On certain October mornings in the Adirondacks the sun hits the mountains just right and the whole landscape is illuminated with incandescent color.
In the valleys, the wind bends the ocher grasses and rustles through the treetops, sending cascades of leaves twirling through the sky. A few months later, snow piles so high on the pine boughs that the trees begin to look like giants. I love to cross-country ski through the soft, sparkling forest and feel its hush envelop me. Come spring, the new leaves glow an enticing lemony green. But I think that best of all I like summer, when the hermit thrushes trill in the woods and the scent of the air is an unforgettable mix of balsam, moss and wild thyme.
During any season, Adirondack Park—some six million unspoiled acres in northeastern New York State—is so beguiling that once you start coming here, it's impossible ever to stop. Proof of this is everywhere in the High Peaks, near Lake Placid, where my husband and I have spent every summer of our lives. (He and I were childhood friends, and one of the things that brought us together was our shared love of the area.) The location isn't convenient: it's a five-hour drive from New York City (where we live) or Boston. But the rewards are numerous and unparalleled. There's something deeply peaceful and salubrious in the air. No matter what is going on in my life, the second I arrive in the Adirondacks, all is right with the world.
My friends feel the same way. For the most part, their families have come to these mountains for at least three generations, and each successive generation seems to cherish them more. It may have something to do with the refreshing simplicity of the lifestyle, which is outdoorsy, family oriented and old-fashioned. Poking around in one of the rattly old summerhouses, you're more likely to come across rotary phones, Victrolas and cabinet radios than you are televisions or DVD players—and don't even bother trying to find a cell-phone signal.
All this lends the place a wonderful sense of continuity and timelessness. Every year, we mark my son's height on the wainscoting in his great-grandparents' house, next to the annual heights of twenty-eight other relatives, including his father and grandfather—a little bit of family history literally inscribed into the architecture of the house. My sister-in-law drives fifteen hours from North Carolina with her two young children each summer to spend July here. Plenty of places are a lot closer, but nothing else will do.
Although the idea of the Adirondacks as paradise is now firmly rooted in the American mind, the region had something of a rocky start. Its reputation in the 18th century was perhaps best expressed by a moniker it was given by Native Americans at the time: couchsachrage, or "dismal wilderness." New Yorkers were no less disdainful. As one map, leaving the area blank, explained, "This country, by reason of mountains, swamps, and drowned lands, is impassable and uninhabited." (The region wasn't even surveyed until 1872.)
Unfortunately, the impetus that helped East Coasters overcome their fear and loathing turned out to be greed. In the mid-19th century, rapacious speculators descended on the area, feverishly buying up huge parcels of land, often sight unseen. Soon there was a mad rush to plunder the abundant natural resources, including iron ore and lumber—notably the magnificent old-growth white pine and spruce trees. Meanwhile, in 1837, the state finally got its act together and gave the region a name: the Adirondacks, an Iroquois word meaning "bark eaters," an insult aimed at a neighboring Algonquin tribe and implying poor hunting skills.
In an ironic twist, while the area was being shamelessly ravaged, Americans' perception of it was radically transforming. As travel conditions improved and civilization began to make slow but steady headway, lumber companies weren't the only ones to discover the remarkable attributes of this vast wilderness. Sportsmen reveled in the countless secluded lakes filled with oversized trout. Poets, painters, philosophers and ministers found a landscape so awesome in its power and beauty that it tapped reservoirs of creativity and spirituality within them. The worshipful tone of one Ralph Waldo Emerson poem, written at the eminent Philosophers' Camp, on Follensby Pond, in 1858, reflected this new, decidedly improved perspective: "We swept with oars the Saranac, / With skies of benediction, to Round Lake, / Where all the sacred mountains drew around us."
Naturally, New York high society wanted in on all this. In the late 1800s, a developer named William West Durant—whose father, Union Pacific Railroad tycoon Thomas C. Durant, controlled 650,000 Adirondack acres—found a way to lure the posh from their marble mansions to the unforgiving North Country. He began to design and build what came to be known as Great Camps: over-the-top estates where world-weary moguls could revive their spirits in a woodsy but still grand fashion. J. P. Morgan and Alfred Vanderbilt were two of the first to buy in; they were followed over the years by cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, as well as the Carnegies, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers and a host of other high-profile families.
There was nothing humble about these camps—many had hundreds or thousands of acres, dozens of buildings and scores of servants—but they were amazingly true to, and respectful of, their surroundings. Cathedral ceilings were supported by massive logs polished with beeswax; fireplaces were constructed of local fieldstone; detailing was supplied in the form of shaggy cedar twigs and sheets of rough birch bark. Durant had invented Adirondack rustic style.
As the region gained devotees, from poets to patriarchs, there was a growing public outcry to protect the wilderness from marauders. In 1892, New York State created the Adirondack Park, leaving a little more than half the land in private hands (with strict laws governing development) and claiming the rest for the public. Written into the state constitution was the now famous line "The lands... constituting the Forest Preserve shall be forever kept as wild forest lands." The result was a resource unlike anything else in this country: a park roughly the size of the state of Vermont and containing the perfect mix of small towns and protected wilderness. That means you can stay in style and eat top-notch food but also have easy access to some of the most impressive natural beauty in the East.
