The Adirondack Mountains (; a-də-RÄN-dak) are a massif of mountains in Northeastern New York which form a circular dome approximately wide and covering about . The region contains more than 100 peaks, including Mount Marcy, which is the highest point in New York at . The Adirondack High Peaks, a traditional list of 46 peaks over , are popular hiking destinations. There are over 200 named lakes, with the number of smaller lakes, ponds, and other bodies of water reaching over 3,000. Among the named lakes around the mountains are Lake George, Lake Placid, and Lake Tear of the Clouds. The region has over of river.
Although the mountains are formed from ancient rocks more than 1 billion years old, geologically, the mountains are relatively young and were created during recent periods of glaciation. Because of this, the Adirondacks have been referred to as "new mountains from old rocks." It is theorized that there is a hotspot beneath the region, which causes continued uplift at the rate of annually.
The Adirondack mountain range has such unusual characteristics compared to the area around it that it is divided into its own province within the Appalachian Highlands physiographic division. It is bounded by three other provinces - the St. Lawrence (Champlain) on the north, northeast; the Appalachian Plateau to the south, southwest; and the Valley and Ridge to the southeast.
The entire region lies within Adirondack Park, a New York state protected area of over . The park was established in 1892 by the state legislature to protect the region’s natural resources and to provide recreational opportunities for the public. It covers over 20 percent of New York state's land area.
Etymology
The word Adirondack is thought to come from the Mohawk word ha-de-ron-dah meaning "eaters of trees". The earliest written use of the name was in 1635 by Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert in his Mohawk to Dutch glossary, found in his Journey into Mohawk Country. He spelled it Adirondakx and said that it stood for Frenchmen, meaning the Algonquians who allied with the French. Another early use of the name, spelled Rontaks, was in 1729 by French missionary Joseph-François Lafitau. He explained that the word was used by the Iroquois as a derogatory term for groups of Algonquians who did not practice agriculture and therefore sometimes had to eat tree bark to survive harsh winters.
The Mohawks had no written language, so Europeans used various phonetic spellings of the word, including Achkokx, Rondaxe, and Adirondax. Such words were strongly associated with the region, but they were not yet considered a place name; an English map from 1761 labels the area simply Deer Hunting Country. In 1837, the mountains were named Adirondacks by Ebenezer Emmons.
Human history
Humans have lived in the region of the Adirondack Mountains since the Paleo-Indian period (15,000 to 7,000 BC), shortly after the last ice age. The first group to move into the area came south from the St. Lawrence River Valley and settled along the shores of the Champlain Sea around 13,000 BC. These Archaic period people, known as the Laurentian culture, were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers. Evidence for their presence in the Adirondacks includes a projectile point of red-brown chert found in 2007 at the edge of Tupper Lake.
Over the next 11,000 or so years, the region's climate slowly warmed, and forests began to replace the original tundra. Transitioning from the Archaic Period to the Woodland period, multiple different cultures— Sylvan Lake, River, Middlesex, Point Peninsula, and Owasco cultures— replaced the Laurentian culture over time. By the time of the Owasco culture, around 0 AD, maize and beans were being cultivated in the Adirondack uplands.
The first Iroquoian peoples, the Mohawk (or Kanyengehaga) and the Oneida (or Oneyotdehaga), arrived in the Adirondack region between 4,000 and 1,200 years ago. Both groups claimed the Adirondack Mountains as hunting grounds. According to Haudenosaunee historian Rick Hill, the region was considered a 'Dish with One Spoon,' symbolizing shared hunting resources between the groups. A group of Algonquian people, known as the Mahicans, also occupied the region, particularly the Hudson River Valley.
These were the groups that the first European explorers of the area encountered. European presence in the area began with a battle between Samuel de Champlain and a group of Mohawks, in what is now Ticonderoga in 1609. The Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues became the first recorded European to travel through the center of the Adirondacks, as the captive of a Mohawk hunting party, in 1642.
