Adirondack Mountains

“ SARANAC LAKE, ADIRONDACK MOUNTAINS, NEW YORK, U.S.A., NOVEMBER 21, 1887.
MY DEAR SYMONDS, - I think we have both meant and wanted to write to you any time these months; but we have been much tossed about, among new faces and old, and new scenes and old, and scenes (like this of Saranac) which are neither one nor other. ”

“ We can not, for example, look at a geological map of America without perceiving that the Appalachian ridges, which intervene between the Atlantic and the St.Lawrence Valley, have been driven bodily back by a force acting from the east, and that they have resisted this pressure only where, as in the Gulf of St.Lawrence and the Catskill region of New York, they have been protected by outlying masses of very old rocks, as, for example, by that of the Island of Newfoundland, and that of the Adirondack Mountains. ”

“ In the isolated mass of the Adirondacks, south of the Canadian frontier, they rise to a still greater elevation, and form an imposing mountain group, almost equal in height to their somewhat more modern rivals, the White Mountains, which face them on the opposite side of Lake Champlain. ”

“ When we left Lake Placid we felt we ought to suffer from a case of Adirondack travel indigestion.
Thursday morning two parties were ready to start at 6:30 in the Stanley steamers driven by Mr. Godfrey Dewey and Mr. Hubert Stevens for an all day trip of about 110 miles. It was a glorious day and the early morning ride in the cool, bracing air made us forget every care and worry. We followed the West Branch of the Ausable River, with the road crossing it many times and often winding beside it on narrow ledges with the mountains towering above us where we could get the proper thrills of danger. ”

“ Some distance from the seashore it begins to rise, and we find ourselves at first among hills, then among mountains.
We rise higher and higher until we reach at last the tops of the Blue Ridge and Allegheny ranges. In New York are the Catskill and the Adirondack groups, famous as summer resorts for people from the cities.
The level land along the ocean is a part of the Atlantic coastal plain, and the hills that rise from it belong to the Piedmont plateau region. The mountain ranges are part of the great Appalachian system, which extends on southward, and are the watershed. ”

“ Emmons as a field more especially interesting to him on account of its mineral localities and minerals, and giving him a field more congenial to his tastes and experience. He made the public acquainted with the Adirondack region and named its principal mountains. In 1837 he named, described, and classified the celebrated Potsdam sandstone. Among the other rocks and divisions to which he gave a name or a place in geology are the Chazy limestone, black marble of Isle la Motte, Lorrain shales, Champlain group, Ontario group, Helderberg series, and Erie group. ”

“ The rugged region embracing the Adirondacks, together with the more elevated portions of New England and of the adjacent provinces of Canada, has many geographical features that are similar to those of the southern Appalachians, but at the same time this, the central portion, differs in a marked way from the southern extension of the Atlantic mountains. The higher mountains in each of these picturesque regions are at least in a general way to be considered as the unconsumed remnants of ancient uplands, the greater part of which have been eroded away. ”

“ Forest fires and the lumberman's axe, while destroying much of the beauty, have yet brought out these features with striking emphasis, and when the light intensifies the relief with shadows they appeal to the observer in the strongest way. The narrow ridge between Lake George and Lake Champlain contains some of the roughest country in all the Adirondack region.
The faults and their escarpments were doubtless much freshened up by the Labradorean ice-sheet which plucked away from their faces the loose rock, sheeted by the parallel faults. ”

“ The region known as the Adirondack Wilderness, or the Great North Woods, embraces between 5000 and 6000 sq. m. of mountain, lake, plateau and forest, which for scenic grandeur is almost unequalled in any other part of the United States. The mountain peaks are usually rounded and easily scaled, and as roads have been constructed over their slopes and in every direction through the forests, all points of interest may be easily reached by stage. Railways penetrate the heart of the region, and small steamboats ply upon the larger lakes. ”

