Adirondack Park

The Adirondack Park includes New York's Forest Preserve in Upstate New York, United States. The park's boundary corresponds to the Adirondack Mountains. Unlike most preserves, about 52 per cent of the land is privately owned. This area contains 102 towns and villages. The year-round population is 132,000, with 200,000 seasonal residents. The inclusion of human communities makes the park one of the great experiments in conservation in the industrialized world.

The park's 6.1 million acres (2.5×10^⁶ ha) include more than 10,000 lakes, 30,000 miles of rivers and streams, and a wide variety of habitats including wetlands and old-growth forests.

History

For the history of the area before the formation of the park, see The History of the Adirondack Mountains.

Early tourism

Before the 19th century the wilderness was viewed as desolate and forbidding. As Romanticism developed in the United States, the view of wilderness became more positive, as seen in the writings of James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.