America’s Remarkable Mountains: Snow In The Adirondack Park

Imagine a place where nature is allowed to reclaim the land, where you can hike, ski, snowshoe for hundreds of miles amidst winter splendor. Such a place does exist–the Adirondack Mountains. Since its inception as a protected reserve in the 1880s, the Adirondacks have served as a model of nature conservation for the world. In these photographs we witness some of America’s most remarkable phenomena: snow on icy rockface, an icy stream, thick blankets of snow and our son’s Great Grandfather, a retired Marine, who has thrived in the arctic tundra.   

The Adirondacks are often associated with summer and winter homes of the ruling class. Families like the Rockefellers, Prescotts and the Witneys built their great camps in the Adirondacks including one American president who made this place his permanent home. 

The early settlers who came to these rugged mountains after the American Revolution were pushing westward to what was then the wild frontier. Using what they found in the woods–tree trunks and birch bark, branches and stones–they built small cabins and filled them with furniture they made with an ax and their own hands. The first camps were crude, but as they evolved, enormous stone fireplaces were built for heat and porches laid out for fine weather. The new craft and architecture of the woods was so striking, so unique, that it became knows as “the Adirondack style.”

Attracted by the handsome, rustic cabins and the endless forests at a time when wilderness was fast disappearing, the millionaires of the Industrial Age descended upon the Adirondacks to build their winter retreats. Mansions of log and stone sprang up on the edges of the high clear northern lakes, and trainloads of wealthy visitors–nannies, footmen, champagne and silver in tow–came to “rough it” every winter. The era of the Great Winter Camps had begun.

Near the heart of the center of these wide mountains is Lake Placid. It is an old lake, deep and pure, five miles from end to end and strewn with islands. The surface is so shiny it could be taken for polished stone. Whiteface Mountain towers above, nearly a mile high. 

On the forested edge of Lake Placid, in the shadow of Whiteface Mountain, a small hotel looks out over the water. An old Adirondack lodge of arching cedar, smooth painted pine and diamond shaped windows with views to take your breath away.