Blue Mountain Lake.

Blue Mountain Lake is, by geography, the dead center of the Adirondack Park. Stand at the public dock and you are equidistant from Lake George and Tupper Lake, from Lake Placid and Old Forge. The hamlet has a permanent population of well under two hundred. There is one general store, one real restaurant, one small lodging cluster, and one of the best regional museums in the United States.

The Adirondack Experience — formerly the Adirondack Museum, before the 2017 rebrand — sits on a hillside above the lake on twenty-three campus acres, with twenty-five buildings, a working blacksmith shop, the historic Marion River Carry steam locomotive, three log cabins moved from elsewhere in the Park, the Vanderbilt-era Bull Cottage, and one of the great American collections of Adirondack guideboats. It is the institution that defines the central Park's self-understanding. Visitors who come for an hour stay for half a day.

Blue Mountain itself, at 3,759 feet, is the regional summit. The trail is two miles each way, ends at a working fire tower, and gives the cleanest 360-degree view of the central Park anywhere. The Hedges, a Vanderbilt-cousin Great Camp on the lake's south shore, has run as a hotel since 1921 and is still operating. There is, in short, a startling amount of weight in this very small hamlet.