“ The Adirondack wilderness covers almost the whole of Northern New York. This region is an elevated plateau of about fifteen thousand square miles, crossed by mountain ranges. It stretches from Canada down almost to the Mohawk Valley, and from Lake Champlain northwest to the St. Lawrence, in rugged surface, the plateau from which its peaks arise being elevated about two thousand feet above the sea. Five nearly parallel mountain ranges cross it from southwest to northeast, terminating in great promontories upon the shores of Lake Champlain. ”

“ CHAPTER XIII THE ADIRONDACKS Whoever passes through the Green mountains and arrives at Burlington in the evening of a fair day will he rewarded by one of the most beautiful views of natural scenery the world has to offer. The outlook from the hilltop here is enchanting. Looking westward you see the beautiful expanse of Lake Champlain, dotted with numerous islands that stretch away to the purple wall of the Adirondacks, whose summits are outlined by a bright golden light which slowly ascends and diffuses along the horizon as if striving to linger around the loveliness below. ”

“ Gazing at their sombre contour, the reason can be readily divined why the Indians called this vast weird region Cony-a-craga, or the "Dismal Wilderness." The higher Adirondack summits, composed of the hardest granite, are said by the geologists 299 to be the oldest land on the globe and the first showing itself above the universal waters. Some distance above Port Henry is Westport Landing, the village standing in the deep recesses of Northwest Bay, where the long ridge of Split Rock Mountain, stretching towards the northeast, makes a high border for the bay. ”

“ The Archaean hills and mountains, how slowly they melt away! In the Adirondacks, in northern New England, in the Highlands of the Hudson, they still hold their heads high and have something of the vigor of their prime.
The most enduring rocks are the oldest; and the most perishable are, as a rule, the youngest. ”

“ At the base of the western declivity lies the valley of the East Branch of the Au Sable, and beyond, the great Adirondac range, overtopped by Whiteface and Mount Tahawus. We greeted these giants with due reverence, hoping for a nearer acquaintance, for only their extreme summits are visible from that point, Whiteface bold and peaked, Tahawus round and indistinct. The great ridge, hiding all but their heads, is here jagged or flowing, steep, and dark with spruce and pine. It rises like an impassable wall; of a clear morning, a frowning barrier of granite and forest ”

“ The ground covered by the author, who gives his facts while he tells the story of his own and a friend’s wanderings through the Adirondacks, covers a section of woodland wilderness larger than Connecticut, girdled and laced with over a thousand lakes, shouldered into the skies by hundreds of mountains. The forest is swarming with deer and the waters with fish. There are sections in the Adirondacks where one may go for miles without meeting another human being ”

“ To the eastward is the pretty Mirror Lake, about three miles in circuit. Both lakes have high wooded shores, and around them are gathered the hotels, cottages and camps of a large summer settlement. Surrounded by a grander galaxy of finer and higher mountains than any other lakes of this region, here is truly the "Eye" that views these dark Adirondacks in all their glory. These mountains are all sombre, and some almost inky black; many are hazy in the distance. To the northeast the Wilmington Pass, alongside Whiteface, lets out the western branch of Ausable ”

“ SARANAC LAKE, OCTOBER 1887.
DEAR ARCHER, - Many thanks for the Wondrous Tale. It is scarcely a work of genius, as I believe you felt. Thanks also for your pencillings; though I defend 'shrew,' or at least many of the shrews.
We are here (I suppose) for the winter in the Adirondacks, a hill and forest country on the Canadian border of New York State, very unsettled and primitive and cold, and healthful, or we are the more bitterly deceived. I believe it will do well for me; but must not boast. ”

“ CHAPTER XIV LONG LAKE, LAKE GEORGE, AND SARATOGA Long Lake is one of the most charming of any found in the Adirondacks. Its islands are lovely beyond words to describe. No artist, not even Turner, has ever caught the magic sheen that clothes it, nor portrayed the rosy clouds the crimson west has painted, that seem to hang motionless above it. Neither has anyone caught those ethereal blues or royal purples that the soft semi-light of evening makes upon its bosom where the darker mountains seem to be floating. ”

