Adirondack blues

Another charmed stay in the Adirondacks, this one a little different. 

We've avoided during the summer season before. But someone canceled and our usual host let us know of the possibility just at a moment we were thinking summer travel. Luckily it turns out this week is still pre-season: all the shops are open but the crowds aren't here yet. (We saw them streaming in as we drove out this morning, thankful still to be blessedly countercyclical.) 

The season's colors are blue and green, with a few pops of yellow and white and occasional purple flowers, but mainly in meadows and marshes and along the roads. Step into the woods and it's greens on greens (on brown). This was the view at one of our familiar haunts, the tip of Lake Durant in Blue Mountain Lake, seen from a bridge on the Cascade Pond Trail.

But the true discovery for us this time, which amounts to a sort of aspect shift, was being able for the first time to explore the blue world of the lakes! Far from being just beautiful barriers and borders to roads and trails, lakes and streams are the traditional transit network of the Adirondacks. Since the dinner cruise on the W. W. Durant and rental watercraft were now available (summer!), we came to know the lake we were staying on for the first time as a thoroughfare!

These are some views from the cruise. Turns out the lake's nearly 100 mile shoreline is dotted with landings for some 250 dwellings of various sizes, nearly invisible through the trees, and most of which are accessible only by boat - still!! What looks like wilderness on a road map is in fact full of human activity.

And that's the W. W. Durant itself, a 1991 replica of the wooden steamships that made this a busy hub for visitors to the Great Camps and hotels at Raquette and Blue a century ago, espied from the spiffy Craig Cat we rented the next day. (This was the only watercraft available at the nearby marinas.) It's from this light vessel, which sits right on the water, that we got to experience the lake surface as a space for movement in all directions, even as were able to observe up close the rippled waves in the big picture at the top of this post... 

A change of aspect indeed! Not just that blue background became foreground, as the green worlds receded into the background. We learned that Blue Mountain and Raquette Lakes only came late to the motorable roads by which we know them, and when State Route 28 was opened in 1929, it spelled the end of a whole lost world of interconnected railroads, steamships and luxurious hotels.

This, for instance, is Prospect House on Blue Mountain Lake, with 300 rooms and huge verandas. It opened in 1882 and was the first hotel in the world to have electricity in each room (arranged by Thomas Edison himself!). The largest hotel in the Adirondacks it was supported initially by stage coaches coming from the rail terminus at North Creek on the Hudson, then by steamships, assisted at one point by the shortest railroad in the country, coming across Raquette Lake -which used to have a station, too, coming from Utica. (Most of these were projects of one W. W. Durant, btw.) Along with the trains and steamships, there's nothing on that scale around here now - though still, as I learned, plenty of people.

An Adirondacks education... what a lot of history, and city people. And the illusion of innocence of car travel exploded! Maybe it's time to go back to canoe or kayak.