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The Nature Conservancy’s recent purchase of 26,500 acres consolidated some 195,000 acres of protected Adirondack wilderness and preserved
a long-lost canoe route.
Photo © Mark Godfrey
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By Bill McKibben / Photographs by Mark Godfrey
We stuck our canoes in the water at Round Lake—a name that tells you confoundingly little. There are Round lakes and Round ponds scattered across the Adirondack region; I can call to mind half a dozen without even looking at a map. There’s so unbelievably much water here that it must have exceeded the imaginative reserves of the early settlers. With few Indian names to draw on (Native Americans used the central Adirondacks as a summer hunting ground, not a permanent settlement), the first European arrivals were left to their own devices for designating roughly 3,000 lakes and ponds and countless rivers and streams. Hence Round. Also Clear. Also Mud. Also Fish.
But our trip, more precisely, began at the end of Round Lake at an old rock dam, started in 1892, that was designed to raise the level of the water in the spring so that lumbermen could flush a winter’s worth of logs down to the mill. The dam (which has made the lake anything but round) does in fact tell you something about this place: Though very wild, the land we’d be traveling for the rest of the week isn’t wilderness. People have used it, and in some cases used it hard, since the late 19th century. Perhaps you could say it’s in recovery now; perhaps that’s what this trip was really celebrating.
I was joined in my journey by the Frenette brothers, Jim and Bill. For me, the chance to paddle with the Frenettes was as sweet as the chance to paddle the newly conserved lands that would make our route possible. At ages 76 and 78, respectively, Jim (former head of the land zoning commission) and Bill (a former trustee of The Nature Conservancy’s Adirondack chapter) are nearly as much landmarks of this place as the mountains circling the lakes. After a lifetime of hunting, fishing, hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, dog sledding and otherwise reconnoitering this landscape, they were the best possible guides. Except for one thing: They kept disappearing over the horizon, their effortless tandem paddling pulling them steadily away from me in my solo boat.
We set out at noon, on a perfect high-summer day, big fair-weather clouds in a blue sky, a small wind at our backs as we went from Round Lake on to Little Tupper (named for being smaller than Tupper Lake, which was named for the surveyor who’d first mapped it). Little Tupper was long the summer home of the Whitneys, as in, for instance, Manhattan’s Whitney Museum. A few years ago the state finally managed to persuade the family matriarch to sell the lake so it could be added to the nearly 3 million acres of the Adirondack Forest Preserve lands—lands within Adirondack Park that were designated “forever wild” by the New York legislature in 1885. The remainder of the 6-million-acre park is private land, including small hamlets, timberlands, farms, homes and camps.
And loons. We were halfway down the lake when we noticed a collection of 11 large birds a little to our left. They looked like loons, but none of us had ever before seen them gather in such flotillas, except sometimes right before they migrate. They didn’t leave us guessing for long—they broke out into a cacophony of unmistakable tremolos and trills and stern laughter, the loon music that would inhabit our dreams each night of this journey. With their benediction at our backs, we paddled past the peninsula where a Whitney hunting camp, Camp Bliss, had been removed and the land allowed to return to forest, and then chased a decorous great blue heron down a short stream into Rock Pond (I can think of half a dozen Rock ponds, too), where we spent the night.
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