On March 5, 1995, Lloyd Ferriss was on the top of Springer Mountain in Georgia. Sleet pelted down on a small group of hikers. The temperature was 35 degrees.

“My goal is to climb seven mountains and several lesser peaks in the next three days, then file this story,” Ferriss later wrote in the Maine Sunday Telegram.

He did file his story, the first installment in a monthslong project. Ferriss, a longtime outdoors writer and gardening columnist for the Portland Press Herald, was one of the reporters and photographers from five East Coast newspapers who teamed up to hike the Appalachian Trail in sections and document their journey in weekly dispatches.

That adventure was just one of the stories Ferriss told throughout his life. He died April 11 at the age of 84. His family and former colleagues described him as adventurous and playful, someone who loved to be outside in his garden or on a summit.

“He was curious all the time,” said John Ewing, a retired Portland Press Herald photographer who worked with Ferriss.

Ferriss grew up in New York, raising chickens at his family’s home and lifeguarding at the local beach in Cold Spring Harbor, according to his family. Once, they said, he swam across Long Island Sound from New York to Connecticut. His brother Bruce rowed alongside him and fed him raw eggs for fuel.

Ferriss discovered a love of the White Mountains while attending Proctor Academy in New Hampshire, his family said. He earned an English degree from the University of New Hampshire and then moved to Richmond, Maine, where he bought an antique farmhouse that was his home until the last years of his life.

Sarah Ferriss, his daughter, recalled ice skating on a nearby pond and listening to her father’s stories next to the wood stove. His son Guy Ferriss said his father took great pride in his sprawling vegetable garden. Chickens often came and went from the house.

“I remember walking the woods with him identifying leaves and pointing out moss or lichen,” Sarah Ferriss said. “At nighttime, we’d all go, my brother and I and him, would go into the back field and stargaze together.”

When the crocuses came up in spring, his children said, he would bring them outside to say, “Look at that.”

After their parents divorced, their dad continued to take them on outdoor adventures to Baxter State Park and Banff National Park in Canada, they said. He was more likely to build a treehouse than throw a baseball and loved to hike and run. Guy Ferriss said he was 13 years old when he and his dad started riding with a cycling club that sometimes surpassed 100 miles in a day. When they summited mountains together, he said, they would yell at the top of their lungs to hear the echoes come back to them.

“I don’t think I ever heard him say the word ‘hate,'” Guy Ferriss said. “It just wasn’t in his vocabulary.”

Lloyd Ferriss remarried, and he and his wife adopted a son. His children said Jane Frost helped her husband stay in his beloved farmhouse as long as possible when he started to struggle with memory loss. They said they plan to scatter his ashes in places that had special meaning to him, including an alpine field near Mount Jefferson in New Hampshire and the property where he kept his garden and chickens.

Ewing said Ferriss was already working at the Press Herald when he started as a photographer in 1981. His journalism career spanned decades, and he also authored several books, including a novel called “The Amethyst Stone” published in 2014. He always had a camera in hand and found sanctuary in a darkroom he made at home.

“He saw this world as an absolutely beautiful place,” Guy Ferriss said.

Steve Greenlee, the former executive editor of the Portland Press Herald, said he loved working with Ferriss.

“He was a master of his craft, but he had zero ego,” Greenlee wrote in an email. “He was full of ideas, and he approached every story with wonder and enthusiasm.”

In his dispatches on the Appalachian Trail, that wonder is obvious. Ferriss got the symbol for the Appalachian Trail tattooed on his calf. His longer dispatches included short blurbs called “Trail Mix” with little anecdotes from the hikers he met along the way. Even on that wet day in Georgia, he noted the mountain laurel not yet in bloom and the song of red-wing blackbirds in the morning.

“I’ve learned lessons in Georgia: Pens fail on soggy paper, tents need extra respect, and old boots still give blisters,” Ferriss wrote in that first story. “Beyond such common instruction, I’ve glimpsed the joy of hiking the AT into springtime. This is just the beginning.”