Robert C. Lawrence and his wife, Carol Ann, were kayaking on an Adirondack lake, watching some loons, when she asked him how the mountain looming over them, Blue Mountain, got its name.

Lawrence thought he’d buy a book on Adirondack place names at the Blue Mountain Museum to answer the question. But there was no such book.

So he wrote one.

He and his wife, both retired teachers, operate as a team, Lawrence says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “We just enjoy life,” he said — traveling cross-country in their camper, gardening, playing with their dachshund who is named Adirondack.

“What’s with Those Adirondack Mountain Names?” is Lawrence’s second book. His first book, “Sailor of the Stars,” takes students through the process of astronaut training — beginning with the application process and ending with a post-mission press conference.

Lawrence says, as a child of the sixties, he grew up on the space program, watching every space launch. He was a paperboy for the Watertown Daily Times in northern New York and “read every article on space.”

That also inspired him to be a writer, Lawrence said. He wrote for the Space Launch News and once involved his eight most gifted writing students in interviewing and writing about astronaut Eileen Collins and Albany Med doctor Heidi DeBlock, who monitored the hearts of astronauts when they landed at Kennedy Space Center.

“I was even able to interview my favorite folk singer,” Lawrence said. Judy Collins had written a song, “Beyond the Sky,” for Commander Collins and her crew before their launch in July 1999.

His current book starts with a song written by a friend and fellow teacher, Dale Wade-Keszey: “Marcy was some important guy,” go the lyrics. “But the rest, can you tell me why?”

Lawrence, who has retired from his career as a Guilderland teacher, taught fifth grade at three elementary schools — Lynnwood, the old Fort Hunter, and Guilderland — before teaching at Farnsworth Middle School. He’s stayed in touch with some of his students and next month is going to the wedding of a former sixth-grader of his.

Lawrence used the book he had written on astronauts in his classroom along with many other creative ways of teaching. An enrichment course he taught in summer school for a decade, “It’s for the Birds,” involved among other projects having the kids build bird nests with just two fingers, to simulate what it is like to weave a nest with a beak.

Lawrence also used baseball as a teaching tool, taking his students to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. One of the tasks his students had to do, complete with sound effects, was recreate a game based on the ticker-tape description of the various plays.

Lawrence served on an advisory committee for education at the Hall of Fame. Another member of the advisory board was Dolly Brumfield White who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and Lawrence says he was excited to get to know her.

Lawrence’s book on Adirondack mountain names has one chapter for each letter of the alphabet. The chapters start with a picture and a quotation, drawn from a wide variety of people — including space explorers as well as mountain explorers.

Unlike “Sailor of the Stars,” Lawrence’s current book is self-published, which means he has to do marketing himself but also means he could put it together just the way he wanted.

The publisher of his first book thought the title should include “astronaut” because it would be more salable rather than “Sailor of the Stars,” which Lawrence says is Greek for astronaut.

“I stood my ground on the title,” he said.

In his current book, he uses the Greek word for mountain place name, oronym, for each chapter title. The book was beautifully put together by The Troy Book Makers. The colored cover photograph — of Blue Mountain, which started the project — is by Mark Bowie, an Adirondack photographer who is following in the footsteps of his grandfather.

Many of the book’s photographs — in old-school black and white — are by Kay Flickinger. She was the 41st person to become a 46-R by climbing all 46 of the Adirondack peaks over 4,000 feet.

Her photographs capture the Adirondacks in all seasons and in all kinds of weather in the 1940s and 1950s. One of them pictures Orra Phelps, a doctor and naturalist, perched on Owlshead, looking towards Cascade and Porter.

Lawrence documents the names and history of the Adirondacks’ one-hundred highest peaks as well as the Saranac Six, the Tupper Lake Triad, and a few of his personal favorites.

Just four of those mountains are named after women — one of them, Inez Mulholland, was known as The Suffragist Joan of Arc. A lawyer, she promoted world peace, prison reform, African Americans’ rights, and a woman’s right to vote.

“She was famous for leading a women’s suffrage parade, wearing a white cape and a crown on a large white horse on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in Washington, D.C. on March 3, 1913,” writes Lawrence. She died young, before the 19th Amendment had passed.

And so pieces of American history as well as Adirondack lore are woven into the stories that Lawrence tells of mountain names.

Lawrence says he looks at writing in the same way that his wife, Carol Ann, looks at quilting. “I piece writing like she pieces fabric,” says Lawrence.

The pieces, sewn together, make for a colorful and useful cover.

His book is dedicated to her.

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“What’s With those Adirondack Mountain Names,” a 152-page paperback, is available at local book stores and through Amazon for $19.99.