ANDY’S STORY

Andy lived by a simple
but powerful principle

Nothing is impossible

Formative Years
Born in 1949, Andy grew up in New Haven, CT and, at age 14, became the state’s youngest Eagle Scout. He graduated from Dartmouth College in the class of 1971. It was at Dartmouth, and especially the Dartmouth Outing Club, where Andy discovered his deep love of climbing and his passion for the wilderness.

While still in college, he took part in a number of climbing expeditions as well as the North American Andean Relief Mission in Peru in 1970 following an earthquake there.

Expedition Leader
After graduating from Dartmouth, Andy was variously an expedition leader or teammate on climbs of several major peaks, a river guide in the US and Nepal, a timber management contractor/logger, an oilfield roughneck in Alaska and co-author of a book about one of his expeditions.

Business & Legal Career
After completing law school, Andy practiced law in the Office of the Attorney General in Washington State, joined the Federal Reserve of New York, co-founded Arcturus Motion Picture Company which specialized in mountaineering exploration and adventure films before pursuing a business career in international agro-business.

Over these years he led or participated in more than a dozen climbing expeditions in North and South America, Nepal, Tibet, China and India.

Back to Dartmouth
In 2004, Andy returned to Dartmouth, eager to mentor the next generation of young leaders as the Director of Outdoor Programs. He empowered a new era of student leadership at the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) and spearheaded a number of bold projects, including the building of The Class of ‘66 Lodge (formerly the Harris Cabin), the most impressive structure the DOC had constructed in seventy years.

“Among all the great programs at Dartmouth, most of them classroom-based and scenario-driven, none is like the DOC,” Andy said, “None teaches the same mix of usable hard skills –running a business, how to use tools, how to set a broken bone – and also the softer skills of how to work within a group, how to manage, how to plan, how to improvise, how to make decisions in the moment. And none marries that to an understanding of the environment and what it means to live sustainably on this planet. When all of that’s done, over four years, students in the DOC have gone through an astonishing amount of real-life training. They’ve taken it into every one of their other activities, where they often become the leaders. They carry it into the world and make a difference.”

Younger Onset Alzheimer’s
In June 2008, Andy was asked to resign from Dartmouth. It was a time when there was little awareness of the early signs of cognitive decline among employers and even healthcare professionals. Nine months later, Andy was diagnosed with Younger Onset Alzheimer’s and, despite significant support from his family, Dartmouth classmates and friends, was unsuccessful in persuading Dartmouth to acknowledge this diagnosis as causative of the issues that led to his leaving the college.

Andy and his wife, Kathy, became extremely active in the Alzheimer’s community and, following his death in 2019, Kathy and Andy’s friends and Dartmouth classmates continued to honor Andy’s legacy.

In addition to AHLI, Andy’s other legacy projects include: