If you’re not from around here, the first thing to clear up is that when someone in the Adirondacks says “we’re going up to camp,” they don’t mean a tent, a sleeping bag, and a canoe trip. They mean a house. Usually several.
Back in the late 1800s, wealthy families from New York and Boston started building elaborate rustic retreats deep in the Adirondack woods, and they called them “camps” — a bit of modesty for what were often sprawling, architect-designed compounds. Instead of one grand mansion, the tradition that took hold was a cluster of separate small buildings: a main lodge for gathering and eating, several smaller cabins for sleeping, maybe a boathouse, all connected by paths and porches and built from local logs, bark, and stone so the whole thing looked like it grew out of the forest rather than being dropped into it.
The style caught on far beyond the Gilded Age fortunes that started it. Up and down the lakes of the Adirondacks and the Champlain Valley, families of much more modest means built their own smaller versions of the same idea — a few simple buildings near the water instead of one big house — and called them camps too. The name stuck, and so did the layout.
Ask anyone who grew up going to one, and “camp” is as much a state of mind as it is a building. You don’t vacation at camp, you go to camp, and camp is either open or it’s closed for the season. Screen doors slam. Bathing suits live on a line strung between two trees. Nobody’s furniture matches, and nobody minds. Days get measured out in swims, in who’s on dish duty, in cannonballs off the dock, and in what time the loons start up.
It’s also, deliberately, a little bit rustic. Camp is where you’re allowed to track sand across the floor, where the water pressure is what it is, and where a warped screen door or a wonky path down to the beach isn’t a flaw so much as proof the place is real.
True to the tradition, Camp Two Step isn’t one house — it’s three small ones scattered around a shared beach and dock on Corlear Bay: the Lodge, the Cabin, and the Lake House. Everybody shares the water, the kayaks, and usually a fire by the end of the night. However many houses you’re bunking between, you’re always at the same camp. And it all sits inside Adirondack Park, the same six-million-acre stretch of woods and water where the camp tradition took root.
Curious about the actual houses? Here’s the Lodge, the Cabin, and the Lake House.