To the westward is the water system of the Raquette River, leading to the St. Lawrence; this stream, the chief one in the district, flowing out of Raquette Lake. This lake is irregularly shaped, about ten miles long, and surrounded by low hills, its elevation being nearly eighteen hundred feet. The dense forests that are adjacent teem with game, and its hotels and private camps are among the best in the region, "Camp Pine Knot" being especially famous as the most elaborate and attractive of its kind in America. Blue Mountain rises to the eastward nearly thirty-eight hundred feet, and at its southwestern base is the Blue Mountain Lake, having on its southern edge the small Eagle Lake, where lived in a solitary house called the Eagle's Nest the noted "Ned Buntline," the author. To the southwest of Raquette are the chain of eight Fulton Lakes. North of Raquette are the Forked Lakes, and northeast of it, following down the Raquette River, Long Lake, which is fourteen miles long and barely a mile wide in the broadest part, having Mount Seward rising at its northern end. To the northwest, still following down the Raquette, are the Tupper Lakes. These are a few of the larger lakes in this labyrinth of water courses, there being hundreds of smaller ones; and, as the forest and water ways extend northwest, the land gradually falls away towards the great plain adjoining the St. Lawrence. These regions, however, are remote from ordinary travel, and the western Adirondack forests are rarely penetrated by visitors excepting in search of sport.
This wonderful region has only during recent years attracted general public attention as a great sanitarium and summer resort, but its popularity constantly increases. Its dark and forbidding mountains have become additionally attractive as they are better known, probably for the reason, as John Ruskin tells us, that "Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery." Its universal woods and waters have a resistless charm. As one wanders through the devious pathways, or glides over the glassy surface of one of its myriad lakes, the vivid coloring and richness of the plant life recall Thomson, in the Seasons:
"Who can paint
Like Nature? Can imagination boast
Amid its gay creation hues like her's?
Or can it mix them with that matchless skill,
And lose them in each other, as appears
In every bud that blows?"
But after all, the great Adirondack forests, vast and trackless, much of them in their primitive wildness, are to the visitor possibly the grandest of the charms of this weird region. The "Great North Woods" still exist as the primeval forest on many square miles of these broad mountains and deep valleys, recalling in their solitude and grandeur William Cullen Bryant's Forest Hymn:
"The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned