Old Forge.

Old Forge sits at the western entrance to the Park, sixty miles north of Utica, at the southern terminus of the Fulton Chain of Lakes. The eight-lake chain — First through Eighth Lake, connected by short carries — is the central paddle of the western Adirondacks, the route the early-twentieth-century guides ran for the Adirondack League Club out-of-towners, and a credible weeklong canoe trip that ends at Raquette Lake.

The village is a working family-vacation town. Enchanted Forest / Water Safari, the regional waterpark, has run since 1956 and is the largest single visitor draw in the western Park. McCauley Mountain, the small ski area on the village's south side, runs in winter. The Strand Theatre on Main Street is a working independent cinema. Old Forge Hardware — a four-story emporium with the largest-by-square-footage hardware-and-everything-else inventory north of Albany — is, accurately, a destination of its own.

What Old Forge does that no other Adirondack region matches is family-vacation density. The waterpark, the lakes, the ice cream stands, the train rides, the mini-golf, the hardware store: all within walking distance, all built for kids, all running on a long summer season. It is the antithesis of the High Peaks region's austere wilderness aesthetic, and it has its own decades-long visitor loyalty. People come back here for generations.