Courtesy ADKX
Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake (ADKX) will hold its annual Benefit Gala and Harold K. Hochschild Award ceremony Saturday, July 25, from 5 to 9 p.m. at the museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. The fundraiser highlights the museum’s service to Adirondack communities and honors its annual Hochschild Award recipient.
The 2026 recipients are Dick Beamish and Adirondack Explorer Magazine. The award honors the museum’s founder, Harold K. Hochschild, whose interest in the Adirondacks and its people and environment helped inspire the museum and the creation of the Adirondack Park Agency.
For more than five decades, Beamish has advocated for the Adirondack Park. A longtime summer visitor to the region, he became the first communications director of the Adirondack Park Agency in 1972 and traveled the state to explain the need for planning and protection. His accounts of the agency’s early years are preserved in the ADKX archives as part of an oral history collection donated by author Brad Edmondson.
Beamish launched Adirondack Explorer in 1998 as a nonprofit news magazine covering the park’s natural and human communities. Its mission: “to inform and influence, to identify problems and solutions, to help shape public opinion and policy.”
ADKX Trustee Nancy Keet said, “Dick Beamish’s vision and unwavering commitment have strengthened understanding of the Adirondacks for generations, and Adirondack Explorer continues that vital work every day. Their dedication to thoughtful dialogue, environmental stewardship, and community storytelling reflects the very ideals Harold Hochschild championed. We are honored to recognize Dick and the Explorer with this year’s award, and we look forward to celebrating their extraordinary impact at the 2026 Gala.”
ADKX Executive Director David Kahn said, “We are grateful for Dick Beamish and Adirondack Explorer’s decades of dedication to the Adirondack Park. Their commitment to thoughtful reporting and community engagement has made a lasting difference, and we’re delighted to honor them at this year’s Gala.”
Tickets and contributions are available through the ADKX website.
Provided by Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake (ADKX); edited for style and length.