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Adirondack Park
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The Adirondack Park is a located in northern New York State, some 300 miles from New York City. At six-million acres in size, the Adirondack Park is bigger than the State of Vermont. The Adirondack Park contains a checkerboard of publicly owned Forest Preserve lands (2.5 million acres), conservation easements owned by the state (250,000 acres), and private lands (3.2 million acres), of which 2.5 million acres are commercially managed forests, of which 1.3 million acres is owned by just 30 landowners. See map below.
The Forest Preserve is protected as lands “to be forever kept as wild forest” in the New York State constitution. This is the tightest wilderness protection in the U.S.; no timber harvesting, strict limits on motor vehicle use. Created in 1885, the Forest Preserve today represents 85 percent of the total wilderness lands in the eleven Northeast states.
The Adirondack Park is renown for its wild landscape of mountains, water and forests. The Adirondack Park has 46 peaks over 4,000 feet, eleven with rare alpine summit vegetation, and some 1,500 peaks over 1,000 feet. Water resources abound: 2,800 lakes and ponds, 35,000 miles of streams, over one million acres of wetlands. There are over 5.5 million acres of forests in the Adirondacks, of which 500,000 acres are eastern old growth.
This diverse landscape makes the Park a safety deposit box for biological diversity: fully 90 percent of all plant and animal species that exist in the Northeast U.S. are present in the Adirondacks. The Park is home to moose, cougars, lynx, bobcats, coyotes, black bears, wild turkeys, bald eagles, boreal birds, and has some of the highest beaver concentrations in the world.
The Adirondack Park is a model for people living amidst wild areas in a way that’s mutually beneficial to both. The Adirondack Park is home to 130,000 residents spread across 103 towns and villages. Land uses in the Adirondack Park are jointly managed by the State of New York Adirondack Park Agency (APA) and local governments. The APA's Land Use Plan sets zoning densities for the Park's private lands and classifies different units if the Forest Preserve. Fully one-half of the Park's private lands are zoned as Resource Management by the APA and allows a maximum of just one house everfy 42.7 acres.
What makes the Adirondack Park truly special is that it is the most accessible wild area in the U.S., within a half day’s drive of 75 million people. The Adirondack Park receives between 10-12 million visitors annually.
The Forest Preserve
The 2.5-million acre Adirondack Forest Preserve is the largest public, protected landmass east of the Mississippi, and north of the Everglades. The Forest Preserve underwrites the Adirondack economy, the quality of life in Adirondack communities, the Park’s treasured open space landscape, and protects a great range of ecosystems, habitats, and wildlife. The Forest Preserve protects the traditional Adirondack landscape of great forested open spaces dotted with rural communities.
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The Forest Preserve is protected under the New York State Constitution as "lands to be forever kept as wild forest lands" that cannot be logged, sold, leased or destroyed. This is the tightest wilderness protection in the U.S. and possibly the world. The Forest Preserve was created in 1885 and made "forever wild" in 1894 by voters who affirmed a new State Constitution that year. All who use the Forest Preserve today owe a debt to previous generations who have given us the view from Mount Marcy, the opportunity to hike the Seward Range, the canoe trip up the Oswegatchie, a paddle on Little Tupper Lake, and many many other great places to visit. They have given us immense forests and they have given us abundant wildlife.
Today, we face many opportunities to expand the Forest Preserve and to manage it in a way that so that future generations will it a place reliably wild and providing the same wild experiences for people in 2050 and 2150 that we enjoy today. The Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks (RCPA) advocates for Forest Preserve protection through research and fieldwork, by monitoring state agencies that manage the Forest Preserve and the policies they practice (the Adirondack Park Agency and Department of Environmental Conservation), grassroots organizing, and legal action.
In the first decade of the 21st Century, the Forest Preserve faces many challenges. This page of the website features information on some of the most pressing.
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