Tupper Lake.

Tupper Lake started as a lumber town and never quite stopped being one. The mills that processed the central Park's spruce and hemlock are gone, but the layout of the village still reflects the railroad-and-river logistics that built it. It is the third corner of the Saranac–Placid–Tupper triangle that anchors the High Peaks region, larger by population than either of the other two, and noticeably less polished. That is part of the appeal.

The Wild Center is the gravitational draw, and deservedly so. The 115-acre natural-history campus opened in 2006 with a working otter habitat, river-otter and trout viewing, and the Wild Walk treetop boardwalk added in 2015. It is among the best regional natural-history museums in the eastern United States, and it is here, in a village of 3,500 people, because the founders understood that the central Adirondacks were the right place to tell the natural-history story.

Beyond the Wild Center, Tupper Lake is the launching point for some of the Park's deepest wilderness — the Bog River, the Five Ponds Wilderness, the Boreas Tract — the wild country that the High Peaks region's more famous villages are too far east to reach as easily. If you came to the Adirondacks to be inside them, this is one of the right villages to stay in.