ADIRONDACK PARK

The author's party toils through a bony section of the Raquette River.

Gliding across the deep, lucid lake, Jim, a Registered Adirondack Guide, gave me a short history lesson on his beloved parkland. "It may come as a surprise," he said, nodding toward the majestic lakeside woods, "but the Adirondack forest you see today is, paradoxically, more beautiful than it was 100 years ago." Before an 1894 amendment to the New York State Constitution, guaranteeing that the lands of the Adirondack Forest Preserve "shall be forever kept wild," many of the area's mountainsides, river corridors, and lakeshores had been devastated by fires and clear-cutting or flooded by dams in order to float logs.

Time has healed many scars in the area, and to the casual eye it looks nearly pristine, but even Jim, an avowed Adirondack cheerleader, acknowledges that all is not perfect here. To quote local author Paul Jamieson, the Adirondacks remain "a slightly flawed paradise."

From an outsider's perspective, the "flaw" is obvious. Although 43 percent of Adirondack Park's six million acres is state-owned Forest Preserve (with more state lands being purchased every year), the remainder is in private hands. And there lies the rub. I was amazed to learn that a hundred or so small communities are nestled in the Adirondacks' deep mountain valleys. More than 130,000 people live full-time within the park's boundary; another 200,000 are seasonal residents. Overuse, overdevelopment, and "suburbanization" in the park continue to be controversial issues. But that was stuff to digest and discuss later. Or sooner.

Heading west through a narrow inlet spanned by an ornate bridge built in 1891, we entered small and narrow Eagle and Utowana Lakes, and here received our first taste of a distinct Adirondack anomaly. Sprinkled along more than a few privately owned lakes and shorelines in the park are Great Camps, as they have come to be known, the elaborate retreats of the extremely wealthy, some dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In front of these sprawling estates, with their multibuilding complexes of grand rustic design, are equally rustic and finely crafted boathouses that shelter some very expensive toys-from rare and meticulously maintained old wooden motorboats to quarter-million-dollar floatplanes. Curmudgeonly Cliff, expressing his disdain for these egregious intrusions on the shores of otherwise unspoiled lakes, groused that "there ought to be a law against this sort of thing." But he tempered his scorn upon noticing that most of the boathouses also contained fleets of perfectly maintained wood-canvas canoes. "Well, I guess the moneyed class isn't all bad," he conceded as we cruised by.

Civilization, such as it was, got left behind for the remainder of the day when a half-mile portage, or "carry" as they're known here, led us to the Marion River. The sluggish stream passed through wild meadow and marsh fringed by black spruce and tamarack.