Advertisement

The New York State wilderness that is perfect for family adventures

Great Camp Sagamore, Adirondacks - Jessica Reihl
Great Camp Sagamore, Adirondacks - Jessica Reihl

After a while, we stopped telling people we were spending summer in the Adirondacks. More often than not, it drew blank faces, even from our American friends. This vast wilderness a few hours’ drive north of New York City remains largely unknown outside the United States, and even within it, which is truly confounding given all it has to offer.

The Adirondack Park is big even by American standards. The second largest publicly protected area in the country covers six million acres and encompasses peaks, lakes, virgin forest and miles of rivers. It is larger than Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and Everglades National Parks combined. The landscape is so kingsize we found we could walk or kayak for days without encountering another soul. The emptiness was startling, coming from our crowded little island.

The beauty of the Adirondacks is in no small way thanks to a heroic clause in the New York Constitution, which has decreed since 1894 that large chunks of it should remain “forever wild”. And so it is that this landscape enjoys the highest degree of protection anywhere in the US.

After two days in New York City, we took the Amtrak train early one morning from Penn station to the state capital Albany (only two hours and 40 minutes away). From there we hired a car and drove for two hours through miles of woodland and forest into the Adirondack Park. We felt like astronauts who had travelled to Mars.

Suddenly, here we were at Elk Lake Lodge, in a wooden cabin beside a lake within a 12,000-acre, privately owned forest. There were no sounds apart from the haunting cry of common loons and the bell summoning us for dinner each evening.

Wil Walk at the Wild Center - Darren McGee
Wil Walk at the Wild Center - Darren McGee

The lodge, which hosts a small number of guests in eight rustic private cabins, has been run for generations by the same family. They have trodden lightly on the landscape. We rarely saw anyone except at breakfast and dinner in the main lodge. Was the bearded man who ate alone a famous writer, we wondered? Staff were delightful, chatty and local. Often we were the only people swimming in the 600-acre lake. We kayaked, we walked the private trails, picnicked by the lake, marvelled at the eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies and the ruby-throated hummingbirds and, well, breathed.

It is hard to convey the vastness of the space. It affected us in all sorts of ways. Almost immediately, we stopped being quite so British. Americans, we remembered, are more friendly, more open. They talk to you. When we did bump into other guests we began to shrug off our reserve and talk back, even to the young guy from Maryland in the next-door lodge who told me he voted for Trump and would do so again.

I suspect few people willingly leave Elk Lake Lodge, but our itinerary took us on to Great Camp Sagamore, a remote estate built in 1897 and bought as a summer retreat for the Vanderbilt family. Many wealthy families of the Gilded Age (think Rockefellers, Carnegies, Guggenheims; rock stars of their day) built their own “great camps” in the Adirondacks, where they could escape the city – quickly, as we had done – to spend time in the wilderness with their families, affecting the simple life. Of course, they weren’t really camps but rather grandiose estates complete with boathouses and bowling alleys.

Sagamore, designed by William West Durant and built on 1,526 acres, is now a restored national historic landmark – literally a museum you can stay in. It is less perfect than Elk Lake Lodge – being old and all that – but we loved the ”camp” atmosphere: no keys to our lakeside cabins, eating at long tables with strangers, sitting on the cabin porch watching the stars. Wi-Fi for 12-year-old Edward was limited, which is always a plus. It didn’t require much imagination to cast oneself back into history and wonder which Vanderbilt might also have gazed at the stars from our cabin.

Great Camp Sagamore - Jessica Reihl
Great Camp Sagamore - Jessica Reihl

Nothing could have contrasted more with this silent, rural, dark retreat than our day spent white-water rafting on the Hudson River. I was hoping my family would give this a miss, knowing that I pale at the mention of moving water. Somehow, though, I have a son who adores speed and danger.

Brad, our guide from the Adirondac Rafting Co (half an hour’s drive from Sagamore) noted my anxiety, as well as my son’s excitement. “So this is my first day…” he joked, before launching into tales of death, danger and derring-do on the river. He was surely chuckling at me when he made Edward “ride the bull” (sit on the front of the raft, rodeo-style, while holding on with one hand) as we negotiated nasty-looking, gurgling waters with strange names such as JiffyPop, Widowmaker and Twin Nasties.

rapids
rapids

Needless to say, we all loved the mixture of excitement and fear that conquering Class III rapids brings with it. We learnt about enjoying risk and decided we would be less British and “More Like Brad”, whose devil-may-care attitude was infectious.

We spent the whole day on the river, travelling more than 16 miles without seeing any sign of civilisation. At intervals, we flopped off our raft and floated quietly downstream in our life jackets.

From Sagamore, we drove north to Lake Placid, home to the 1980 Winter Olympics, and on to the KOA Campground in Wilmington. This was a campsite proper, although we had a particularly posh tent with double bed, sofas, dining table and coffee machine. We watched the chipmunks eat our crumbs, played table tennis, mini golf, chess on a giant board like Alice Through the Looking Glass and fell asleep listening to the Flume waterfalls on the Ausable River.

Back, with great reluctance, in New York City, I wondered why this special place remained so elusive, why it hasn’t entered our British consciousness in the way Yellowstone or Yosemite have. Even many NYC dwellers aren’t entirely sure what the Adirondacks actually are. Interestingly, one Upper West Sider we met while white-water rafting, who has a second home in the Adirondacks, urged us not to write too lovingly of the place. They want to keep it all to themselves.

America As You Like It (020 8742 8299; americaasyoulikeit.com) offers a nine-night trip to New York State from £7,395 for a family of four (two children, aged 2-11) . It includes return flights from London with United, three nights in New York City, six nights split between Elk Lake Lodge, Great Camp Sagamore and KOA Wilmington, and seven days’ Avis car rental. For more information see visitadirondacks.com.