BOLTON LANDING, N.Y. — The Adirondacks, land of long lakes and last Mohicans, do their big business in the summer, when upstate New York receives its meager annual allotment of warm weather. The forest-fringed waterways and low mountains leap to life as boaters and campers arrive from downstate and beyond. From the 1920s cabins in the northern woods to the kitsch-rich village of Lake George, the place seems to buzz with merriment and just-born bugs.
Then everything freezes.
By mid-October, dozens of lodgings and restaurants have closed for winter, and scores more will follow. By January, the subzero nights have arrived, the crust on the lakes is thickening, and the population has dwindled to skiers, snowmobilers and ice fishermen.
But there’s a gap in the conventional wisdom about the Adirondacks, and it extends from Labor Day to Columbus Day, maybe a few weeks beyond. During that spell, the leaves turn, the lodging rates fall and the locals are happy to see you, especially on a weekday.
Maybe because the color comes so early and lasts so briefly, the Adirondack leaf season doesn’t get outsiders’ attention the way neighboring New England’s autumns do. But the more locals I spoke with in late July during my family’s five days around Lake George, the more I saw the area as a two-season temptation.
“Not only do we have the reds of the maples and the yellows of the beech and the birch, we have the brilliant yellow of tamarack, which you don’t often find in New England,” said Neil Woodworth, executive director of the Adirondack Mountain Club.
Still, my introduction to the territory was not pretty. First, US Airways cost us a day by canceling our incoming flight to nearby Albany, N.Y., for crew-related reasons. Then the Sagamore resort, the grandest hotel in the region’s southeastern corner, assigned us to a nonsmoking room that stank of cigarettes. (Could this be what happens, I wondered, when you vacation where New Yorkers vacation?) Then, killing time while the staff was finding another room for us, I found that the snack bar was charging a mandatory 18 percent gratuity. By dinner time, I was practically snarling.
And then the lake tide turned.
Part of the reason was simple scenery: First you see the thriving maple, oak, beech, willow, pine and spruce, then you look down and see it all again, upside down, in the waters of the spring-fed, 32-mile-long Lake George. And then there’s the Sagamore hotel, where we spent three nights.
The hotel, built on its own 72-acre island in 1883 and connected to the lake shore by a short causeway, burned twice and was rebuilt twice. The 350-room version that endures today really began with a 1930 redesign and expansion that was inspired by George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, Va., so the heart of the place is the column-lined veranda where two wings of the hotel come together, with lawn all around. It’s grand in every sense.
But with its peak season so short, the Sagamore has had a rocky history. It fell idle for a few years in the early 1980s, then re-emerged with new owners and 200 new guest rooms and condos at one end, an indoor pool at the other.
Our room, chosen from the least-costly price category, was among those added in the 1980s. It lay half-underground, with no lake view, where a butler’s butler might be lodged. In those first grumpy minutes, I sat there considering the $233 a night it was costing. But it was spacious (roomier than most of the 100 rooms in the hotel’s historic main building, in fact), and I grew to like the way light filtered down to our shady little balcony.
The longer we stayed, testing three of the resort’s restaurants and a few of its kids’ programs, the better the service seemed. And I will long remember lolling on the Sagamore’s sloping lawn while our daughter, Grace, and her friend Caroline turned somersaults as only 3-year-olds can.
Off the hotel grounds, we took in the views from atop hiker- and driver-friendly Prospect Mountain. We clowned around on the big red Adirondack chair at Ben &Jerry’s in high-toned Bolton Landing. And we lunched dockside at the Algonquin Restaurant while a sudden shower drummed on the canopy overhead.
“Sorry for the delay,” servers said to us at several restaurants — even though we hadn’t noticed any delay. (Vacationing where New Yorkers vacation: Hmm. …)
We also explored the lake on a speedboat, checking out private estates and overgrown islands, and I took a quick spin in a kayak that mostly left me wishing we had more time.
Perhaps because we knew we were only passing through, we even got a kick out of the feature that most people like least about Lake George in summer — the parade of garish roadside businesses in Lake George Village at the waterway’s southern end, which includes such specimens as Dr. Morbid’s Haunted House, Tired John’s (a restaurant), the House of Frankenstein Wax Museum, the Magic Castle, the Magic Forest, the Alien Encounter and the Tiki Resort, whose Waikiki Supper Club features “fire and knife acts.”
We never got around to the fire and knives, nor did we hike the highly recommended Fifth Peak, Buck Mountain and Sleeping Mountain, all nearby. But we did stop at the Up Yonda Farm and the headquarters and book shop of the nonprofit Adirondack Mountain Club, which has been fighting to promote and protect the area since 1922.
In sticking near Lake George, we sampled only the tiniest, southeastern sliver of the Adirondacks. But at every turn, we bumped against landmarks. Back in the middle 18th century when the French and English were skirmishing over who would take over North America, one of the most crucial prizes was Fort Ticonderoga, which the French called “the key to a continent” but failed to hold.
About 20 years later on the same soil, upstart American troops led by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold won their first major victory against the British by grabbing the same fort. (Soon after, the British bloodily took it back, but the larger war for independence was won elsewhere.)
By the late 19th century, the mightiest families of New York had begun building summer “Great Camps” here, giving birth to that rustic cabin-and-furniture fashion now known as Adirondack style.
Legislators, meanwhile, had already begun setting aside the 6 million acres that make up Adirondack Park, which includes about half-and-half public and private property. In all, the park covers more ground than Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon combined.
Visits to the lake have become a summer tradition for tens of thousands of New Yorkers and their East Coast neighbors, and every return trip is a chance to wallow again in the sensations of childhood.
“I’ve been coming for 20 years,” said Sue Jurkowski of Belchertown, Mass., who was playing shuffleboard at the Stepping Stones Resort. “Even my kids — they’re 21 and 23 — they love it so much that they come back too.”
For my three-member family with our 93 years of collective California residency, learning the lake was like finding a new planet.
Visitors might want a tour by water, and the options include the Lac du Saint Sacrement, the Minne-haha and the Mohican (three large vessels operated by the Lake George Steamboat Co. in Lake George); and the Morgan, operated by the Sagamore in Bolton Landing.
Still, there’s plenty to see by land. If you bear north on the two-lane state Highway 9N, which runs up the west side of Lake George, the roadside kitsch gradually falls away, leaving only forest and peek-a-boo views of the lake, the path gently rising, falling and bending.
If you continue to Fort Ticonderoga at the northern tip of the lake, you pass the tempting town of Hague and the log cabins and docks of semi-rustic resorts such as the old Trout House, one of the few year-round lodgings on the lake.
In the Ticonderoga exhibition rooms, visitors filed past iron breastplates, arrowheads, etched powder horns and a host of pistols and rifles, where many boys and their fathers lingered and marveled. And from the high ramparts of the star-shaped fort, it was easy to understand the site’s importance: It looks down upon the waters of Lake Champlain in one direction, Lake George in another.
But be warned: On Oct. 21, the fort closes until May.
And anybody considering a late summer or fall journey to these parts needs to make a study of seasonal discounts and closures — sometimes it’s a matters of days between a bargain and a locked door.
At the Stepping Stones Resort, management cuts cottage prices roughly in half on Sept. 1 (this year the low end for fall is $120 nightly), then closes for the season at the end of October
The Sagamore stays at least partly open throughout the year, with room rates starting at $229 in summer, dropping to $179 in September and October, then bottoming out at $129 in winter, when I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jack Nicholson patrolling the halls with an ax.
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