From Westport on Lake Champlain is one of the favorite routes into the
Adirondacks. The name of this dark region originally came from the
Mohawks, who applied it in derision to the less fortunate savages that
inhabited the forbidding forests. The luxurious Mohawk, living in
fertile valleys growing plenty of corn, could see nothing for his
dusky enemy in this dismal wilderness to eat, excepting the dark
trees growing on its mountain sides, and therefore the Mohawk called
these people the Adirondacks, or "the bark and wood eaters." The
actual derivation of the word is thought to come from the Iroquois
root "atiron," meaning "to stretch along," referring to the mountain
chains. Starting from Westport, we penetrate the region by a steep
road into the Raven Pass, known as the "Gate of the Adirondacks,"
going through one of the ridges, among juniper bushes and aspen
poplars, and thus get to the pleasant valley beyond, where flows the
lovely Bouquet River. Here are a bunch of red-roofed cottages
surrounded by elms contrasting prettily with the green fields, with
boarding-houses and hotels interspersed, making up the village of
Elizabethtown, the county-seat of Essex, which is hereabout called
E-Town, for short. It spreads over the flat bottom of a fertile
valley, encompassed around by high mountains. Circling all over the
valley and yet concealed in deep gorges is the Bouquet River, which
flows out to Lake Champlain, near the Split Rock. To the westward
rises the sharp bare granite top of Mount Hurricane, nearly
thirty-eight hundred feet, and to the southwest the towering Giant of
the Valley, over forty-five hundred feet. Cobble Hill, rising two
thousand feet, closes up the western end of the main village street,
its ball-like top being a complete reproduction of a huge
cobble-stone. Out to the northward goes a wild mountain road, through
the Poke o' Moonshine Pass, leading to Ausable Chasm, twenty-three
miles away.
Travelling westward from E-Town, we mount the enclosing slope of the
Pleasant Valley, and through the gorge alongside Mount Hurricane, up
the canyon of the western branch of Bouquet River. Crossing the summit
among the granite rocks and forests, we then descend into another
long, trough-like valley, stretching as a broad intervale far away
both north and south, through which flows Ausable River. This
intervale includes the charming "Flats of Keene," the sparkling
Ausable waters meandering quietly over them beneath overhanging maples
and alders, quivering aspens and gracefully swaying elms, occasionally
dancing among the stones and shingle in some gentle rapid. Here are
farmhouses, with many villas, the great mountain ridges protecting the
valley from the wintry blasts. This intervale has in the eastern ridge
the Giant of the Valley, with Mount Dix alongside, rising nearly five
thousand feet, and to the southward, reared thirty-five hundred feet,
exactly at the meridian, is the graceful Noon Mark Mountain, which
casts the sun's noon shadow northward over the centre of the "Flats of
Keene." The river, coming from the south, flows out of the lower
Ausable Lake or the Long Pond, and dashes swiftly down its
boulder-covered bed. Its waters are gathered largely from the eastern
flanks of Mount Tahawus, and also from the galaxy of attendant
peaks--Dix, Noon Mark, Colvin, Boreas, the Gothics, and
others--grandly encircling the southern head of the attractive Keene
Valley. The Ausable River rises under the brow of Tahawus, and flowing
through the two long and narrow Ausable Lakes at two thousand feet
elevation, traverses the whole length of the Keene Valley northward,
to unite with its western branch at Ausable Forks, and thence goes
through the great chasm to Lake Champlain. The head of the Keene
Valley with the adjacent mountain slopes, extending through parts of
three counties and covering a tract of forty square miles, is the
"Adirondack Mountain Reserve." This reservation gives complete
protection to the fish and game, and also preserves the forests and
sources of the water supply. The Lower Ausable Lake is about two miles
long and the Upper Ausable Lake nearly the same length, there being
over a mile's distance between them. Some of the highest and most
romantic of the Adirondack peaks environ these lakes. The sharply-cut
summit of Mount Colvin rises forty-one hundred and fifty feet
alongside them. The Ausable Lakes are in the bottom of a deep cleft
between these great mountains, their sides rising almost sheer, two
thousand feet and more above them. The lake shores are steep and rocky
walls, reared apparently to the sky, the deep and contracted cleft
making the lakes look more like rivers, surmounted high up the rocks
by overhanging foliage, the trees diminutive in the distance. Of the
Upper Ausable Lake, Warner writes that "In the sweep of its wooded
shores, and the lovely contour of the lofty mountains that guard it,
this lake is probably the most charming in America."