Hiking - Lake George, NY -

Hiking - Lake George, NY

Hiking - Lake George, NY

Taste the good life in one the country's most fabled wilderness retreats

The largest park in the continental U.S.—larger than Yosemite or the entire state of Massachusetts—the six-million-acre Adirondack State Park is legally protected to remain 'forever wild', a debt owed to the tireless efforts of 19th-century lawyer-turned-surveyor Verplanck Colvin.

The park isn’t completely wild, but rather a patchwork of public and private lands covering 12,000 square miles in northeastern New York state. The mountains it’s named after are among the world’s oldest peaks, made of billion-year-old Precambrian rocks. An 1830s geologist, Ebenezer Emmons, gave them the moniker after a tribe of Indians who hunted here. (A more common legend has it that the Mohawk scornfully dubbed the Montagnais, an Algonquian tribe that lived nearby, adirondack, or ‘bark-eaters’.)

Topics: Hiking, Canoeing and kayaking, Fishing, Historic hotels, Skiing, Dogsledding, Museums, New York, Northeast