Schroon Lake.

Schroon Lake is what Lake George might have been if the railroad had not arrived in 1882: a working lakeside village of about a thousand people, with a single small main street, a town beach, and a summer economy that runs on church camps, second homes, and people who came up from the city looking for somewhere quieter than the southern shore. It is twenty-five miles north of Lake George by Route 9, and the difference in scale and tone is the entire point.

The Word of Life Inn — the conference center the Christian-evangelical organization has run on the lake since 1942 — is the largest single employer in the region and one of the things that has kept Schroon Lake on its quieter trajectory. The town also produces an enormously durable summer-stock theater, the Seagle Festival, which has trained working opera singers since 1915. That is unusual heritage for a village this size.

The lake itself is nine miles long, deep enough for serious lake-trout, and bordered by Pharaoh Mountain Wilderness on the east and Hoffman Notch Wilderness on the west — meaning state-protected wilderness on both shores. Severance Mountain on the lake's north end is one of the easiest small-summit hikes in the southern Park, popular with families. If Lake George is the showcase, Schroon Lake is the antidote.