The 1960s were a little late for an argument over whether Lake George belonged in the Adirondack Park. A major extension of the Blue Line had enfolded that lake, which Francis Parkman once called the most beautiful in America, as early as 1931. But old men have long memories.
The Adirondacks are big and diverse. It is no wonder that notions about the true Adirondack experience vary widely with place, time, and person. Kenneth Durant, who was 83 at the time of his death in 1972, had spent the summers of his youth at a family camp on one of the headwater lakes of the Raquette River. Ironically, this area might have become the Lake George of the central Adirondacks if trends started by senior members of the Durant family had continued beyond the turn of the century and fallen into hands of less discrimination and taste.
