The Adirondacks and Forever Wild

The Adirondack Park is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States. It covers about six million acres, which is more than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier and Great Smoky Mountains combined. It is also, unlike any of those, about half private land, with towns and farms and businesses inside its boundary.

Why it was protected

The argument that created it was not principally about scenery. New York protected the Adirondacks because the state was worried about water.

Logging had stripped large areas of the mountains by the 1870s, and the surveyor Verplanck Colvin, among others, argued that the cutting was drying up the streams that fed the Hudson and, more to the point, the Erie Canal. A state that depended on the canal for its commerce could not afford an unreliable water supply. The Forest Preserve was created in 1885 on that reasoning, and the Adirondack Park followed in 1892, its boundary drawn on the map in a blue line that still gives the region its shorthand name.

Forever wild

Protection by statute could be undone by statute, and it very nearly was. In 1894 a constitutional convention wrote the preserve into the state constitution itself, in what is now Article XIV:

The lands of the state, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the forest preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. They shall not be leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or private, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed or destroyed.

This is a stricter protection than any national park enjoys. Changing it requires a constitutional amendment, passed by two separately elected legislatures and then approved by the voters. Amendments have passed, for highways and reservoirs and a few land exchanges, but each one has had to be argued in public, and most proposals fail.

The mountains

The High Peaks region holds forty-six summits over four thousand feet by the traditional count, the highest being Mount Marcy at 5,344 feet. Climbing all forty-six is a recognised pursuit with its own club, dating from the 1920s.

Lake Placid, in the middle of them, has held the Winter Olympics twice, in 1932 and 1980, one of a very small number of places to do so. The 1980 games are remembered chiefly for a hockey match, but the bobsleigh run built for 1932 on Mount Van Hoevenberg was the first in North America and is the reason the village became a winter sports centre at all.