Valedictorian

Dawson loves nature, wants to stop the climate crisis

VOORHEESVILLE — After reaching a mountain’s summit, Karen Dawson looks back to see how far she came.

She likes hiking because she likes to be “completely immersed in nature,” said Voorheesville’s valedictorian.  There are no man-made structures in sight when she hikes in the Adirondacks, Dawson said.

She’s working on completing the 46 high peaks, all those above 4,000 feet, in no particular hurry.

Dawson describes herself as passionate about the environment and recognizes what she calls the climate crisis.  She wants to “work to stop it.”

She plans to study environmental engineering at Clarkson University, in Potsdam, where she has taken summer classes and where her brother went to school.  Her favorite class at Voorheesville, though, was Advanced Placement physics, which went more in depth than the Regents-level course she took since it “only scratched the surface,” she said.

Dawson played the trumpet in the school band, but prefers to play jazz, which, she said, is more unique.

She also spent time in the Lego League of For Inspiration and Recognition of Technology where she helped to program and build a robot out of legos.  The robot had to complete certain tasks in competition.  She mentored the program for a year and said, “It was fun.”

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Our Choice are two of Dawson’s favorite books, she said after giving the question some thought.  “I think they’re really informative,” she said.

More New Scotland News

  • On Oct. 7, the New Scotland Planning Board will hear comments on RIC Energy’s request to place an approximately 11,300-square-foot, five-megawatt storage system on seven secluded acres of the 137-acre New Scotland Beagle Club.

  • Peter was one in a long line of Ten Eyck stewards of Indian Ladder Farms, which runs along the base of the Helderberg escarpment on both sides of the Altamont-Voorheesville Road for nearly a mile, and has become a mecca for the Capital Region, where city dwellers and suburbanites alike can connect with the country.

  • VOORHEESVILLE —  Barring another out-of-left-field request, Voorheesville’s nearly decade-and-a-h

The Altamont Enterprise is focused on hyper-local, high-quality journalism. We produce free election guides, curate readers' opinion pieces, and engage with important local issues. Subscriptions open full access to our work and make it possible.