Adirondacks

“ The Adirondacks are said to be one of the original ranges of the earth, and when one reflects that these spruces and maples and hemlocks and birches had great-grandfathers about the same time—the sensation is almost uncanny, and I realise how over-civilised we all are. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The higher the civilization has risen, the more abject is the desolation of barbarism that ensues. The most melancholy spot in the Adirondacks is not a tamarack-swamp, where the traveler wades in moss and mire, and the atmosphere is composed of equal active parts of black-flies, mosquitoes, and midges. ”

“ Clavering had come to these woods nearly every year since he had made the north his home, and she had forgotten nothing of her woodland lore. When one is "in the woods," as the great Adirondacks are familiarly called, one rarely talks of anything but their manifold offerings. It is easy enough to forget the world. They both had had their long tramps, their rough campings-out, more or less exciting adventures. When a loud bell, hung in a frame outside the camp, summoned them to dinner, they walked out briskly. ”

“ The landscape in one direction consisted of dark wooded hills between which a stream flowed on its way like a ribbon of silver until it disappeared behind the purple headlands. Here was a picture to surpass the wildest dream of any painter; such infinite details and inexhaustible variety, blended forms and flowing contour, dim and elusive shadows, imperceptible blending of color-all were spread out before us, and so extensive was the view that the distant peaks of the Adirondacks printed their faint outlines on the sky. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Here amidst such sylvan beauty, where the air is rife with the fragrance of birch and balsam, as you gaze at the Adirondacks that lift their startling cliffs into the air, or farther along the horizon stand bathed in a radiant glow, while a gold tangle of sunset glitters among the white birch trees or casts a soft sheen like the tints on a mourning dove's neck—pray tell me, have you ever seen anything fairer than your own placid lakes? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rain or shine, before noon or after, in the deep forest or in the village grove,—when it is too hot for the thrushes or too cold and windy for the warblers,—it is never out of time or place for this little minstrel to indulge his cheerful strain. In the deep wilds of the Adirondacks, where few birds are seen and fewer heard, his note was almost constantly in my ear. Always busy, making it a point never to suspend for one moment his occupation to indulge his musical taste, his lay is that of industry and contentment. ”

“ These islands were covered on all sides with the richest moss and the most delicate ferns, and on the top of each grew great trees, their long roots gripping the sides of the rock like petrified pythons. Then a water-course choked with smaller boulders, and rising [281] out of it, straight up for five hundred feet, a solid wall of rock crowned with a pine forest. The wall was a half-mile long and so smooth that one could well imagine some terrible convulsion of these Adirondacks during which a mountain had been split in twain, one side grinding itself into these boulder-islands of the forest. ”

“ There in this wide expanse stretching across toward the blue irregular mountain line of the Adirondacks, far to the southward, then eastward till the vision meets the water line, lie the islands grouped for beauty by nature’s gardener, called by the writer the Arcadian Archipelago.
The very atmosphere of this enchanted region compels the thoughts of peace and freedom. A restful idleness pervades the life of its people ”

“ I couldn't do without the sense of woods, and space, and sky. I can stand at this window and imagine all sorts of things—that the park really does run into the Catskills, as it seems to do—that the Catskills run into the Adirondacks—and that the Adirondacks take me up to the Laurentides with which my earliest recollections begin. ”

“ At my very feet, so near that I could have leaped at once into eternity, the earth was cleft to a depth of six thousand six hundred feet—not by a narrow gorge, like other cañons, but by an awful gulf within whose cavernous immensity the forests of the Adirondacks would appear like jackstraws, the Hudson Palisades would be an insignificant stratum, Niagara would be indiscernible, and cities could be tossed like pebbles. ”

“ As society is at present constituted in Christian countries, I would rather for my own security be a cougar than a fawn.
There is not much of romantic interest in the Adirondacks. Out of the books of daring travelers, nothing. I do not know that the Keene Valley has any history. The mountains always stood here, and the Au Sable, flowing now in shallows and now in rippling reaches over the sands and pebbles, has for ages filled the air with continuous and soothing sounds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And to miscarry in a dedication is an abominable form of book-wreck; I am a good captain, I would rather lose the tent and save my dedication.
I am at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, I suppose for the winter: it seems a first-rate place; we have a house in the eye of many winds, with a view of a piece of running water - Highland, all but the dear hue of peat - and of many hills - Highland also, but for the lack of heather. Soon the snow will close on us ”

