Forever Wild

As I drive around the Adirondacks without a canoe or kayak on the roof of my car, I feel like a woman without a hat at the Kentucky Derby. Everyone here is only traveling overland between stretches of water. And why not? The lazy oxbows, reedy inlets and braided channels of Adirondack rivers have been attracting paddlers since the Abenaki and Haudenosaunee people used them as transportation. And no river calls out more for a boat than the Raquette River, which Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of rowing up in his poem “The Adirondacks”:

“Winding through grassy shallows in and out, 

Two creeping miles of rushes, pads and sponge,

To Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons.”

I’m not surprised when, arriving at Follensby Pond myself to meet a group of scientists, I have the only car without a roof rack. Ravens have built a huge nest under the eaves of a grand but aging lodge that sits near the water’s edge, bat droppings adorn the boathouse entrance, and pine needles have nearly buried an overturned rowboat. This place served as timberland for over a hundred years and was privately owned by different families, but it still has a primeval feel. 

“John [the former owner] told me three things,” Tom Lake, its caretaker for 55 years, tells me. “‘I want the property logged. I want to make money. And don’t destroy the place.’ Well, I did all three.” The property was selectively logged over the years, and the preserved forest helped supply local rivers and ponds with clean water.

The 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, covering one-fifth of New York state, is the largest park in the lower 48 states. But it differs from national parks, like Yellowstone or Yosemite, and state parks, which are typically set aside for recreation or wildlife. Managed by two state agencies, the park has no gates or entry fees, and it’s peppered with small towns, farms, timberlands, businesses and hunting camps, all nestled among forests, mountains, rivers and lakes. All told it is one of the largest tracts of protected wilderness east of the Mississippi, and if it had a heart, it would be right about at Follensby Pond.

Follensby Pond is not really a pond, but rather a 102-foot-deep lake slightly larger than Central Park. For the local Haudenosaunee and Abenaki, it was a hunting area, accessed via canoe routes that traversed the Raquette River, the historic “highway of the Adirondacks.” Ralph Waldo Emerson followed that route on his own famous trip to the area in 1858, when he and a group of transcendentalist artists and thinkers visited the pond on a month-long camping excursion later dubbed “the Philosophers’ Camp.” A painting of the campers made their Follensby lakeshore campsite famous, and tourists sought it out until the 1890s, when a timber company bought the land. In private hands, it became a family retreat as well as timberland. Now, over a century later, the question for TNC was: What comes next?

When the Follensby property came up for sale, TNC’s Adirondacks team was already in the midst of another large land deal. At the time, economic forces were driving paper companies to sell off their logging properties at bargain prices—an enticing opportunity for land conservation. So, in 2007, TNC purchased 161,000 acres of former timberlands, structuring the deal so that some lands were ultimately sold to nearby communities for economic development, some were kept as sustainably forested timberlands, and the most unique and recreationally valuable were sold to the state.

Then, in 2008, The Nature Conservancy closed on the Follensby property. Just about everyone expected the organization to sell it to New York state to become part of the Adirondack Forest Preserve. But with the economy entering a recession, the state had no funds to buy another big parcel. Under no time pressure to transfer the land, TNC began studying it.

“The delay turned out to be fortunate,” says Peg Olsen, TNC’s Adirondacks director. “We put together a ‘brain trust’ to brainstorm about the vision for the property’s future. The science shaped our thinking.”

To start, TNC hosted a “bioblitz,” bringing 50 scientists—geologists, soil scientists, ecologists, fish experts—onto the land to survey its flora and fauna. What the science showed was that this property wasn’t just historically vaunted; it was ecologically significant. The lake in particular held a “functioning ecosystem that is almost as intact as they come,” says Michelle Brown. Brown is one of a literal boatload of TNC scientists who are showing me around Follensby Pond.

A loon dives into the dark water and bobs up; an osprey glides overhead. But one of the most notable creatures lurks unseen. This lake harbors a population of freshwater lake trout. And not just any lake trout—“old-growth” lake trout, according to past research led by McGill University. Because of the minimal fishing at Follensby, the trout have been able to grow older than similar trout might in other lakes.  

