The Adirondack Park: Forever Wild
Near Lake Placid, New York
Lake Placid sits near the heart of something genuinely vast, the Adirondack Park, the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States. The park covers roughly six million acres, an area larger than Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Parks combined. But it works unlike any national park you may know.
Inside its boundary, marked on maps by a single blue line, lies a patchwork of state owned wilderness and privately owned land, towns, farms, and homes, all mixed together. Roughly half is public forest preserve, and half is private. The park was created by New York State in eighteen ninety two.
Two years later, in eighteen ninety four, the state took an extraordinary step, writing into its constitution that the public forest lands here shall be kept forever wild, forever protected from logging and development. That phrase, forever wild, remains some of the strongest land protection language in the country, and changing it requires amending the state constitution itself. The park was born partly out of a practical worry, that clear cutting the mountains would ruin the watersheds feeding the Erie Canal and the Hudson River.
Today more than one hundred thousand people live inside the blue line year round, sharing their home with black bears, moose, loons, and millions of visitors.
