close a trail, and nobody has to register anything. New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation runs the land. The High Peaks Wilderness is state Forest Preserve, protected by the "forever wild" clause of the state constitution, and DEC has no opinion at all about whether you've climbed 46 mountains.
So when people ask who could fix the list, the answer is that the club could, and won't. Marshall took his elevations straight off the USGS maps of the day, and the surveys have moved under them ever since. Correcting the list would mean telling several thousand people that one of their climbs no longer counts, and adding a mountain nobody in a hundred years has had to do.
The club's practical role is smaller and more useful than the arguing suggests. It keeps the roster, it publishes the list, it runs trail crews, and it funds stewardship on the summits that its own members are wearing out.
How many of the 46 have a trail?
Twenty-one of the High Peaks have no marked, maintained trail to the summit. That's DEC's own count, in the High Peaks Wilderness management plan amendment, which refers to "the 21 traditional trailless peaks" without ever naming them. Almost every popular source says twenty instead, and no official page I could find says twenty. Either way it's roughly half the list, and it's the split that organizes a 46, because the two halves are different activities.
When the Marshalls were climbing, by the club's own account, only twelve of the 46 had trails at all.
Reached by a marked DEC trail
- Signed junctions, disc markers on the trees, and a route someone maintains.
- The busiest of the 46 sit here: Cascade, Marcy, Algonquin, Giant, Wright, Phelps, Big Slide.
- Navigation is mostly reading the signs and not running out of daylight.
- This is where a first-time High Peaks hiker should start, and where most of the erosion is.
Reached only by an unmarked herd path
- Nothing is marked, signed or maintained beyond keeping everyone on one line instead of twenty.
- The Santanoni Range, the Seward Range, Allen, Cliff and Redfield, Street and Nye, Marshall, Gray.
- Unmarked on purpose: wilderness classification limits what can be built, so DEC and the 46ers agreed on a single access path to each summit rather than a trail.
- Map, compass and the ability to lose a path and find it again. Braided junctions in flat spruce are where people go wrong.
The 46, by the numbers
- 46
- Peaks on the list
- 17,035
- Registered finishers
- 21
- With no marked trail
- Dec 21 – Mar 21
- The winter window
Unchanged since the 1920s
Through the class of 2025, per the club's roster
DEC's count; most sources say 20
About 1,265 have finished inside it
What does finishing the 46 actually involve?
Most people take years, and the reason is arithmetic rather than difficulty. The 46 are scattered across a region the size of a small county, several of them sit five or six miles from the nearest road before you start climbing, and the efficient way to collect them is in ranges: three or four summits in one long day. So a 46 is really about twenty to twenty-five trips, and a working hiker gets maybe fifteen good weekends a year.
None of the 46 requires technical climbing. Several require scrambling: the Great Range in particular, where Saddleback's cliff and the open slabs on Gothics want your hands and are seriously exposed when wet. Length is what stops people. A Santanoni Range day is a full day of walking on a path that disappears at intervals, and Allen has a reputation earned entirely by the approach.
The Adirondacks are also wetter and colder than their elevation suggests. These are 4,000-foot mountains that behave like much bigger ones, with above-treeline weather on the exposed summits, mud that never dries, and traction required from roughly October to May. Anyone who tells you it's an easy list has done it in August.
Two teenagers and their family's guide decided which mountains counted, and a century later nobody has been willing to overrule them.
How do you register a finished 46?
There's no verification step. No witness, no GPS track, no photograph of a summit sign. The club takes your word for it, and that honor system is a large part of what the tradition is.
- 01
Keep dates as you go
Which peak, what date. That's what the finisher form asks for, and the club still calls the record your Questionnaire and List of Mountains. Reconstructing eleven years of weekends from memory is harder than writing them down as you go.
- 02
Get a correspondent, if you want one
Optional, and separate from registering. The original correspondent system, where a volunteer wrote back about every climb, ended in the spring of 2013 under the weight of the paperwork; the club rebuilt it in 2015 as an online program with close to a hundred volunteers, on its own site.
A correspondent is a mentor you opt into while you're climbing, not a gatekeeper who checks your finish.
- 03
Finish all forty-six
In any order, over any span of time, alone or with anyone. Nothing resets if you take a decade off in the middle.
- 04
Make a website account and pick the right form
Registration is online only. There's one form for a three-season finish and a separate one for a winter round, plus a version for registering on someone else's behalf.
- 05
Pay the registration fee
A one-time application fee: $20 at the time of writing, and the same again for a winter round. Check the club's How To Join page for the current figure instead of trusting a number in an article.
- 06
Get your number
The club emails you an official letter of congratulations with your assigned climbing number, and that letter is what makes you eligible to buy the patch and the rest of the emblem items. Certificates are handed out at the club's spring gathering and mailed to everyone who can't make it.
Each year's class closes at midnight on 31 December, and numbers are issued in the order paperwork lands. Finish in November, file the form in January, and you land in the following year's class.
- 07
Add the W, if you want it
A Winter 46 means all forty-six climbed between 21 December and 21 March, across as many winters as it takes. It's registered the same way and adds a W after your existing number, plus a rocker patch under the original one. About 1,265 people have done it since Edgar Bean, the first, in 1962.
The club spells this one out: it's for hikers already fit, properly equipped and skilled in winter travel.
The words 46ers use
- Herd path
- An unmarked, unmaintained route worn in by feet instead of built. About twenty of the 46 are reached this way. They braid, they vanish in flat ground, and they aren't on every map.
- Trailless peak
- A High Peak with no marked DEC trail to the summit. That doesn't mean there's no path. It means nobody signs it, marks it or promises it will still be there next year.
- The Great Range
- The chain running roughly from Lower Wolf Jaw over Armstrong, Gothics, Saddleback, Basin and Haystack toward Marcy. The most sustained scrambling on the list.
- Winter 46
- All forty-six climbed between 21 December and 21 March. Registered separately, marked with a W after your 46er number.
- Alpine zone
- The bare, above-treeline ground on the highest summits, where arctic plant communities left behind by the glaciers still grow. New York has very little of it, and nearly all of it is on the High Peaks.
- Postholing
- Punching through soft snow to your thigh at every step. It's what March on the High Peaks does to you without snowshoes, and it's why DEC requires skis or snowshoes in the High Peaks Wilderness once there are eight inches of snow on the ground.
What has the surge in finishers done to the trails?
Worn them out. The club's own roster tells that story better than any argument about overuse. Cumulative finishers stood at 4,771 in 2000 and 17,035 through the class of 2025, more than tripled in twenty-five years, and the annual classes have run in the seven-to-nine hundreds every year since 2020, against 116 in 2000.
They were never built for it. Most routes into the High Peaks were laid out to reach a summit rather than to survive traffic, straight up the fall line with no drainage, and a century of boots on a wet mountain turns that into a trench.
The numbers come from the Adirondack Council: an analysis by Adirondack Park trail professionals in 2018 found more than 130 miles of High Peaks trail needing significant redesign, places with over two and a half feet of soil loss, and some trails that have tripled in width to over 25 feet in less than thirty years. Registrations at the Cascade Mountain trailhead have more than tripled since 2005.
You meet the response before you meet the trail. The Adirondack Mountain Reserve at St. Huberts has run a free reservation system since 2021, and you need one to park and to walk in. The season has generally run 1 May to 31 October, but the dates move: 2026 opened on 17 April, so check DEC's page before you drive up. DEC also finished its High Peaks visitor use management study in 2026, which is the work the state's visitor capacities will come out of.
The summits are the part that can't be repaired. Above the treeline the soil is thin, the growing season is short, and the plants are relicts with nowhere else in New York to go. That's why there's a person standing on Marcy and Algonquin all summer.
Gear the High Peaks argue for
Nothing here is required to climb a mountain in New York. These three come up because the High Peaks stay wet most of the year and hold ice long after the calendar says spring.
Common questions about the Adirondack 46
What does it mean to be an Adirondack 46er?
It means you've climbed all 46 peaks on the Adirondack High Peaks list and registered the finish with the Adirondack Forty-Sixers, who issue you a climbing number. The numbers are sequential and go back to Herb Clark, who finished in 1925 and is 46er number one.
Why are four of the 46 under 4,000 feet?
