HENRY IVES BALDWIN

1896-1992

Henry Baldwin was bom in Saranac Lake, N.Y. and brought up in the Adirondacks, where he was one of the founders of the Adirondack Mountain Club. He was one of the early enthusiastic skiers, learning and perfecting the telemark technique, which he and his wife Birgit practiced until shortly before her death in 1987.

He studied forestry in Germany and Scandinavia and at Yale University, graduating from the School of Forestry in 1920. He also received from Yale a Ph.D in botany.

He was a flying officer in World War I and an intelligence officer in World War II, leaving the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel.

He was one of the first professional foresters hired by the forest industry, working as a research forester for the Brown Company in northern New Hampshire and Maine in promoting the growing of softwoods for their paper mills in New Hampshire and Quebec. He then was a professor of forestry at Penn State University.

In 1933, he became the research forester for the New Hampshire Forestry Department, a post he held until his retirement in 1965. For the next ten years, he returned to teaching as professor of botany and ecology at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, New Hampshire.

His interest in mountaineering started in 1939 when he helped pioneer one of the new routes at the south end of Cannon Mountain. He joined the American Alpine Club in 1943 and made a number of climbing trips in the Wind River Range of Wyoming and in British Columbia.

He remained an avid skier and outdoorsman until shortly before his death on December 10, 1992.

William R House