2) Elk were widespread throughout the Adirondacks until the late 1800’s. Check your facts, or just log on to RMEF.org. The elk racks on every barn in Adirondack park weren’t imported. Depending on the research you read, the reason they have failed during reintroduction is the entire ecosystem has nearly collapsed for lack of an apex predator remaining in the system. Even the deer herd can barely support itself. They’ve closed most hunting camps for lack of game.

I LOOOOOVE people who debate with a computer keyboard to prove their intellectual superiority without ever being challenged.

I am quite aware that the aboriginal populations have no famous furniture making tradition.

The elk thing kind of surprised me though. Pennsylvania’s elk population has been growing healthily since their reintroduction earlier this century. But released elk apparently never took hold in New York (as noted by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation). Not that I was aiming for any particular versimilitude or anything, but I was startled to learn that New York was so inhospitable to introduced elk given their success in the Allegheny foothills.

I enjoyed your post but I’d like to clarify a few things -

1) The natural habitat is far from extinct in the Adirondacks. In fact, there is more natural habitat and wilderness areas up here than any place east of the Rockies. The Adirondacks alone (and the rest of upstate also many natural areas that are not a part of the Adirondack Park) covers an area about the size of Massachusetts (or Vermont). The park has 46 peaks over 4,000 feet, eleven with rare alpine summit vegetation, and about 1,500 peaks over 1,000 feet. There are about 2,800 lakes and ponds, 35,000 miles of streams, over a million acres of wetlands, and over 5.5 million acres of forests, including more than 500,000 acres of old growth.

The Adirondack Park is larger than the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite COMBINED!

2) The fact the Adirondack Chairs were first built in the late 1800s aside (a part of the rustic architecturual tradition of white people), the Mohican (with an “o”) are an Indian tribe from a book of fiction (Last of the Mohicans). The page you cite about the Mahicans (with an “a”) makes this clear. I know it’s easy for someone in Southern, urban / suburban New York (where I admit I assume you are from or are living) to think of the Hudson River valley where the Mahican lived as one in the same as the rest of the Hudson River Valley. However, the Hudson River that flows about a mile from my house you could walk across (at low water) and still stretches far into the true wilds of the Adirondacks where it would take you at least two days of hiking to reach.

3) The Borscht Belt of Dirty Dancing fame is in the Catskills, a much smaller natural area at least 3-4 hours of highway driving south from the southermost point of the Adirondacks.

4) Elk don’t live in the Adirondacks (or anywhere upstate) and never really have except for a few scattered herds perhaps a thousand years ago, and a few surviving members into the very early 1800s. The native trout we have here is do not live in schools in lakes, but individually in streams.

It was a funny post and would have worked out well except for these crazy ideas about what Upstate New York is -

I’m sure I’ve entertained you enough with my comment here, but I encourage you to come up for a visit. When you do - leave your cell phone home and be sure to consult a map .