Saranac Lake and Paul Smith's VIC

Saranac Lake is the village on Lake Flower that grew up around the tuberculosis cure, and Paul Smith's College runs a public nature center with more than 25 miles of trails on NY 30, about 13 road miles north of it. From the cabins the college's Visitor Interpretive Center, the VIC, is about 30 road miles south and downtown Saranac Lake about 43. The two make one easy day out: boardwalks over a marsh and a bog in the morning, then the village's museums and lakes in the afternoon.

Getting there from the cabins

Take County Route 25 to NY 30 and follow NY 30 south for about 23 miles, past Meacham Lake, to the VIC at 8023 NY 30. That is about 30 road miles, roughly 45 minutes. Less than a mile farther on, NY 86 leaves NY 30 at Paul Smith's College and runs about 12 miles southeast to Berkeley Green, the small park at the corner of Broadway and Main Street in the middle of Saranac Lake. The whole drive to the village is about 43 road miles, about an hour.

The St. Regis Mountain trailhead on Keese Mills Road is 3.7 road miles from the VIC, and Lake Placid is about nine road miles past Saranac Lake, mostly on NY 86, and 52 from the cabins. Watch for deer after dark, and in snow read the winter driving guide before you go.

Paul Smith and his hotel

Apollos Austin Smith, known as Paul, was born in Vermont in 1825. At 16 he went to work on the canal boats that ran between Albany and Montreal. He ran a small inn at Loon Lake, northeast of Paul Smiths, before a loan from one of his guests let him buy land on Lower St. Regis Lake in 1858. He married Lydia Martin in 1859, and a few weeks later, in May, the two of them opened a hotel with 17 rooms. The Loon Lake guide covers the hamlet where he started.

Paul Smith's Hotel grew into a five-story building with 255 guest rooms, quarters for 60 guides, a boathouse, a casino and a bowling alley. Three U.S. presidents stayed there, among them Calvin Coolidge and Grover Cleveland, and so did P. T. Barnum with his family and New York's governor Alfred Smith. The family business spread to a railroad, a telephone company and a regional electric company. Lydia died in 1891 and Paul in 1912. Their son Phelps ran the hotel until September 5, 1930, when an electrical short started a fire that destroyed the wooden building. Its 75 guests got out.

Phelps Smith left most of his estate to found a college in his father's name, and in 1937 his will set it up on the hotel grounds. Paul Smith's College opened in 1946 with a first class of 150 men and women, largely World War II veterans and local high school graduates, studying forestry and resort management. It is still the only college granting bachelor's degrees inside the six-million-acre Adirondack Park. A William G. Pomeroy Foundation marker, put up on campus at 7777 NY 30 in 2023, marks where the hotel stood.

The hotel is also where Saranac Lake's story starts. In May 1873 a young New York doctor, Edward Livingston Trudeau, sick with tuberculosis, went up to Paul Smith's, which he knew from an earlier trip to the Adirondacks. He came back the next summer with his wife and their small children, and that fall he decided to stay through the winter. The hotel usually closed at the end of October, and no outsider had ever spent a winter on St. Regis Lake. Paul and Lydia Smith said no at first, and Lydia agreed only reluctantly; before the winter was over the Trudeaus had come to love her. In November 1876 his family joined him in Saranac Lake, and the village's history runs from there.

Coolidge's summer White House

In 1926 President Calvin Coolidge spent the summer at White Pine Camp, a group of cabins on Osgood Pond in Paul Smiths, and the camp became his summer White House. It is private lodging today, with 13 cabins and cottages, a Japanese teahouse on a tiny island reached by a 300-foot wooden bridge, and a vintage bowling alley the president used himself. The camp is at 432 White Pine Road, about 34 road miles from the cabins; its cabins are let to overnight guests, so contact it before you drive in.

The Paul Smith's College VIC

The Visitor Interpretive Center opened in 1989, built by the state's Adirondack Park Agency on land owned by the college. In 2010 Governor David Paterson's budget proposed closing both of the state's visitor centers, and on December 31, 2010, the agency turned the building and its outbuildings over to Paul Smith's College, which reopened the center in the summer of 2011. The main building has 24,500 square feet, with a 158-seat hall, exhibit and classroom space, a nature museum and an art gallery. In its first 21 years the staff guided nearly 75,000 students on school field trips.

