Volume 45, Number 2 · February 5, 1998
Call of the Wild
By Bill McKibben
The Adirondacks: A History of America's First Wilderness
by Paul Schneider
Henry Holt, 368 pp., $25.00
Contested Terrain: A New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks
by Philip G. Terrie
The Adirondack Museum/Syracuse University Press, 223 pp., $26.95
If you snowshoe up Blue Mountain, which is more or less in the middle of the Adirondacks, you look out over the greatest wilderness in the East. I've lived in this wilderness most of my adult life, and yet every time I get up high I am startled by its rugged emptiness. You see lake and forest and ridge and then lake again, stretching out in every direction. The Adirondacks, a mixture of public and private land, cover six million acres, about a quarter of New York State. That makes it bigger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Parks combined, not to mention bigger than the state of Massachusetts, bigger than Connecticut, about the same size as Vermont but with one sixth the population. Along with the city five hours to the south, this park is one of the Empire State's two great gifts to the planet. In many ways it's the place where the world's sense of wilderness was born.
Review, 2954 words
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