Queen’s quest: Hiking challenge honors forgotten Adirondack women

With only five of more than 1,600 Adirondack mountains honoring women, hikers combine 24 miles of trails and 161 miles of biking to celebrate these overlooked figures

By Tim Rowland

Katie Rhodes is a frequent visitor to the Adirondacks, bouncing up and over mountains like a kangaroo and steeping herself in local history and culture. There aren’t a lot of ADK angles she’s missed.

So when she picked up Sharon McMahon’s “The Small and the Mighty” and read about the meteoric brilliance of suffragist and part-time Adirondacker Inez Milholland, Rhodes was stunned—and maybe just a tad angry.

“I was like, whoa, how did I not know about this?” she said.

Milholland has received her due at the local level in the town of Lewis where her family had a retreat, and with Champlain Area Trails, which on Aug. 17 is leading a hike up a spectacular little peak that was named in Inez’s honor in 2019.

But the predominant Adirondack peaks are almost exclusively male territory, from (William) Marcy on down. So Rhodes went down a rabbit hole—or maybe up a rabbit hole is a better way to put it, searching for Adirondack mountains named for women and creating a challenge of hiking them all, drawing some much-needed attention to historical figures who were owed their due. 

A glaring imbalance

One problem: There were only four that she could find, and for Rhodes and her hiking partner Debbie McElwaine, each of whom had climbed all 46 High Peaks —in less than a week—this hardly made a challenge.

They knew about Grace, Esther, Inez and Jo, but surely they had to be missing some. They reached out to foremost Adirondack authority Tony Goodwin to flesh out their list, and he was able to add one: Frederica Mountain named for the daughter of railroad titan Seward Webb.

“Tony said, well, you missed one, but that’s really the only one,” Rhodes said. “Of all 1,600-plus mountains in the Adirondack Park, only five honor women, and we were blown away by that.”

For Rhodes, it got even worse. No one can find any evidence that Esther McComb (Mount  Esther) ever existed, and “histories” of Josephine Scholfield (Mount. Jo) typically contain one sentence relating what is known of Scholfield, the rest being hogged up with the story of her boyfriend, Henry Van Hoevenberg, a man about whom much is embedded in the Adirondack canon.

So to make the challenge challenging, Rhodes and McElwaine decided to hike all five peaks in one outing, connecting from trailhead to trailhead—from Grace in North Hudson down to Frederica in Long Lake—by bicycle. And so the “Queens Quest” challenge was born.

Stories worth telling

“I love to do these historical hikes based on Adirondack history that I find to be interesting, and call attention to those stories publicly,” Rhodes said. “The big message was that these women were here, they were doing incredible things and made contributions to society that may otherwise be very overlooked.”

Their stories are also quite different. The enduring image of Milholland is astride a horse in a blaze of white, giving a crowd of jeering men the business at a suffragist rally in Washington, D.C. Contrast that with McComb, whose existence and whose story — that at age 15 in an act of defiance she set out for Whiteface and wound up on top of her namesake peak instead — may be a fabrication.

But whether she existed or not is in some ways immaterial, since, even in 1839 such an adventure was apparently regarded as a possibility for a woman.

“To learn that she may not have existed, I think, is a little bit heartbreaking,” Rhodes said. “But still there were women at that time who were capable and had the desire and the grit to do these big things. So it’s still a special mountain.”

Even the paucity of information about Esther is a message in itself.

“The fact that we don’t know if she existed speaks to the erasure of women in history here,” McElwaine said. “There are so many prominent Adirondack male figures, but we don’t really know much about the women who lived here. And there were women who were living these incredible lives and had ambitions and dreams, and we don’t even know about them.”

The quest unfolds

The inaugural Queens Quest odyssey began on the summer solstice with Esther at 4 a.m. to catch the sunrise on the peak, then a bicycle ride to Mount Jo in North Elba, before peddling east on Route 73 to Grace and up Route 9 to Inez (before riding to Frederica the next day. Their chosen routes included 24 miles of hiking and 161 miles of biking.

Rhodes’ husband and McElwaine’s husband were there at each trailhead with snacks and drinks, and lights after darkness set in. 

Their husbands have their own names, of course—Kenny and Colt—but 19th-century women were not afforded the same respect.

“It’s like the opposite of what these women had, because we have these men in our lives who are our biggest supporters, and they’re so excited for what we were doing, and they spent their whole day out there helping us,” McElwaine said.

For the climbs, the pair donned representative accessories—“I voted” buttons for Inez, lengthy skirts for Jo, checkered shorts for Grace and photos of themselves at age 15 for Esther. From their research they suspected Frederica may have been a victim of domestic abuse, so they wore purple. Grace and Inez were easier to research and get to know than the ghostly figments of Jo and Esther. “After researching Esther and Jo and coming up empty handed, it was refreshing that there was so much information out there about Grace,” Rhodes said. “We read all her inspirational quotes and really felt like we knew who she was as a person.”

McElwaine tells her daughter bedtime stories about Grace. “Grace has been a superhero in my family, as my daughter, Thea, hiked the 46 and finished when she was 4—she was the youngest 46er.” 

Without saying as much, Rhodes and McElwaine understand that the five women they honor—and upon whose shoulders they stand—would have appreciated their own exploits and careers. McElwaine is a corporate lawyer for an international law firm in Boston, while Rhodes, with a master’s degree in conservation biology, writes management plans for a Saratoga land trust.

On top of Mountt. Inez, McElwaine said, “We held our “I Voted” buttons in the air as a way of honoring her life’s work—these two women standing on her summit who now can vote, and she would have, I think, been really happy about that.”