Welcome to the Adirondacks in St. Lawrence County
St. Lawrence County, the largest County by area in New York State, contains approximately 623,500 acres of the six-million-acre Adirondack Park. Within the Adirondack Park portion of St. Lawrence County, approximately 376,450 acres are accessible by the public to some degree throughout the year. These lands contain beautiful waterfalls, free-flowing lakes, rivers and reservoirs, hunting, fishing, boating, snowmobiling, virgin forest tracts, mountaintop wilderness vistas, and a variety of special habitats that will delight both the amateur and professional naturalist. Supporting the use of this great resource base are small communities with friendly people and needed services.
What is the Purpose of This Guide?
The northwestern portion of the Adirondacks is indeed beautiful but it is lightly used in comparison to areas such as the High Peaks. We hope that this guide will give you a sense of the resources here and make it easier for you to come and visit. In recent years New York State has been able to acquire lands in fee (outright purchase) and also easements (specific rights such as for public access or development) on thousands of acres of forest land. This has created a greatly expanded public resource; however, determining when you as a member of the public may enter these lands and what you are allowed to do once there has not been so straightforward. The goal of this guide is to comprehensively describe the permitted uses for all publicly-accessible lands and waters, to note the available food, fuel, lodging and emergency services and to list additional information resources for specific areas. In short, this guide should address the basic questions about how to get here, what to do, where to obtain needed services and what do in case of emergencies.
The Guide is available for download in PDF-format here with clickable links to topics and maps in its Table of Contents. Please note that the document is approximately 9 MB in size, so please allow appropriate time for downloading depending on your internet data transfer speed.
This project has been funded in major part by a grant from the New York State Environmental Protection Fund through the Adirondack Park Community Smart Growth Program of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
