The Whiteface Memorial Highway

Lake Placid, the little Adirondack village that hosted the Winter Olympics twice — the addressable start of the drive, on Mirror Lake in the heart of the High Peaks.

The 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid — the night a team of American college kids beat the unbeatable Soviet hockey machine, in the depths of the Cold War.

As you leave Lake Placid, keep an eye out for the strangest skyline in the Adirondacks: two enormous ski jumps, like giant slides reaching up into the sky, standing right at the edge of this little village. Those are…

The 1932 Winter Olympics — the first ever held in the United States, staged by a tiny Adirondack village, and the astonishing athletes who made history here.

Here's something about the country you're driving through that surprises almost everybody. All around you is the Adirondack Park — and it is the single largest park in the entire lower forty-eight states. Six million…

The abolitionist John Brown, who farmed and chose to be buried near Lake Placid — 'John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave.'

Route 86 through the Wilmington Notch — the narrow gorge the West Branch of the Ausable River carved between the mountains, one of the loveliest river drives in the Adirondacks.

How the clean, cold Adirondack air made nearby Saranac Lake into the great tuberculosis-cure town of America — Dr. Trudeau, the cure cottages, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

These deep Adirondack woods are wilder than they look from the road, and they're full of life if you know where to look. Out on the lakes and ponds, listen for the loon — that wild, wavering, laughing call that is the…

High Falls Gorge on Route 86 — a series of thundering waterfalls the Ausable River pours through a slot of billion-year-old rock, with walkways right out over the water.

Where the name 'Adirondack' comes from — a Mohawk word for their Algonquin neighbors, and not a kind one.

If you've timed this for the fall, you already know why you came — and here's the why behind the why. These mountainsides are covered in exactly the trees that put on the best show: sugar maples going scarlet and flam…

How Whiteface got its name — the pale scar of a great landslide that lays the mountain's bare rock open to the sky.

The little town of Wilmington at the foot of Whiteface — where Route 86 meets the Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway, and the drive turns LEFT to begin its climb.

The Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway itself — five switchbacking miles and 2,000 feet of climb up a road hand-built in the 1930s to honor the veterans of the First World War.

How Governor Franklin Roosevelt willed the Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway into being in the depths of the Depression, to honor the dead of the First World War.

Look off to the south and southwest whenever the trees open up, and you're looking at the High Peaks — the tallest cluster of mountains in New York State, crowded into the middle of this park. There are forty-six of t…

A straight word as you climb toward the summit, because the top of this mountain is a different world and it fools people. Down where you started it might be a mild, sunny afternoon. Up top it can be thirty degrees co…

The stone Castle at the very top of the highway, built of granite blasted from the road itself — where the drive ends, you park, and the short climb to the true summit begins.

The last climb from the Castle to the true summit — up the stone Stairway Ridge (or the elevator in the mountain) into one of the only alpine zones in the eastern U.S.

The 4,867-foot summit of Whiteface — the fifth-highest peak in New York, a rare alpine world with a hundred-mile view over the High Peaks, and a working weather observatory. The grand finale.