11 Small Towns in the Adirondack Mountains that were Ranked Among US Favorites

The 1980 Winter Olympic ski jumps in Lake Placid still operate, the bobsled track at Mount Van Hoevenberg still offers public rides, and Saranac Lake's tuberculosis cure cottages still stand along the village's residential streets. The eleven towns ahead pull on those layered histories in different ways. One holds the country's longest-running winter carnival. Another anchors the resort run that brought the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers north in the 1880s. A third sits at the fort Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold took in a pre-dawn raid on May 10, 1775. Each town fits a different week of the year.

Tupper Lake

The Wild Center anchors Tupper Lake the way a lighthouse anchors a coastal town. Spread across 115 acres beside Raquette Pond, the natural history museum opened in 2006 and runs an elevated walkway called Wild Walk, a network of bridges and treetop platforms that rises into the canopy. Inside the main building, otters, porcupines, and ravens live in dedicated exhibits, and a glacial erratics garden traces the park's geology back about 12,000 years.

The town itself sits on a chain of three connected lakes, which gives paddlers a 16-mile route to Saranac Lake without portaging. Tupper Lake also runs the Adirondack Sky Center and Observatory, the only public observatory inside the park, with regular Friday-night viewing sessions in clear weather. About 3,500 people live here year-round, with a long winter and a busy short summer.

Lake Placid

Two Winter Olympics happened here. The 1932 Games introduced bobsled to the United States, and the 1980 Games produced the Miracle on Ice when the U.S. men's hockey team beat the Soviets. Most of the venues still operate. The Olympic Ski Jumping Complex runs summer training on artificial surfaces, and the bobsled track at Mount Van Hoevenberg offers public rides for about $100. The Lake Placid Olympic Museum, attached to the Olympic Center, holds Eric Heiden's five gold medals and Jim Craig's hockey stick.

Lake Placid the village actually sits on Mirror Lake, not Lake Placid itself, a confusion that catches every first-time visitor. Mount Marcy, the highest point in New York at 5,344 feet, is about 15 miles southeast as the crow flies, with the most popular trailhead at the Adirondak Loj on Heart Lake. Year-round population hovers around 2,200, but the village hosts the Ironman triathlon every July and a competitive figure skating circuit through the winter.

Champlain

Sitting six miles south of the Quebec border, Champlain is the last American town on Interstate 87 before the Canadian customs station at Lacolle. About 5,500 people live in the town, which includes the village of the same name and several hamlets along the Great Chazy River. French is the second-most-spoken language in the local schools.

The town predates the United States. Samuel de Champlain passed through the area in 1609, and French settlers built the first farmsteads in the 1740s before the French and Indian War scattered them. Today the Samuel de Champlain Memorial Lighthouse, finished in 1912 to mark the tercentenary of his exploration, stands at the southern edge of the lake in nearby Crown Point. Champlain village itself sits on the Great Chazy, not directly on Lake Champlain, a detail older guidebooks routinely get wrong.

Saranac Lake

Saranac Lake spent roughly seventy years as the country's leading tuberculosis treatment center. Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau opened the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in 1885, betting that cold mountain air, rest, and high-calorie meals would help patients recover. By the 1920s the village contained dozens of cure cottages with their distinctive screened porches, and patients included Robert Louis Stevenson, who wintered here in 1887 and 1888. Streptomycin ended the sanatorium era in the 1950s, but more than 150 of those cottages still stand, several restored as private homes.

The village runs the country's longest-running winter carnival, started in 1897 and built around an ice palace cut from the lake each February. The Saranac Laboratory Museum on Church Street, set inside Trudeau's original research building, holds the lab equipment and patient records that documented the discovery of how tuberculosis spread.

Lake George

Thomas Jefferson called the lake "the most beautiful water I ever saw" in a letter to his daughter Martha in May 1791, written during a tour he made with James Madison. The lake itself runs 32 miles north to south and reaches depths of nearly 200 feet, with water clear enough that divers can see shipwrecks from the French and Indian War on the bottom. Several sunken bateaux, deliberately scuttled by the British in 1758 to keep them out of French hands, are protected as the Submerged Heritage Preserves.

The village of Lake George sits at the southern tip with about 900 year-round residents. Fort William Henry, the British outpost made famous by James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, was rebuilt as a museum in 1953 on the original 1755 foundations. The lake steamer Minne-Ha-Ha, a paddlewheeler built in 1969, still runs daily cruises in summer.

Old Forge

Old Forge sits at the western entrance to the park and at the southern end of the Fulton Chain of Lakes, eight connected lakes that paddlers run end to end in two or three days. The Adirondack Scenic Railroad operates a tourist line out of the Old Forge station, restored from the original 1892 New York Central depot, with summer runs north to Carter Station.

Enchanted Forest Water Safari, opened in 1956 and expanded with the water park half in 1984, is New York's largest water theme park by ride count. The town gets serious snow. McCauley Mountain, a small community ski hill at the edge of the village, opened in 1947 and runs the Adirondacks' longest single chairlift at over a mile. Old Forge also claims the highest annual snowfall of any community in New York, averaging about 200 inches.

Speculator

Lake Pleasant and Sacandaga Lake meet at Speculator, giving the village two large warm-water lakes inside walking distance of the town center. About 320 people live here year-round, making it one of the smallest incorporated places on this list. The Camp-of-the-Woods conference grounds, founded in 1900 on Lake Pleasant, brought summer crowds long before the highway arrived.

The Mini-Route 66 attraction on Route 30 is the village's odd hook, a roadside collection of vintage signs, gas pumps, and Americana built up over decades by a local collector. The Oak Mountain ski area opened in 1948 on a 650-foot vertical drop, small by Adirondack standards but family-priced and locally owned. Speculator also marks the western entrance to the Siamese Ponds Wilderness Area, a 114,000-acre stretch with no roads and almost no development.

Ticonderoga

Fort Ticonderoga changed hands six times between 1758 and 1781. The most famous capture happened on May 10, 1775, when Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold took the fort from a sleeping British garrison in a pre-dawn raid. Henry Knox then hauled 59 of its cannon overland to Boston that winter, a 300-mile drag across frozen rivers that forced the British to evacuate the city in March 1776. The fort, abandoned after the Revolution and quarried for stone by local farmers, was restored beginning in 1909 by the Pell family and now runs as one of the country's oldest restoration museums.

The town of about 4,800 sits on the La Chute River, which drops 220 feet over three miles as it connects Lake George to Lake Champlain. Ticonderoga also hosts a Star Trek Original Series Set Tour, a full-scale reconstruction of the 1960s Enterprise bridge and corridors built by a local fan and opened to the public in 2016.

Lake Pleasant

The town of Lake Pleasant is the seat of Hamilton County, which is the least populated county in New York with about 5,100 residents spread across 1,800 square miles. There are no traffic lights in the entire county. Lake Pleasant village itself counts roughly 700 year-round residents and shares its lake with Speculator next door.

The town sits inside a ring of designated wilderness areas. Silver Lake Wilderness covers 105,000 acres to the south, West Canada Lake Wilderness 168,000 acres to the west, and Jessup River Wild Forest 47,000 acres to the east. The Northville-Placid Trail, a 138-mile through-hike that traces the spine of the park, passes through Piseco just west of Lake Pleasant and crosses the West Canada Lakes region on its way north. Local outfitters in town serve as the main resupply point for hikers running the full route.

Wilmington

Whiteface Mountain hosted the alpine skiing events for the 1980 Winter Olympics and still posts the largest vertical drop east of the Rockies, 3,430 feet from the summit at 4,867 feet down to the base lodge. The mountain runs lift-served skiing on the eastern slope and a separate gondola up Little Whiteface for sightseeing. A toll road, the Veterans Memorial Highway, climbs to within 300 feet of the summit, where a stone castle and elevator built into the rock take visitors the rest of the way up.

Wilmington itself sits in the West Branch Ausable River valley below the mountain. The Ausable, a federally designated trout stream, runs fly-fishing-only catch-and-release water through town, and the Hungry Trout Resort has anchored the fly-fishing scene since 1976. About 1,200 people live in the town year-round.

Queensbury

Queensbury anchors the southern gateway to the park and runs the largest population on this list, about 28,000, which technically stretches the "small town" label. The town surrounds the city of Glens Falls without quite touching it, the result of an unusual local arrangement that left Glens Falls a separate incorporated city in 1908. Most of the commercial development around Lake George funnels through Queensbury's Route 9 corridor.

Six Flags Great Escape and Hurricane Harbor, opened originally as Storytown USA in 1954, is one of the oldest theme parks in the country. SUNY Adirondack, the regional community college, draws about 3,800 students. Cole's Woods, a 100-acre town-owned forest in the middle of Queensbury, gives the population a network of cross-country ski trails inside the town limits, with lighting on the main loop for night skiing.

Where the Park Keeps Its Best

The Adirondack Park's six million acres make it the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States, but the towns inside it carry the actual story. Ticonderoga and Lake George hold the Revolutionary War record. Saranac Lake holds the tuberculosis-cure history. Lake Placid holds the Olympic legacy. Old Forge, Speculator, and Lake Pleasant hold the deep-woods quiet that drew the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers to build their Great Camps here in the 1880s. Each town fits a different week of the year, and none of them runs out of reasons to come back.