Adirondacks: Introduction

The North Country Trail begins at the southern end of Lake Champaign on the New York-Vermont border at Crown Point State Historic Site. The first major segment of the Trail traverses the Adirondack region of New York. The North Country Trail route passes through the Adirondack region counties of Essex, Warren, Hamilton, and Herkimer. Public lands through which the North Country Trail passes in the Adirondack region inlcude Crown Point State Historic Park, Adirondack Park, and Pixley Falls State Park.

Known as the Last Wilderness in the Eastern United States, the Adirondacks are cherished for their unbridled mountainous terrain only hours from some of the country’s most populous metropolitan areas. Judge Winslow C. Watson of Essex County described the Adirondacks in 1869:

This remarkable region has not, until comparatively a recent period, elicited any great degree of attention from the tourist or explorer. The mind does not readily accept the fact, that a territory nearly equal in size to half the State of Vermont and about the same superficial area as Connecticut, lies in the bosom of New York, touching one extremity the long occupied and densely populated valley of the Mohawk, and encircled by a highly cultivated and matured country, is still shrouded in its primeval forests, and remains almost as it came from the hands of its Creator.

Topics covered in the Adirondack region of New York are Native Americans, Europeans and American colonists, the lumber industry and forest conservation, and the Great Camps and outdoor recreationalists.

Footnote:

Winslow C. Watson, The Military and Civil History of the County of Essex, New York (Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1869): 100.