From the boat, Dirk Bryant, who directs land conservation for TNC in New York, is avidly watching ripple lines of white foam on the lake surface. An experienced angler, he tells me lake trout can be found underneath those bubbles. The trout’s length here can reach 2 to 3 feet; the record one here weighed 31 pounds. That’s a prized quarry for someone who has been obsessed with fishing since he was four. Yet Bryant loves the idea of keeping the pond and these fish protected.

“In the Iroquois constitution, the first thing we talk about is the natural world,” Dave Kanietakeron Fadden tells a group of students as I watch, “the things that keep us alive.”

Fadden is speaking at the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center in Onchiota, New York, about 30 miles northeast of Follensby Pond, to students from nearby Paul Smith’s College. Founded by his grandparents, the cultural center is packed with items illustrating the Indigenous presence in the Adirondack region: paintings, maps, pottery, baskets and beadwork, including a 75-foot-long beaded belt telling the story of the founding of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, confederacy. It was made by his grandfather, Ray, and is stunning in its intricacy.

Fadden tells me his father recalls when the Akwesasne (Mohawk) Indian Territory, about 60 miles northwest of Onchiota, was alive with the sound of mallets hammering the thin splints from ash logs that would be used in making baskets. But as their access to ash trees shrank, and many trees succumbed to the invasive emerald ash borer, those sounds have died away.

The Adirondacks have always been considered a shared resource by the Abenaki and Haudenosaunee, Neil Patterson Jr. tells me. Patterson is the executive director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, which is run out of the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

A 1794 treaty between the Six Nations and the fledgling United States sought to establish peace and affirm the land rights of the Native peoples—a clause largely ignored by the American government in later years. But the treaty, Patterson points out, guaranteed the Indigenous people “free use and enjoyment” of their lands.

“That’s a beautiful phrase,” he says. “It’s been a 200-year struggle, and only now are conservation organizations trying to tear down those walls to provide the free use and enjoyment.”

The Follensby Pond easement is the first in New York history to provide for Indigenous access to the land—supporting arts like basketry by allowing access to certain tree species, but also seeking to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into the scientific understanding of the freshwater preserve. The center, for example, worked with the Conservancy to plan an Indigenous-led biocultural bioblitz on the Follensby property.

The region, Patterson tells me, has always been “a place of exchange and trade and life together.” He sees reestablishing that connection to the land itself as critical.

Day two of the 2025 Adirondack Canoe Classic, a three-day race from Old Forge, New York, to Saranac Lake, is cold. It rains off and on, even though the year has been exceptionally dry and some sections of the Raquette River are shallow enough that paddlers must take turns. Still, enthusiasm is high. For nearly 40 years paddlers have raced these 90 miles with 10 miles of the river’s left bank closed to the public. Until now.

For the first time in a century, the left bank of the Raquette River is open to public uses like camping, hiking, or simply pausing amid a day of paddling.

The freshwater preserve, meanwhile, will have tightly managed public access, aimed at education, Peg Olsen tells me. The Conservancy is partnering with The Wild Center, an interactive museum in Tupper Lake, to develop ways to allow locals, history buffs and others to visit Follensby Pond in a low-impact way.

The Wild Center is a beautiful complex on land abutting the Follensby parcel. Just off the sunny lobby, I find a large tank full of lake trout and stop to admire them. They arrived on glacial meltwater 12,000 years ago and somehow they look it.

I meet Kerri Ziemann, program director for the center, at its cafe. We sit near windows overlooking a pond that laps peacefully at the museum’s exterior.

No one quite knows yet how managed public access in the freshwater preserve will work.

“We’re still figuring out what it looks like to keep a preserve, but to bring people in and offer understanding and appreciation,” Ziemann says. But she relishes the challenge.

“I see it being an intimate experience,” she adds.

“Intimate experience” is not a phrase typically associated with outdoor recreation. And yet, isn’t that what everyone wants? Indigenous people reconnecting with their ancestors, paddlers carving a path through the current, an angler feeling a tug on her line: Everyone is seeking an intimate connection to the natural world.

“Follensby is ecologically special, recreationally important, and historically relevant,” Michelle Brown told me. “It’s this coming together of culture and history and ecology.”

If the Follensby Pond parcel can offer intimate connection, while also being a refuge for climate-stressed species and a laboratory for furthering scientific understanding of freshwater ecosystems, that will be something very special—perhaps as special as this place itself.