The property covers 3,000 acres, with more than 25 miles of trails used for hiking, nature watching, fishing, lean-to camping, canoeing and, in winter, skiing and snowshoeing. The trails are open from dawn to dusk every day and are free outside the ski season. In fall 2026 the lodge is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday through Monday; check the VIC's website before you go. Dogs are welcome on a leash all year; sign in at the center and clean up after them. The Breck Chapin Native Species Butterfly House opens from Memorial Day to Labor Day, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and has closed for the season by October.

The trails

For a first visit, walk Barnum Brook out to its overlook and then go around the Heron Marsh loop, about 3.6 miles together, with a few moderate hills. Add the Boreal Life loop if you have another hour; its boardwalk crosses Barnum Bog, the best place on the property to see tamaracks, the conifer that turns gold and drops its needles in fall. Jenkins Mountain is the one long walk, with about 900 feet of climbing, so start it in the morning. Stop in at the lodge for current trail conditions; the trail map is on the college's website.

Programs in October 2026

The VIC runs guided walks and classes through the fall. Its October 2026 calendar lists a nature walk through the bog and boreal forest on the Boreal Life trail on October 11, from 1 to 3 p.m.; a tour of the Elder Grove, white pines that started growing in 1675, on October 18, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.; and a tree identification class on October 23, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Programs change, so check the VIC's calendar before you plan around one.

In winter

From about December 1 to April 1 the trails are groomed for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, and you need a day or season pass from the center. The cross-country skiing and snowshoeing guide covers the passes, the rentals and the other ski centers nearby. The St. Regis Mountain guide covers the fire-tower climb a few minutes up the road.

Lunch at the college

Paul Smith's students cook and serve the meals at The Ganzi, the college's training restaurant in Cantwell Hall. It reopened for the fall 2026 semester on Wednesday, September 16, with a three-course tasting menu on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, seated at 11:30 a.m., noon and 12:30 p.m., for $19.10 a person. Book a seat through the college's online reservation system. The schedule follows the school year, so check it for your dates; on other days, pack lunch at the cabin or eat in Saranac Lake.

The campus sits on Lower St. Regis Lake, the water Paul Smith built his hotel beside. The Saint Regis Canoe Area guide covers the public launches there and the ponds and carries to the west.

Bloomingdale Bog

Bloomingdale Bog, between Paul Smiths and Saranac Lake, is one of the largest bogs in northern New York, and a level path runs straight through it on an old railroad bed. The line was the Chateaugay Division of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, which connected Plattsburgh with Saranac Lake. The path is a raised bed of sand, dirt and gravel, easy walking above the wet ground, so you can go as far as you like and turn back.

There are two ways in. The south parking area is on NY 86, about 1.4 miles north of the village hospital, Adirondack Medical Center, and about 2.8 road miles from Berkeley Green; from there the path first skirts a small marsh and a beaver pond. The north parking area is off County Route 55, the Bloomingdale-Gabriels road, about 8 road miles from the VIC. Bigelow Road, a dirt road closed to traffic, crosses the bog in between.

Birders come for the boreal species: Canada jays, boreal chickadees and black-backed woodpeckers, which turn up most often around Bigelow Road. More than 100 kinds of birds have been recorded along the trail, and dozens of wildflowers and shrubs, among them cottongrass, leatherleaf and Labrador tea. The marsh at the south end draws red-winged blackbirds, wood ducks, American bitterns and green herons. Bring binoculars from home; the cabins do not list any. In summer the mosquitoes and deer flies can be fierce.

How Saranac Lake grew

Jacob Smith Moody, the first permanent settler, arrived in 1819. In 1827 the Saranac River was dammed to run a sawmill, which Captain Pliny Miller built, and the millpond behind the dam became Lake Flower. It took the name later, in honor of Governor Roswell P. Flower, who helped pay to clear the stumps out of it. The Works Progress Administration rebuilt the dam at Main Street in 1937 and 1938; the federal program paid $22,000 for the labor and the village put in $1,000.

The cure made the village. Trudeau settled here in 1876 and in 1884 opened the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium. Late that fall the first two patients arrived, sisters named Alice and Mary Hunt, factory workers from a crowded tenement, worn out after a 42-mile ride from Ausable Forks. The first cottage, Little Red, was not finished until February 1, 1885: one room, 14 by 18 feet, with a wood stove, two cots and a porch so small that only one patient could sit out at a time. Trudeau remembered it costing about $400, money a Mrs. Jenks of Philadelphia gave. In 1894 came the Saranac Laboratory, the first laboratory in the United States built to study tuberculosis.

