Many people who didn’t know Stuart Weiss in person would recognize him nonetheless, often astride his bike even until this past year at the age of 89.
Mr. Weiss, who lived at the Windmill II apartments in East Hampton, died on March 16 at East End Hospice’s Kanas Center for Hospice Care in Quiogue.
“I’ve gone over 700 miles this year,” Mr. Weiss said in a 2019 interview in The East Hampton Star, when he was 85. “It’s good for me mentally and physically.” Since then he had bought an electric bike, which allowed him to continue getting around town on two wheels.
He moved to East Hampton in early 2018, after a nomadic period that eventually took him to Woodstock, Vt., for 10 years and then Bath, Me.
Mr. Weiss, who was born on March 30, 1934, began his career working in sales for a New York City direct-mail printing company. In his 40s, he moved to San Francisco and took up backpacking and photography.
Inspired by the work of the photographer Eliot Porter, he began taking pictures of the Sierra Nevada range, a change of life that also changed his outlook. “I really learned to like myself doing this,” he told The Star in 2019. He started a magazine, California Explorer, in 1978 and began to write as well. His photography was published in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and AAA magazine.
When he left the business, he sold his house, bought a motor home, and traveled the country with his golden retriever before settling down in Vermont.
He had a son, but was not in touch with him.
Mr. Weiss had spent time on the South Fork as a younger man and said he was lucky to have found his way back here, where he had “a little cottage with a deck and beautiful trees, and I can just take my bike outside and ride around . . . I’m not in some high-rise apartment.”
