After 40 years of service and 80 years on Earth, Andy Wiessner — wilderness warrior, land wheeler-dealer and longtime friend to High Country News — is stepping off our board of directors.
Andy attended a one-room schoolhouse in Stowe, Vermont, and his mother, Muriel, let him and his sister run free in the North Country woods. Andy’s father, Fritz, was a pioneering rock climber. Andy recalls being “dragged up all kinds of horrible peaks in the Alps” as a teenager, including Switzerland’s Schreckhorn, whose name literally means the “horn of terror.” He learned to love mountaineering, but says he never took to technical rock climbing.
With an undergrad degree from Dartmouth and a JD from Boston University, Andy went to Washington, D.C., in 1974 to work as a congressional staffer. It was the heyday of wilderness protection, and Ohio Rep. John Seiberling, a Democrat who headed the House Subcommittee on Public Lands, enlisted Andy to help survey — often by airplane or helicopter — Western lands that had been recommended for protection.
Tough duty. “I had the best job in the world,” Andy said.
A writer for this publication posited in 1985 that Andy might have done more than any other individual to protect wildlands in the Western U.S. Seiberling told HCN that during the five years that he led the subcommittee, it processed legislation that added more than 200 areas in 34 states — a total of 64 million acres — to the National Wilderness Preservation System. “Andy Wiessner has worked on every acre,” he said.
After leaving Capitol Hill, Andy moved West, taking a job with the Western Land Exchange Company (now the Western Land Group), which specializes in public-private land swaps. Andy said that “the public always got good land out of the deal,” citing a trade he helped orchestrate with Plum Creek Timber Co. that traded out checkerboard lands around the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in Washington’s Central Cascades. But the work sometimes spun up controversy.
A proposed land trade in Western Colorado put him cross-wise with his longtime friends Ed and Betsy Marston, the former publisher-editor team at HCN. Andy, who was working on behalf of billionaire Bill Koch, said the trade would have put valuable wildlife habitat around Blue Mesa Reservoir into public hands. But it would have blocked a popular trail into the Raggeds Wilderness, and Ed was an outspoken opponent.
The deal fell apart, and the friendship endured, but Betsy never changed her position on such land trades: “What it taught me was that land trades are usually proposed by the wealthy, and they are almost always bad for the public,” she wrote.
At HCN, Betsy and others lauded Andy’s fearlessness as a fundraiser. He was instrumental in rallying donations to purchase the building in Paonia, Colorado, that became HCN’s headquarters in the early 1990s. (When our staff dispersed across the West decades later, we benefited yet again when we sold the building and used the proceeds to rebuild our digital infrastructure and underwrite the first few years of our family, medical and emergency leave program. Our Customer Service team still works out of a corner office there.)
Andy’s fellow board members, past and present, note his lifelong passion for the West and his generous heart. “Andy fit perfectly with HCN’s motto — a publication ‘for people who care about the West,’” wrote Dan Luecke, a board president in the 1990s. “He did care deeply while at the same time not trying to impose his will — something that can happen with volunteer board members of public interest and nonprofit groups.”
Wayne Hare, who served on the board from 2008 to 2021, called Andy “one of the kindest people that I have ever known.”
Staff will always be grateful for Andy’s hospitality. Over the years, his home in Old Snowmass became a de facto bed and breakfast for staff and board members, and he still loves to host fundraisers, leading the team making crostini appetizers in the kitchen and, after the guests have filed out, sharing his favorite pear brandy. One particularly memorable evening in 2021 saw 100 people gathered under a wedding tent on his front lawn to celebrate HCN’s 50th anniversary.
Asked about his plans for the future, Andy is staying true to his roots: He’ll put his energy into protecting wild places. “The older I get, the more I’m a fan of simply locking up lands,” he said. “Because once we lock them up, human beings can’t fuck with them anymore.”
We will always be grateful for all that Andy has done for HCN and the West — and we look forward to welcoming new board members soon.
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This article appeared in the January 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A wilderness warrior to the core.”