“ The Adirondack wilderness is essentially unbroken. A few bad roads that penetrate it, a few jolting wagons that traverse them, a few barn-like boarding-houses on the edge of the forest, where the boarders are soothed by patent coffee, and stimulated to unnatural gayety by Japan tea, and experimented on by unique cookery, do little to destroy the savage fascination of the region. In half an hour, at any point, one can put himself into solitude and every desirable discomfort. The party that covets the experience of the camp comes down to primitive conditions of dress and equipment. ”

“ Within twenty rods of the top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the New England States, flows out a copious spring of water. The whole mountain system is full of springs and lakes. The entire Adirondack region is in the same condition. ”

“ High and erect these young mountains stand to this day, their sharp angles and rocky contours vouching for their youth, in strange contrast with the shrunken forms of the old Adirondacks, Green Mountains, and Appalachians, whose lowered heads and rounded shoulders attest the weight of ages. ”

“ Nature threw up those mountains and clothed them with lofty woods, that they might serve as a reservoir to supply with perennial waters the thousand rivers and rills that are fed by the rains and snows of the Adirondacks, and as a screen for the fertile plains of the central counties against the chilling blasts of the north wind, which meet no other barrier in their sweep from the Arctic pole. ”

“ The Adirondack region abounds in mountain lakes of romantic beauty.
Climate. The climate of the State is of the continental rather than the insular type, though the extreme coastal regions of Long Island are somewhat tempered by the ocean. The range of temperature is nowhere as great as in the States of the Northwestern plains. The average maximum is about 100° and the minimum zero, or a few degrees below, but these figures vary much with the topography, the winters in the Adirondacks being very cold. ”

“ It was only twenty minutes' drive from the station to a landing, where they were met by a trim little naptha launch with "The Indiana" painted newly, in bright letters, upon the prow. She puffed slowly up one of the largest lakes in the Adirondacks, buried in the very heart of the mountains. The latter are higher in this particular region, the scenery wilder than elsewhere. Nature had designed a beautiful color scheme from the lake ”

“ The natural conditions in the Adirondacks which for so many years made the mountain wilderness impregnable by civilization and to a great extent preserved that region from the denudation which has characterized the more thickly populated parts of the State have also retarded the development of road building. ”

“ The mountain stands in the heart of the Adirondack country, just near enough to the thoroughfare of travel for thousands of people to see it every year, and just far enough from the beaten track to be unvisited except by a very few of the wise ones, who love to turn aside. Behind the mountain is the lake, which no lazy man has ever seen. Out of the lake flows the stream, winding down a long, untrodden forest valley, to join the Stony Creek waters and empty into the Raquette River. ”

“ If we found anything, that would be time enough to tell them, that’s what Harry said.
Now maybe you don’t know anything about the Adirondack tour, but anyway, it’s all planned out on a map for motorists. The way you go is up the Hudson to Albany and then you hit out west and go up through Utica to Syracuse. Then you go up north right close to Lake Ontario till you come to Watertown and then you go up along the St. Lawrence River till you get to Ogdensburg. There’s a dandy big apple orchard near Ogdensburg. ”

“ From this we learn that the mountain ranges of the earth are by no means all of the same age. The original Adirondacks were formed long before the Taconics, which originated millions of years before the Appalachians, these latter having been folded up long before the Sierras. ”

“ The waters of these baby fountains are swollen by contributions from the streams, ponds, and lakes of the Adirondack wilderness, until along the banks of Fishing Brook, a tributary of the Hudson, the water is utilized at the first saw-mill. A few miles lower down the forests are vexed by the axe of the lumbermen, and logs are floated down the river one hundred miles to Glens Falls, where the State Dam and Great Boom are located. Half a million logs have been gathered there in a single spring. ”