Climb Every Mountain--and Write to Gracie : Goals: Grace Hudowalski mastered her first peak more than 70 years ago. Now she encourages others.

To become a member of the elite club called the Adirondack 46ers, one must do two things: climb the 46 highest peaks in New York state, and write to Grace.

For more than half a century, Grace Hudowalski has been corresponding with those who aspire to ascend the fabled 46 and earn the prestigious patch with the “ADK 46-R” emblem.

At age 86, she wrote more than 1,600 letters last year.

“It’s like writing to a legend,” said Fred Johnson, 55, of Troy, N.Y., who finished his 46th summit with a 22-hour trek in a snowstorm in August, 1982.

Hudowalski has kept tens of thousands of letters from those who have set out to become 46ers. The letters from most of the 3,187 who have achieved the goal fill boxes that stretch 30 feet in the manuscripts collection at the state museum.

Some write little more than what mountain they climbed, when and with whom. Others tell of being driven to their knees by wind and ice, of being moved to tears as they achieved a lifetime goal on a lofty mountain. Children enclose flowers or feathers found on the trail.

And each time they write, whether they have climbed one mountain or 40, the mountaineers get a letter back from Hudowalski, filled with encouragement and personal recollections.

“I like writing to people,” Hudowalski said in an interview in her winter home in Albany. “I tell them, these are very precious experiences, and if you don’t write them down, you won’t remember.”

An atrophied leg has kept her from climbing mountains in recent years. Her face is creased and weathered behind broad bifocals, and her wavy hair is stone gray. But she has a youthful vigor that belies her age.

“She can remember things about you that you’ve forgotten,” said Johnson, who surprised Hudowalski with ice cream on top of Cascade Mountain in August, 1986. It was her last climb.

Hudowalski says she climbed her first mountain in 1922, when she was 15.

“I went with a camp group. It took us three days to climb Marcy”--the state’s highest peak, at 5,114 feet. “Now it’s a day trip, but in those days the trails weren’t much to speak of.”

In 1937, she and other members of a Methodist church group started the Forty-Sixers of Troy. It was renamed the Adirondack 46ers 11 years later. The club’s goal was to share mountain lore and climb the 46 Adirondack peaks 4,000 feet or higher.

Hudowalski became 46er No. 9 and the first woman 46er in August, 1937. Her climbing shorts are in the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake.

“Most of the people I used to climb with are dead now,” said Hudowalski, a widow who lives with a Himalayan cat named K2. “But I’ve become very fast friends with people who’ve written.”

Some finish the 46 quickly--the record was six days--but most take several years. Billie Whittaker of Walnut Creek, Calif., took 39 years to become 46er No. 2908, finishing in July, 1991.

One man was dead when he reached the summit of his 46th peak. Keith Solomon, a Canadian, was climbing alone in July, 1980, when he had a fatal heart attack 150 feet from the top of Saddleback, his final destination. Rangers carried his body to the summit so a helicopter could remove it.

“He had been writing to me all along, and he had his papers with him when he died,” Hudowalski said. So he was duly recorded as 46er No. 1609.

“Sometimes I get as many as 30 letters a day,” Hudowalski said. “I answer the letters from children first.”

She pulled from a file a 12-page letter from Jonathan Esper of Long Lake, N.Y. On Dec. 28, 1992, at age 10, he became the youngest of the 110 people who have climbed all 46 peaks in winter.

Jonathan wrote of thawing his boot liners over a cook-stove, sliding down summits and digging his father out of a spruce tree hidden under deep snow.

His family found the going rough as they bushwhacked down a mountain last March:

“Daddy was soaked from the wet snow dumping on him all day, total darkness was nearly upon us, we were getting tired and hungry, and the trail we were looking for was not packed. God answered our prayers when Mommy saw a trail marker which glimmered in the moonlight.”

Chip Esper, Jonathan’s father, said, “It was Grace who put the idea in Jonathan’s head to become the youngest winter 46er. She shared his enthusiasm and prayed for his success.”

Bill Kozel, who is helping his 10-year-old daughter become a 46er, said, “There’s a connection a climber makes with Gracie that’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.”

Soon after he started working on his 46 in 1969, Kozel said, he was drafted and sent to Germany during the Vietnam War. He asked his mother to send him a copy of the latest 46er book.

“She asked Grace, and Gracie wrote me a beautiful letter,” Kozel said. “I really fell in love with her. There was such a bonding and caring from one climber to another, even though we’d never met.”

Kozel still has the letter, in which Hudowalski described the fiddlehead ferns emerging in her garden at camp, the hummingbirds around her porch, the phoebe nest she was guarding from raccoons, the condition of the trails.

“The mountains will wait for you,” she wrote. “And when you come back, you will enjoy them all the more.”

Seven years later, Kozel invited Hudowalski to his wedding on top of Cascade Mountain. “We had champagne and a cake, and Gracie threw sunflower seeds for the birds,” he said.

A computer database and form letters may one day replace the personable woman who has always kept track of the mountaineers. But friends say the rite of passage of becoming a 46er won’t be the same without Grace.

“She’s the heart and soul of the organization,” Johnson said.