By the turn of the twentieth century the village had the sanatorium, a dozen busy hotels and hundreds of private homes taking in patients, the cure cottages. The heart of a cure cottage was its porch, where a patient could sit out, and better yet sleep out, in the fresh air. Around 1980 one of Historic Saranac Lake's first projects, a survey of the village's cure cottages, found more than 700 of them. The sanatorium, renamed for Trudeau after his death in 1915, closed in 1954, after effective antibiotics for tuberculosis arrived.

Research stayed. In 1964 a new laboratory opened under Trudeau's grandson, Dr. Frank Trudeau, on land given by Edmond Guggenheim; it is now the Trudeau Institute, which studies how the immune system fights infection. That year Gutzon Borglum's 1918 bronze of Trudeau, seated as a patient with a blanket folded on his lap, moved from the sanatorium to the institute. Its pedestal carries the doctor's favorite motto, "Guérir quelquefois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours": to cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always. The old sanatorium grounds, with their 29 buildings, went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 and are being redeveloped as Trudeau Village, with homes and businesses.

The cure museums and tours

Start at Historic Saranac Lake's museum campus, at the corner of Main and Church streets. One half is the Saranac Laboratory, Trudeau's 1894 lab at 89 Church Street, with exhibits on the cure, the science and the care of patients. The other half opened on August 15, 2026: the restored Trudeau Building at 118 Main Street, where three generations of Trudeau doctors practiced medicine, the great-grandfather, grandfather and father of the Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau. Its eight rooms on two floors cover hunting, logging, guiding, the great camps, the grand hotels, the railroad and the Adirondack Park, with exhibits built for children too, and it has a new research room. The campus is open all year, Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. At the 2026 opening, admission was $12, or $10 for students and seniors, and children under 8 got in free. The shop sells books on the village's past. Reservations are recommended but not required; the number is 518-891-4606.

The museum and the chamber of commerce hand out Historic Saranac Lake's walking tour map, which you can also download, for a self-guided loop past the village's historic buildings. In summer the group also leads tours of its historic sites, with a few by appointment the rest of the year. Its guided downtown walking tour leaves at 10:30 a.m. from the Riverside Park bandshell, at Main and River streets, and ends at the museum; tickets have been $10, with children and members free, on the dates the group posts online. By appointment it opens the cabin where the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók spent the last summer of his life. Its online encyclopedia of local history runs to more than 6,000 pages if you want to look up a house before you walk past it.

The Robert Louis Stevenson Cottage

In early October 1887 Robert Louis Stevenson came to Saranac Lake to be treated by Trudeau. He brought his wife, Fanny, his mother, Margaret, his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, and the family's maid, Valentine Roch, and they lived until April 1888 in the cottage of Andy and Mary Baker; Andy was a local guide. That winter Stevenson wrote a series of essays for Scribner's Magazine, among them "The Lantern-Bearers," "Pulvis et Umbra" and "A Christmas Sermon." He wrote most of The Master of Ballantrae, worked with Osbourne on The Wrong Box, and wrote a poem called "Winter," though he complained that he had to set his inkwell by the fire to thaw it. He and Baker used to slip out the back and through the woods to skate on Moody Pond, and the road to the cottage became Stevenson Lane.

The cottage at 44 Stevenson Lane is now a museum, the world's first site given to Stevenson, kept up by volunteers. It holds his infant cap, his last pen, the desk he used in bed, a handkerchief spotted with blood, his ice skates, his riding boots and his sailing gear. The mantel still carries burns from his chain-smoking. The cottage opens for walk-in visits from July 1 to October 15, Tuesday through Sunday, 9:30 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4:30 p.m.; from October 16 to June 30 you visit by appointment, at 518-891-1462. Admission is $10, and children 12 and under are free. Hours can change, so call ahead near the end of the season. The cottage is about 0.7 road miles from Berkeley Green.

Main Street and Broadway

Berkeley Green, at Broadway and Main, holds the bell that finishers of the Saranac Lake 6er ring; that guide covers the outdoor store and the breakfast places around the green. Origin Coffee Co. at 77 Main serves breakfast and lunch from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sunday.

The Hotel Saranac at 100 Main Street opened in 1927 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its restaurant, Campfire, works from a seasonal menu built on local food. The bar sits in the Great Hall, a room designed in the style of a 14th-century Italian palazzo, after the Davanzati Palace in Florence, and it has live music on Friday nights; the village's music calendar listed every Friday in October 2026.

