Michael Wilson was born in 1945 in Santa Monica, California, and passed away at the end of February, 2025 in Glenwood, Maryland. Michael and his family spent decades in the Adirondack Park immersed in the region’s history and environmental protection.
Michael spent most of his childhood in Eugene, Oregon, where he loved the wild places of Oregon and the West and paddled or rowed many of the area’s biggest rivers, such as the Snake, Columbia, and Deschutes. One of his favorites was the McKenzie River in Oregon, where his family plans to spread his ashes. Michael said once that his boyhood was straight out of Norman Maclean’s famous novel “A River Runs Through It.”
After college and graduate school, where he earned a PhD in 18th century British Theater, Michael taught at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage, Alaska, where he met his wife Beverly Bridger, and they were married for more than 40 years. They moved to San Antonio, Texas, where they taught at Trinity College. In the mid-1980s, they moved to Saratoga Springs, where they taught at Skidmore College.
Michael Wilson (left) with Peter O’Shea, two founding members of the Board of Directors of Protect the Adirondacks.
Their time at Skidmore is when Michael discovered the fullness of the Adirondacks and the whitewater of the Hudson River, which gave him many great paddling and rowing experiences. His passion for the Adirondack Park grew intensely after 1990 when Beverly took the job as Executive Director at Sagamore Institute, south of Raquette Lake, and Michael signed on as the Associate Director.
Click here to read a beautiful tribute about Michael’s work at Sagamore Institute over nearly 25 years, where he and Bev, and many others, were quite the team.
At Sagamore Institute, Michael took the lead in managing the Institute’s educational and interpretation programs. He combined the social, ecological, and architectural history of the Great Camp Sagamore with the history and politics of the Adirondack Park. In these years, Sagamore sponsored retreats for major environmental leaders such as Bill Mckibben, Clarence Petty, David Foreman, David Brower, Terry Tempest Williams, and many others. Michael also led camping trips on the Hudson River, where he was a licensed guide, outfitted the trips with “dories” that were rowed through the rapids, boats that he built based on similar boats used in the West. For more than 20 years, Michael and Bev and their young children lived in a house on the grounds at Great Camp Uncas and drove to work at Sagamore over dirt roads, surrounded by the Forest Preserve of the Moose River Plains and Blue Ridge Wilderness, one of the most unique work commutes in the Adirondacks.
Phil Terrie, a leading historian of the Adirondacks, said “Michael Wilson was a scholar, a teacher, a wilderness guide, an unyielding defender of Article 14, and a friend. He will be missed in so many ways.”
Phil Terrie and Michael Wilson (right)
After Sagamore, while living in Saranac Lake, Michael began teaching at SUNY Potsdam and helped to build up its Outdoor Education Program. For years, he worked to organize Stewards at the firetowers throughout the Adirondacks to provide historic and ecological education and interpretation opportunities for visitors. His work at Sagamore and Potsdam lead him to work with hundreds of young people throughout his career, mentoring many. Michael also completed considerable research into the career of Adirondack inventor Abbot Augustus Low, for whom Low’s Lake is named, and his famed manufacturing compound.
Main Lodge, Great Camp Sagamore.
“Great Camp Sagamore was a client of mine. I was about to leave when Beverly Bridger, the executive director, said that her husband, Michael Wilson had a last minute cancellation on his wooden guide boat trip from Newcomb thru the Hudson River Gorge that would be leaving in little over an hour. Would I like to go? Yes, indeed. I had met Michael, but did not know him well. He took the oars of my boat and we chatted most of the way. Each trip had an educational theme, and this one was geology, with the state geologist on board and lecturing. Michael and I became enduring good friends from then on. He was an accomplished man. He was a student of theatre, history, literature and the English language, who was uncompromising as an educator, river guide and wilderness advocate. He loved a good story and was the best fireside companion I ever had. I will miss him,” said Bernard Melewski, environmental attorney, and author of Inside the Green Lobby.
In 2008, Michael joined the Board of the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks (RCPA) and was a founding Director when the RCPA merged in 2009 with the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks to form Protect the Adirondacks! He served as a member of PROTECT’s Board, serving for a long time as a Vice-Chair, and was a leading member of the Conservation Advocacy Committee, from 2009 to 2025. Michael rowed one of his guideboats on Middle Saranac Lake and Weller Pond in the PROTECT’s 2018 Canoe-In for a Motorless Weller Pond protest.
Michael speaking at a PROTECT annual meeting. Fellow Vice-Chair Barbara Rottier stands on the left.
Chuck Clusen, the Chair of Protect the Adirondacks, stated “Michael served PROTECT well as a long-term Vice-Chair and as Chair of the Board Development and Nominations. He was a stalwart wilderness advocate who believed we needed to greatly expand wilderness to save the earth from the twin crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss. He vividly understood how man needs to work with the natural ecosystem and not against it. He greatly enjoyed running rivers in his native Oregon and continued the activity in his adopted Adirondacks exposing many to the joys and the environment. His far-reaching career took him from theatre and performance art to exposing and educating university students and the public more generally to the environmental necessity of creating a sustainable environment and society.”
In the fall of 2024, his son Drew drove Michael from Maryland through the Adirondacks on a road trip to say goodbye. He was in hospice for a short period in February 2025 and died at home with Beverly and their two children and their spouses and two grandchildren.
Michael Wilson’s leadership at Protect the Adirondacks was bold and principled and we’re tremendously grateful for all of his volunteer time and energy. The Adirondack Park was lucky to have him.
