Gene Loughran shows photos of the engines that he invented a heat shield for during his time in the Air Force, which earned him an award, at his home in Wilmington on Friday, Nov. 15. 0180 - Gene Loughran shows off maps, letters and photos from his varied career in the military, the DEC and at Mt. Van Hoevenberg at his home in Wilmington on Friday, Nov. 15.

WILMINGTON — Eugene “Gene” Loughran moved to the Adirondacks with his family in 1956, when he was 10 years old.

His father had just retired from working for the subway system in New York City. He had heart problems and didn’t expect to live long, so he wanted to live the rest of his days in the Adirondacks. He was able to live 14 years in Wilmington, and it ended up being cancer, and not heart issues, that killed him.

“So that’s the way it is, I guess,” Loughran said.

And so Loughran got an Adirondack childhood. He lived next door to Billie Cooper, the young woman who would eventually become his wife. They met soon after the family moved to the Adirondacks, when Loughlan was around 13 years old. They rode the school bus together, and “one thing led to another.”

Soon after graduating from Lake Placid High School, Loughran joined the Air Force in 1964 and served four years at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas. When he joined, he wanted to be in some sort of civil engineering role, like a carpenter or a plumber, but they told him those roles were full. Instead, he was assigned to be a jet engine mechanic. He won an award for inventing a heat shield for the engine that is still used today.

Gene Loughran sits in the kitchen in the house where he raised his family, holding a display of ribbons and medals, on Friday, Nov. 15.

Partway through his time in the Air Force, he had visited Billie at the job she was working at the time in Utica.

“I went in there and saw her, and I said, ‘How about we get married?'” Loughran said. “She said, ‘We can’t get married, we don’t make enough money!”

Loughran did convince Billie to marry him, so a few months later, she flew down to Texas and they held their ceremony at the chapel at the base.

Immediately after leaving the Air Force, Loughran began working for the Department of Environmental Conservation, the work that made up the bulk of his career and represents his proudest work. He started as a fire observer, working May through November in the tower on Whiteface Mountain. It would have been boring work, except that on Whiteface, visitors would drop in all the time. There was only one fire in the two seasons he worked there. That day, he got a call from one of the rangers, saying there was a fire in Wilmington that Loughran hadn’t seen.

“What the hell have you been doing in there?” Loughran recalled the ranger asking him. “But it’s the only fire I ever saw — that one fire.”

Representing three generations of Adirondack childhoods, Gene Loughran poses with his younger son, Morse, and his grandson, Wyatt at his home in Wilmington on Friday, Nov. 15. Wyatt is holding Loughran's jacket from working at Mt. Van Hoevenberg during the 1980 Winter Olympics.

In the winters, he worked the nordic trails at Mount Van Hoevenberg. He was in charge of designing the Nordic cross-country trails in the 1970s that were later used in the 1980 Winter Olympics.

Proud of Matilda

After two years, he was promoted and ended up being in charge of hiking trails for the DEC for 10 years. He and his crew cleared trails and built bridges and lean-tos. One summer, they were out on a maintenance trip at Lake Colden and Avalanche Lake. There are two points on that trail that wind around large rock ledges where there was no shoreline. At the time, hikers had to walk on logs that were lashed together and chained to the rocks. When wet, these logs were very slippery.

Suddenly, they rounded a corner and a member of their party had disappeared. They quickly found out he had slipped into the lake, weighed down by the large pack strapped to waist. They were able to fish him out and dry him off, but for Loughran, the incident was too close for comfort. He went straight to the Ray Brook office.

“I said, we’ve got to do something at Avalanche Lake, because somebody’s gonna get killed there. Somebody’s gonna drown there,” Loughran recalled.

The people at the DEC office asked him what he thought they should do and he said he wanted to build a walkway around the rock ledges.

“So they said, ‘Well, figure out how you want to do it and how much it’s going to cost, and we’ll see what we can do,'” Loughran said.

Loughran brainstormed his design, consulting a friend of his who worked as a ranger in Lake Placid and keeping an Army Corp of Engineers book on his bedside. His research started in 1968 and they started construction in 1970. His team had to visit the location in the spring to see where the ice slid off the rock so that their structure wouldn’t be crushed by ice once it was built. They had to bring the metal and wood to the location by rowboat. The bulk of the work was done in the winter, however, so they could walk on the ice for the construction, using the level of the ice as a natural level.

The “Hitch Up Matilda,” or a type of catwalk, was constructed with cold-rolled steel rods inserted into foot-long holes that were drilled six feet apart across the distance. It took three days just to drill the holes with a cumbersome drill that they had to modify so that it could be used on a vertical surface. They made a mark in red paint on the drill so they would know when they reached one foot in depth.

“That worked pretty good,” Loughran said, using a catchphrase that is common when he talks about his work on the project.

Charley Nolan, the caretaker who lived for years at the ranger cabin in the High Peaks Wilderness, cooked for the crew during the approximately three months it took to construct the whole walkway. He would set up a shelter under a tarp and have hot chocolate at the ready when the team took frequent breaks to warm up.

Overall, the design was a bit of an experiment, and even today, Loughran is a little surprised it worked as well as it did. The wooden parts have been patched and replaced since the 1970s, but the skeleton of the structure is still the original that Loughran built.

“It did pretty good,” Loughran said. “I’m surprised it’s still there today, because a lot of times, with weather and things, it gets torn apart.”

The Hitch Up Matilda at Lake Colden is still one of Loughran’s proudest achievements. When it was finished, the DEC flew him in on a helicopter so he could take a photo of it from the air. For his 78th birthday, a neighbor borrowed the photo to make a cake with his creation on it.

“Millions of feet have walked over something that my father built,” said Morse Loughran, the rounger of Loughran’s two sons. “If you love the Adirondacks, then these stories of what make these iconic places in the Adirondacks, I think they need to be told.”

Another Adirondack childhood

While working at the DEC, Loughran also volunteered with Wilmington Fire & Rescue. He earned his EMT certification around 1970 and was one of the first EMTs in the area. At the same time, Loughran worked as a medic for the Army National Guard on the weekends. He spent 8 years at the Saranac Lake armory and another 8 years in Vermont, where he was mainly in charge of conducting physicals for Blackhawk helicopter pilots.

For Morse, his Adirondack childhood is inseparable from his father’s civil service and the adventures that came out of it. He remembers the phone ringing on the wall for fire calls. Much of the time, it was his mother, Billie, who would pick up. Then she would flatten herself against the wall as everyone took off running.

Morse remembers going to watch when the Wilmington Inn was on fire and seeing Loughran throw a huge rock through the second story window to vent it. He jokes that this was what made him want to join the fire department — getting to throw rocks through windows.

The boys would go with Loughran to work, which sometimes meant going to the office in Ray Brook, and other times meant visiting a lean-to in the wilderness. Morse loved visiting the DEC entymologist, with bugs all over his office, and aspired to by an entymologist also, for a time.

“There were always stinky, dead bugs in my room,” Morse said.

But his parents were patient with him, and this kind of exposure to the outdoors is exactly why he treasures his Adirondack childhood.

“That’s what growing up in this area is, you know? Growing up in this area is walking out your front door and casting a line in the Au Sable. Or, I’m bored today, so I’m gonna go to Cooper Kill and go for a hike,” Morse said. “And it’s men like my father who built that for us.”

Morse, hopes that the DEC will do his father one more favor and fly him in to see the Hitch Up Matilda one more time.

“It brings a sense of pride to me to know that he will always have an indelible mark in the Adirondacks,” Morse said.