Relais & Châteaux luxury hotels and restaurants provide the finest lodging and gourmet dining amid the unspoiled beauty of the “forever wild” Adirondacks. Your Route du Bonheur (road to happiness) in the Adirondacks includes extraordinary luxury and comfortable simplicity at either The Point or the Lake Placid Lodge. From the comfort of your resort at the Upper Saranac Lake or a lodge nestled in the Adirondack Mountains, your vacation might include:

 Gourmet picnic excursions from The Point
 Hiking the Adirondacks on the nation’s largest hiking trail system
 Private cabins or lakeside suites of the Lake Placid Lodge
 Day hikes through Adirondack fall foliage
 Touring French and Indian war museums
 Canoe, kayak, swim or fish in Lake Placid, the Upper Saranac Lake or any of the other ponds, lakes or miles and miles of rivers.

A Taste of Adirondack History

For more than a century The Adirondacks have served as a retreat for luminaries ranging from Teddy Roosevelt to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who helped set up the Philosopher’s Camp at Follensby Pond in 1858. And why not? With six million acres of mountains, lakes and forests, the Adirondack Park is the size of Vermont, bigger than Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Glacier National Parks combined. More than 2.6 million acres have been set aside to remain “forever wild”— places where even a tree can’t be cut without a vote.

Adirondacks Landscape

Many of the towns here seem locked in time, little more than general stores with apple bins and counters to hire fishing guides. Antiquing is a favored pastime. Fall colors are astonishing. To see the Adirondacks as the wealthy industrialists did a century ago, visit one of the great camps, rustic vacation compounds now serving as educational institutes or handsome lodges. More than anything, it is a place to shake off the stresses of everyday life in a basically untouched natural environment.

Luxury Lodging in the Adirondacks