Adirondack Great Camps: A Guide to the Surviving Lodges

A Great Camp is a compound, not a single lodge: separate buildings for sleeping, dining, boats, ice and staff, set around a main house. The buildings use native materials, such as peeled logs, bark siding, stone and local timber, and the camps were built to hold large parties of guests and the staff who looked after them. Their design drew on Swiss chalets, Japanese architecture and the Arts and Crafts movement, adapted to the Adirondack woods.

Great Camp Sagamore, near Raquette Lake, was built by William West Durant in 1897 and sold to Alfred Vanderbilt in 1901. All 27 of its original buildings still stand, and it is a National Historic Landmark run by the Sagamore Institute. Overnight guests stay in the camp buildings as part of multi-day programs, with family-style meals, history tours and guided paddles, so a stay is closer to a retreat than a hotel visit. Reservations are required and fill well ahead.

White Pine Camp, on Osgood Pond in Paul Smiths, was built in 1907 for the New York businessman Archibald White and served as President Calvin Coolidge's summer White House in 1926. The compound includes a Japanese teahouse, a bowling alley, a tennis house and two boathouses, and its 13 cabins and cottages are rented to overnight guests. Guests rent whole cabins, not single rooms, so it suits groups and families, and summer stays are mostly by the week.

The Point was built about a century ago for William Avery Rockefeller II, from native timber and stone, on Upper Saranac Lake. It now has 11 individually named rooms, and the rate is all-inclusive, covering meals, wine and activities. Nearby on the same lake, The Wawbeek, a former Great Camp resort from the 1880s, has been sold as a private residence and no longer takes guests.

The Hedges began in 1880 as the summer retreat of Civil War colonel Hiram Duryea, opened as a resort in 1921 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. It is smaller and less formal than Sagamore or White Pine Camp: cottages line the shore of Blue Mountain Lake, meals are served in the main lodge, and the Adirondack Experience museum is a short drive away.

Most Great Camps that take guests have short seasons, often from late spring to early fall, and few rooms, so summer stays at Sagamore and White Pine Camp need booking months ahead. Expect shared spaces, communal meals, limited cell service and no televisions. For a similar setting in a conventional lodge, The Lodge at Lake Clear, built in 1886 and still run by the same family, and Covewood Lodge, a 1924 Great Camp-style complex on Big Moose Lake, take overnight guests.