Photographer, award-winning wildlife ecologist and bestselling author Anne LaBastille (1935-2011) was a trailblazer.
Perhaps best known for her seminal wilderness book Woodswoman, recounting her years spent living in a cabin on the shores of Twitchell Lake, in the western Adirondacks near Old Forge (she used the pseudonym “Black Bear Lake” in her books to conceal its true location).
Anne LaBastille: A Biography of the Woodswoman (North Country Books, 2026) by first-time author Penny Harr is the first ever biography of this powerful and polarizing woman who dedicated her life to preserving the natural world.
Born in 1933 in in Montclair, New Jersey, LaBastille was raised in a time when women largely stayed at home. A lover of the outdoors, curious, and sharp-witted, LaBastille was determined to become a wildlife ecologist.
When urged to conduct research in a lab while completing her master’s degree in wildlife management at Colorado State, she insisted that the best way to study big game – the subject of her thesis – was out in the field.
A professor who recognized her grit gave her a truck and his best wishes.
After receiving her Ph.D. from Cornell University, LaBastille traveled the world working for the betterment of the environment and its natural inhabitants, especially at Lake Atitlan in Guatemala where she tried for decades in an unsuccessful bid to save the giant pied-billed grebe from extinction.
After a brief marriage to Adirondack lodge owner and environmentalist C.V. “Major” Bowes ended, LaBastille bought land on the roadless edge of Twitchell Lake. In 1964 (with the help of locals) she built a 12-by-14-foot log cabin, hauling logs across the water behind her boat.
She served as a controversial commissioner of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) for 17 years, fiercely championing wild space protections and sounding early alarms on the devastating effects of acid rain.
Throughout the course of her environmental work, LaBastille was an insatiable writer. Beyond Woodswoman II (initially published as Beyond Black Bear Lake) move beyond the Adirondacks.
Mama Poc, chronicles her time in Lake Atitlan; Jaguar Totem covers her conservation work in foreign countries across the world.
Numerous articles – including at least one in her early career she wrote under a man’s name in order to get published – in National Geographic, Readers Digest, Outdoor Life, and Adirondack Life, among others, relate her adventures and adamant principles of conservation.
Throughout her life, LaBastille was awarded the World Wildlife Fund Gold Medal, the Society of Women Geographers Gold medal, and Nature Educator of the Year from the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History.
Through personal interviews and archival research, Adirondack Experience museum interpreter and seventh-generation Adirondacker Penny Harr paints an in-depth portrait of LaBastille’s personal and rich inner-life including and beyond her career achievements, breathing life into a legend of wildlife conservation.
Podcast Interview With Author
In an episode of the ADK Talks podcast, Jane Ackerman and Steve Collins speak with Penny Harr about LaBastille’s life as a writer, wildlife ecologist, conservationist and Adirondack Park Agency commissioner.
The conversation explores her scientific work in the Adirondacks and abroad, the reality behind the romantic image of cabin life, her advocacy for women in the outdoors and conservation and why LaBastille’s ideas about wilderness, independence and even the value of silence continue to resonate today.
You can find the podcast here.
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I so look forward to reading Penny Harr’s biography. Thank you for the book review ! As for the book’s cover, it could not get any better than that.