Hiking the Adirondacks (Pharaoh Lake Wilderness)

Spoiler Alert: Adirondack is more than just a style of chair!

Among the many joys of traveling the country is finding new places to hike, and when time and terrain allow, we love to indulge ourselves in this activity, one of our favorite pastimes. We got such an opportunity while staying in Ticonderoga, located in Upstate New York, inside the confines of The Adirondack Park. With the boundary set by the Adirondack Mountains, the park includes New York’s Forest Preserve, and unlike most preserves, about 52% of the land is privately owned. The area contains 102 towns and villages, with a year-round population of 132,000 and an additional 200,000 seasonal residents. The park encompasses 6.1 million acres with more than 10,000 lakes, 30,000 miles of rivers and streams, and a wide variety of habitats including wetlands and old-growth forests. We spent just one day hiking a very small part of this vast expanse, exploring a trail in the Pharaoh Lake Wilderness on the Putnam Pond Trail. A mostly gentle walk through the woods, we passed ponds, thick forests, interesting plant life, and met a few weekend pack-backers along the way. As so often happens, we weren’t here nearly long enough to thoroughly explore the area – so many trails, so little time! But we are always grateful for even a small sampling of the beauty of places such as this.

Now here’s the rest of the story on the Adirondack chair: Around 1903 Thomas Lee, searching for comfortable outdoor furniture for his country cottage in Westport, New York, near the Adirondack Mountains, came up with the prototype of this style of chair. According to legend, Lee created several iterations of his chairs made out of just eleven pieces of knot-free wood, all from the same tree. His family tested each chair, and ultimately decided upon the gentle recline and wide armrests of what we now know as the Adirondack chair. And as they say…the rest is history!