With the Adirondack Mountains to the west, New York’s shoreline on Lake Champlain is branded recreationally as the Adirondack Coast. This 120-mile lake flows north, making this coast’s unofficial starting point the lake headwaters in South Bay, just north of the historic village of Whitehall in northern Washington County.
Having kayaked several times in South Bay’s shallow, milky waters from a state boat launch off state Route 22, I often wondered about the lake’s distant northern outlet, at the Richelieu River, which runs through Quebec to the St. Lawrence River and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean at the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Last summer offered two weeks to make that trip, driving, camping, and kayaking along portions of a lake with a whopping 587 miles of shoreline in New York, Vermont and Quebec. It could at best be a snapshot, not a detailed portrait.
South Bay forms a southeastern portion of the Adirondack Park’s Blue Line, which runs northward through the lake about 80 miles to the Valcour Island Primitive Area, near the town of Peru in Clinton County. From South Bay and its handful of private camps, the lake moves slowly north past cliff-lined wetlands of the