Because the list was built from the survey maps of the early 1920s and has never been revised. Blake, Cliff, Nye and Couchsachraga were all thought to clear 4,000 feet at the time; later measurements put them below it. The club has left it alone ever since.
Is MacNaughton Mountain a High Peak?
Not officially. The most recent USGS measurement puts MacNaughton at 4,000 feet, which would qualify it, but it was left off the list in the 1920s and has never been added. The Adirondack Forty-Sixers state on their own peaks page that 46ers are not required to climb it. Some people do it anyway.
How long does it take to become a 46er?
Most people take several years. The peaks are spread across a large area, several sit five or six miles from the nearest road, and the efficient approach is to collect them in ranges, which works out to roughly twenty to twenty-five separate trips. Some people do the whole list in a single season, and a small number do it in a single push.
Do you need a permit to hike the Adirondack High Peaks?
There's no general hiking permit for the High Peaks, but four rules still apply. The Adirondack Mountain Reserve at St. Huberts needs a free reservation to park or to walk in, through a season that has generally run 1 May to 31 October but moves year to year. Overnight groups are capped at 8 and day groups at 15. Overnight campers in the Eastern High Peaks must carry a bear-resistant canister from 1 April to 30 November.
And there's no camping above 3,500 feet except at a lean-to. Check DEC's page for the unit you're entering before you drive up.
What is a Winter 46er?
Someone who has climbed all 46 peaks between 21 December and 21 March, the calendar winter window the club uses. It's registered separately and adds a W after your 46er number. The club is explicit that it's for hikers who are already fit, properly equipped and skilled in winter travel.
What is a summit steward?
A trained educator posted on the busiest alpine summits through the hiking season. They talk to hikers about the arctic plant communities up there and ask people to stay on bare rock. The Summit Stewardship Program dates to 1990 and is run jointly by the Adirondack Mountain Club, the Adirondack Chapter of The Nature Conservancy and New York's DEC. Its stewards reached 26,410 hikers in 2025.
Are the trailless peaks dangerous?
They're not technically difficult, but they're unmarked and unmaintained, and the paths braid and disappear in flat spruce. The risk is navigational rather than vertical: getting turned around late in the day, a long way in, is the common failure. Carry a map and compass and know how to use them.
Sources
Facts on this page were checked against these. Conditions, fees and rules change — check the official page before you go.
- The Peaks — Adirondack Forty-Sixers · checked August 29, 2026
- Timeline — Adirondack Forty-Sixers · checked August 29, 2026
- A Bit of History — Adirondack Forty-Sixers · checked August 29, 2026
- Winter 46ers — Adirondack Forty-Sixers · checked August 29, 2026
- How To Join — Adirondack Forty-Sixers · checked August 29, 2026
- East Dix Officially Renamed “Grace Peak” in honor of Grace Hudowalski — Adirondack Forty-Sixers · checked August 29, 2026
- Roster Statistics as of 03-18-2026 — Adirondack Forty-Sixers · checked August 29, 2026
- Become a New Member / Register Peaks — Adirondack Forty-Sixers · checked August 29, 2026
- Correspondent Program — Adirondack Forty-Sixers · checked August 29, 2026
- The High Peaks of the Adirondacks (1922) — Robert Marshall, via Internet Archive · checked August 29, 2026
- High Peaks Wilderness Complex — New York State Department of Environmental Conservation · checked August 29, 2026
- High Peaks Wilderness Complex Unit Management Plan Amendment — New York State Department of Environmental Conservation · checked August 29, 2026
- Bear-Resistant Canisters — New York State Department of Environmental Conservation · checked August 29, 2026
- Adirondack Mountain Reserve Parking Reservation System Returns April 17 — New York State Department of Environmental Conservation · checked August 29, 2026
- 2025 Summit Steward End of Season Report — Adirondack Mountain Club and NYS Department of Environmental Conservation · checked August 29, 2026
- Alpine Stewardship — Adirondack Mountain Club · checked August 29, 2026
- Overuse in the Adirondack Park — Adirondack Council · checked August 29, 2026
- Visitor Use Management: Adirondack High Peaks and Kaaterskill Clove — New York State Department of Environmental Conservation · checked August 29, 2026
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