“ It is this region of lakes and mountains — whose mountain core is well shown by the illustration, 'the heart of the Adirondacks' — that our citizens desire to reserve forever as a public forest park, not only as a resort of rest for themselves and for posterity, but for weighty reasons of political economy. ”

“ Headley's passionate love for nature in all her various moods led him nearly forty years ago to seek those great solitudes which the Adirondacks had at that time kept concealed from all men save the trapper or woodsman. ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ J. W. Powell, Seventh Annual Report, Bureau of Ethnology, pages 45-46. See preceding page. AMERICAN ABORIGINES: Adirondacks. "This is a term bestowed by the Iroquois, in derision, on the tribes who appear, at an early day, to have descended the Utawas river, and occupied the left banks of the St. Lawrence, above the present site of Quebec, about the close of the 15th century. It is said to signify men who eat trees, in allusion to their using the bark of certain trees for food, when reduced to straits, in their war excursions. ”

“ When we visit ordinary places of summer resort, we require no particular outfit, (it being remembered that the "we" alluded to comprehends only males,) excepting a suitable supply of summer clothes. But when we go to the Adirondacks,—certainly a most extraordinary place of summer resort,—we require an outfit which is as remarkable as the region itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many people believe that eventually New York will be forced to go to the Adirondacks 200 miles away for a pure water supply, and that the resources of the Adirondacks should be preserved against that need and should not now be parted with for private use when there is the possibility that in the future they will be required for all the multifarious uses of human existence in the great metropolis. Water conservation in the Adirondacks for municipal use, therefore, is important chiefly with reference to the future. ”

“ If the water supply of the north were cut off, to any perceptible degree, the Hudson, during the months of July and August, would be a mere sluice of salt water from New York to Albany; and the northern canals, dependent on this supply, would become empty and useless ditches. Our age is intensely practical, but we are fortunate in this, that so far as the preservation of the Adirondacks is concerned, utility, common sense, and the appreciation of the beautiful are inseparably blended. ”

“ Those who visit the Adirondacks in search of the wildest beauties of nature will not make the trip in vain. Within this district there are said to be no less than 1000 lakes, and 500 mountain peaks, several of which rise to the height of 5000 feet. It is the Switzerland of America, in the same degree that America is greater and grander in all respects than any of the countries of the Old World. ”

“ Lawrence at Ogdensburg to the ocean at Portland, presents many attractions to the pleasure tourist, which we deem worthy of special mention in this connection. As an avenue of approach to the Adirondacks, Chateaugay Chasm, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, it offers a combination of desirable routes for summer travel. Indeed, the entire line extends through a succession of lake, river, and mountain scenery, of charming beauty and variety. ”

“ The stream drains an extensive district of country, flows into and becomes the outlet of Saratoga Lake, and is now known as Fish Creek and Fish Kill, a very cheap substitute for the expressive Mohawk term.
Adirondacks, or Ratirontaks, a name now improperly applied to the mountainous district of northern New York, is said to have been primarily bestowed by the Iroquois on a tribe occupying the left bank of the St. ”

“ Vernon, when the buck was gone.
The girls listened to the dying echoes of those pounding hoofs, and sighed. Mr. Gilroy sat up and spoke eagerly, "That is the first buck I've ever seen near my bungalow. There are deer in the Adirondacks, but they seldom come near a habitation. It is said that they feed in the barnyards in winter, looking for stray grain, but I am not here in winter, you see." ”

“ There’s no other region just like the Adirondacks. It rains about a third of the time, as a rule. But when it’s clear you forget it can ever be anything else. The breath goes down a mile deeper into your lungs than it can in any other part of the world; and you never get tired. A sort of perpetual ozone jag. Almost any place there is worth going to. We generally hang out at the Antlers,—Mother and I. Up on Raquette Lake, you know. It’s different from other places. It’s run by [206] Charlie Bennett, a giant of a man as broad as Mr. Conover and half a foot taller. ”