Super Marcy challenge tests campers’ physical, mental strength

Adirondack summer camp’s 75-mile hike spans generations, is time-honored rite of passage

By Tim Rowland

Somewhere in the early 1900s, around the time that Fenway Park was going up and the Titanic was going down, a handful of kids summering at at a camp in Willsboro set out to climb Mount Marcy, the highest of the Adirondack High Peaks. Lacking the ubiquitous white transit vans employed by summer camps of today, they walked. And walked, and walked—about 70 miles out, and about a mile up.

The ritual faded away in time, but it wasn’t entirely forgotten, either. For a half century, memory of the Marcy hikes lingered on in the yellowed pages of the camp newspaper. In 1957 the idea was revived by camp owner Jack Swan, alongside future Adirondack hiking legends including Jack’s son Sharp and current 46er treasurer Phil Corell.

What’s now known as Camp Pok-o-MacCready (a merger of the Camp Pok-o-Moonshine boys camp and the girls’ Camp MacCready) is an incubator of climbers. Its alumni represents a sizable chunk of the 46ers club, Corell said.

Still, in 1957, the boys were skeptical. 

“Jack Swan decided, OK, we used to walk to Marcy, so why not reenact what we used to do?” Corell said. “Most of the good hikers in the senior section weren’t interested in a 75-mile backpacking trip over four days. So they asked two intermediates to come along on the trip, and I was one of those two.”

Corell was 11, at the beginning of what would be a 50-year association with the camp.

The evolution of the Super Marcy

It would be another nine years before Corell, by then a camp counselor in charge of a particularly strong class of hikers, thought of rekindling the adventure. Coinciding with the new Super Bowl era it was dubbed the Super Marcy.

By coincidence, another nine years went by before the next attempt in 1975, so that became the standard. Super Marcys were held in 1984, when girls joined the expedition for the first time, and in 1993.

At that time, the route was rather famous for its lack of planning. The group hiked out Reber Road, over the Northway on Hale Hill Road and crossed the Jay Range though a pass north of Arnold Mountain. In ’57, there was no issue with setting up a few tents in whatever hayfield presented itself, and Swan’s band hunkered down near the Covered Bridge in Jay, drawing water from the Ausable River.

In subsequent hikes, the Super Marcy hikers were taken under the wing of the Madden family, who owned a store on the Jay green. One year they slept in the feed warehouse, but as the years went by the Maddens invited the hikers to spend the night in their home, which blessedly included a swimming pool.

The next day was a long haul on a paved road up the hill to Wilmington. “That was awful, that road from Jay to Wilmington,” Corell said. “It’s dangerous and it’s just tedious. But we’d hike to Wilmington to the reservoir, and then go up over Whiteface, and down the back side of Whiteface—some of the fast groups would actually climb Esther along the way for bragging rights.”

A highlight of the Super Marcy was the boat ride from Whiteface Landing to Lake Placid, but arriving in time to catch the last boat of the day sometimes proved problematic. Having missed the boat in 1966, Corell said the groups began an arduous hike around the lake, when they stumbled upon a Great Camp populated by the owners of the Cone Textile empire. 

An heiress of the company in her tennis whites took pity on the dirty and exhausted troop, and hauled out cases of Pepsi before picking up the phone and quickly convincing the owners of the boat livery to make a special run.

Aside from a brief derailment from COVID-19, the Super Marcy has gained frequency—from once every nine years to once every five—and popularity through the years. After girls joined the adventure in 1984, they went on to form all-girls groups of their own.

A test of endurance and camaraderie

For Brooke Taptick, 16, who just completed the 2025 Super Marcy this month, it’s a chance to build camaraderie and tradition, while testing a camper’s physical ability.

“Camp is big on traditions,” she said. “I’m really happy to be part of the Super Marcy tradition because now I can talk to my family about it and learn what their experience was like and compare it to mine.”

Not everyone who starts the Super Marcy finishes, because the challenge is tough, and not just in the physical sense. “People find it a great honor to do Super Marcy because it takes a strong mentality,” Taptick said. “You need to have a positive mindset. Sometimes when people were struggling, it wasn’t necessarily because something was hard. They were tired and felt like they couldn’t do it.”

The route has greatly changed since the early days; the forests leading into the Jay Range are now owned by a timber company and heavily posted, so there’s more road walking required to get to Elizabethtown before picking up the forested trails over Owls Head and Hopkins to Keene Valley.

“In the beginning, you’re facing this huge, daunting task, and you’re looking at it and wondering if you can do it, or this is even something you want to do now that you’re suddenly on the road,” said Nora Wootten who hiked the Super Marcy as a camper and again this year as a counselor in training.

There are indeed challenges—steep climbs and, maybe even worse, Wootten said, miles of silence in a driving rain. Those are times the camp’s tight social structure kicks in.

“You get to know how to support each other, because everyone’s gonna have a rough patch when it’s raining or when it’s hot or when it’s uphill and you’re out of breath,” she said. “And so you’ll learn how to support each other, which is really beautiful.”

That’s why, perhaps, the stories of Super Marcy climbs have less to do with mountains conquered than relationships built as the generations come and go.

“I’ve got a picture on the side of Marcy, and it’s my son, Mark, and myself,” Corell said. “He’s coming down on the 2004 trip heading for Keene Valley, and I’m going up to do my last of seven Super Marcys. And as we’re passing, somebody has taken a picture of the two of us, and that’s sort of a special historical moment for me, because it was the end of my era and the beginning of his.”

Photo at top: Hikers on Mount Marcy in July 2020. Explorer file photo by Mike Lynch