The Saranac Lake Free Library at 109 Main Street is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Its Adirondack Research Room is free to researchers, Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a half hour closed for lunch at 1, and the archivist recommends an appointment. It holds about 3,500 glass plate negatives, 4,500 catalogued photographs, 1,200 lantern slides and more than 2,500 Adirondack postcards, along with a Robert Louis Stevenson collection and George Marshall's Adirondack collection.

The Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation has a visitor center and gift shop at 75 Main Street, with exhibits on the loons of the park's lakes and the work to protect them; its hours change with the season, so check before you go. At 52 Main, the Adirondack Artists' Guild has run a cooperative gallery for more than 25 years, with up to 15 local member artists at a time. Its summer and fall hours have been 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, with Mondays closed after Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Broadway's storefronts include Barefoot Peddler Antiques and the Sugar Shack candy shop, and Bitters and Bones at 65 Broadway is a tavern with local and regional beer on tap. Blue Line Brewery, out on Lake Flower Avenue, serves its beer with pizza. The farmers' market fills Riverside Park, at Main and River streets, on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.; in 2026 its last market is October 10. Hours change with the season, so check before you count on a meal.

The Adirondack Carousel

The Adirondack Carousel in William Morris Park, at 2 Depot Street, opened in 2012 on land the village gave in 2006. Dozens of volunteer carvers from across the country made its figures, and the animals come from the park itself: otters, moose, bears, loons, deer and even black flies. A Chris-Craft boat chariot holds a wheelchair. Its posted hours are noon to 5 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, closed Monday through Wednesday, with 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Columbus Day.

Lake Flower and Lower Saranac Lake

Lake Flower covers 202 acres and is shallow, with a mean depth of 5 feet. The state boat launch is on River Street, and the lake makes an easy morning or afternoon paddle from there. Each February the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival builds its ice palace beside the launch; the 2027 carnival begins February 5, and the carnival guide has the week.

Lower Saranac Lake, west of the village, is about eleven times the size: 2,214 acres with a mean depth of 28 feet, scattered with islands. The state runs the Saranac Lake Islands Campground there, with campsites reached only by boat. A flat-water paddle of about four miles from the State Bridge boat launch to the Ampersand Bay access takes three to five hours, and Bluff Island, the Little Twins and the Sister Islands are kept for day use. Mark Twain spent the summer of 1901 at a cabin on this lake with his family, and Albert Einstein often visited Knollwood, a camp on its shore owned by a group of families. Upstream, hand-operated locks lift boats between Lower and Middle Saranac Lake.

The cabins do not list boats. St. Regis Canoe Outfitters on Dorsey Street and Adirondack Lakes and Trails Outfitters on Church Street, across from Lake Flower, rent canoes and kayaks in the village, and the Meacham Lake guide covers the big lake closer to the cabins.

The Adirondack Rail Trail

The old railroad between Lake Placid and Tupper Lake is now the Adirondack Rail Trail, 34 miles of path through Saranac Lake, finished in the fall of 2025 at a cost of nearly $40 million. It is free and open all year to walkers, cyclists, cross-country skiers and snowmobiles, with a shallow grade, a wide tread and a firm surface meant to work for people with disabilities. From the village it is about 10 miles to Lake Placid and about 24 to Tupper Lake. The state is restoring the Saranac Lake Union Depot as a public stop on the trail. For an easy hour, follow the trail out of the village, turn around and walk back.

A day from the cabins

On a Thursday or a Friday everything below is open: the VIC lodge, The Ganzi, the museum campus and, through October 15, the Stevenson Cottage.

On a weekend, swap The Ganzi for a meal in the village and check the museum days. In fall the VIC's maples and tamaracks are part of the reason to come; the fall color guide has the timing and the drives, and fall at the cabins covers the season as a whole.

Children, dogs and access

Barnum Brook's overlook is built to be accessible, the Heron Marsh boardwalk is flat and accessible, and the Boreal Life boardwalk carries you over the wettest ground. The Rail Trail's firm surface is meant for wheelchairs too, and the carousel has its boat chariot. Children under 8 get into the museum campus free, and children 12 and under into the Stevenson Cottage. Dogs are welcome on a leash at the VIC; see the dog guide for the rest, and the events calendar for what is on in the village the week you come. When you are ready to choose dates, the cabins page has all three.

Questions

Sources

Facts on this page were checked against these sources in October 2026. Hours, fees and schedules change; confirm before you go.

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