Brant Lake.

Brant Lake is a small lake — six miles long — fifteen minutes north of Lake George, and it has had an outsize role in American summer-camp history for over a century. Brant Lake Camp for Boys, founded in 1916, is one of the oldest continuously operating private summer camps in the Northeast. Point O'Pines for Girls, on the same lake, was founded in 1957 and is similarly long-running. Several other camps ring the lake — Mistletoe Lake Lodge, Camp Pine Forest, the Brant Lake Sailing Club — and the eight-week summer rhythm of bunk reunions, color war, and Friday-night campfires has shaped the region's character more than any other single industry.

The permanent population is small. Outside camp season, Brant Lake is a quiet residential lake with a single small commercial cluster on Route 8 — the Brant Lake Inn, the Daby store, the public beach. The shoreline is mostly camp property, second homes, and undeveloped state land. There is no resort. The visitor economy is largely parents at drop-off and pick-up, plus a small but loyal contingent of camp alumni who time their Adirondack trips to overlap with the camps' summer schedules.

If Schroon Lake is the antidote to Lake George's scale, Brant Lake is the antidote to Schroon Lake's scale. It is a place to know that you know about, and a place where the camps run in unbroken multi-generation tradition.