By Beth Kracklauer | Photographs and video by Elizabeth Coetzee/WSJ

A few summers ago, my friend Matt Strauss invited me up north to what his family calls Camp. His great-great-grandparents staked out the rustic lakeside retreat around the turn of the last century in the southwest part of New York's Adirondack Park. I was thrilled, though the region was entirely mysterious to me. Intimidating, even.

I've returned each year since and grown marginally more at ease in Matt's small, secret corner of the Adirondacks. It helps to know somebody who's walked those woods his whole life. But what about the visitor who doesn't?

That's where Joe Dadey comes in. He and Jack Drury co-founded the nonprofit Adirondack Hamlets to Huts in 2017 to establish hut-to-hut travel in the Park. Long a fixture in the Alps, this model sends trekkers through the wilderness minus the burden of hauling camping gear. Lodging along the way provides hot meals and comfortable beds, ideal for a wannabe outdoors person like me with minimal backcountry experience and 55-year-old knees.

Joe built a canoe route around my obsession with the region's historic Great Camps, where Gilded-Age moguls who promoted industrialization went to escape it. A few of them now welcome overnight visitors not named Vanderbilt or Rockefeller. I played up that perk when I pitched the trip to Matt and his wife, Molly Tighe, plus my colleague Elizabeth Coetzee, who came along to photograph our adventure: four days, three nights, 25 miles on the water.

Getting there under your own power is a pillar of the Hamlets to Huts ethos. "There's the physical exercise but also the sense of achievement, " Joe promised. "The 'We did that!' " Privately I wondered: Could I actually do that?

Day 1 | Trial by Fire on the Water

Established by the New York State Legislature in 1892, the Adirondack Park extends over 6.2 million acres. That's bigger than the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky, Yellowstone, Yosemite and Glacier national parks combined. We would paddle only a fraction of it, beginning at an otherworldly expanse of swamp called Browns Tract that's alive with carnivorous purple pitcher plants and, apparently, a legion of beavers.

The Adirondack Park is unusual in that much of what lies within its boundary is privately owned -- some 3.4 million acres as of 2021. New York owns the rest, protected by Article 14 of the state constitution, to be "forever kept as wild forest lands." About 12 million people visit each year and 137,000 live there full-time, forming a historically tricky-to-navigate patchwork of communities inside the Park. Joe and his co-founder, Jack Drury, started Adirondack Hamlets to Huts with a grant from the New York State Department of State to identify where trails exist and where they need to be built.

As we snaked along the oxbow curves of Browns Tract Inlet, Elizabeth juggled camera and paddle in the bow of our canoe as I anxiously maneuvered my own paddle to rudder us clear of the bank. Joe had started us out on a real black-diamond course. When we hit our first beaver dam, his calm, clear instruction helped us find a foothold on the slippery snarl of interwoven sticks. We lifted our canoe over, seated ourselves inside again and sailed on -- until the next beaver dam.

It felt incredible to cruise out onto Raquette Lake. We pulled our canoes out at the hamlet of the same name and settled in at Raquette Lake Supply Co., a big brick oasis of a building with hotel rooms upstairs and a general store downstairs, complete with old-fashioned soda fountain. I enjoyed an outstanding BLT at the adjoining Tap Room, lively on a weeknight though the high tourist season hadn't begun. Third-generation proprietor Jim Dillon, whose family has owned the business since the turn of the last century, ducked in and out all evening. For over a century, his community has provided the surrounding camps with the supplies and labor to carry out their grand experiment in "self-sufficiency."

One bar stool over, a regular named Kevin Norris unleashed a fact-packed torrent of Raquette Lake history, from the 1900 construction of the local railway line to the 2007 statewide ballot measure required to greenlight an urgently needed drinking-water well. The restraints on development within the Park are strict. "Imagine that," he said. "For us to dig a well here, people all the way in New York City had to vote on it!"

Day 2 | The Architecture of Outdoor Adventure

The next morning we fought the winds and currents on Raquette Lake. It was easier going on South Inlet, all the way to the base of Cascade Falls, where we secured our canoes. We hiked on a cushion of evergreen needles -- pausing to face down a ruffed grouse, puffed up in full territorial display -- and on to Great Camp Sagamore.

Railroad scion William West Durant built the property in 1895-97 and Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt purchased it in 1901. On our tour, historical interpreter Leslie Maurer ran through the defining features of a Great Camp. Each building served its own purpose -- one for dining, others for lodging and recreating -- compelling guests to get out in nature as they went about the day. Dreamed up by Durant in collaboration with local craftsmen, the Adirondack style borrowed elements from the chalets he'd seen during his European education. But it was something truly new, too: Its log construction, stone fireplaces and branch-work railings drew inspiration, along with wood and stone, from the landscape.

Operated today by the nonprofit Sagamore Institute of the Adirondacks, Great Camp Sagamore offers programs for both overnight visitors and area residents. On this visit, biologist Janet Mihuc invited us out into the night in search of her specialty, moths. As one striking, spotted Polyphemus with a six-inch wingspan hung out on Joe's finger, the rest of us huddled around, thoroughly awed.

In the wood-paneled dining hall overlooking the lake, meals were communal and chatty. I shared a table with Ellen Butz, granddaughter of the former caretakers, Margaret and Richard Collins. Now a historical interpreter, she shared a remarkable, personal take on the place. One detail I loved: As a girl, her aunt had the job of arranging colored pins in pretty patterns on the pin cushions the Vanderbilts provided their guests.

The story that Great Camp Sagamore tells is constantly evolving, said Cari Ray, senior director, programs and operations. Right now, she and her colleagues are working with a wilderness tracker of the Abenaki nation to create a new guide to the lake trail's flora and fauna. "For the last 50 years, this organization has been opening its doors to the public," Ray said. "It's not an exclusive club anymore."

Days 3-4 | A View Earned

In all sorts of ways, the Adirondacks are becoming less impenetrable. This fall, construction will wrap up on the 34-mile-long Adirondack Rail Trail, intended for use year-round, whether via bike, wheelchair, snowshoe or ski. And I admire the elegant Green Goat Maps made in Saranac Lake. They offer a significantly richer sense of place than typical trail guides, indicating bike shops, breweries and other points where a visitor can engage with local people as well as nature.

It was Green Goat founder Ezra Schwartzberg who recommended I reach out to Joe in the first place: "We're both working to make the Adirondacks more inviting and accessible to a wide range of visitors," he said. To that end, the Adirondack Land Trust recently announced plans to donate an 18-acre property in Wells, N.Y., so Adirondack Hamlets to Huts can construct lodging and a new trailhead.

You can arrange self-guided tours with Adirondack Hamlets to Huts, but I'm so glad we didn't. What a luxury it was to have Joe with us every inch of the way, to never consult my watch or GPS, and just be totally present.

After Sagamore, we paddled to Huntington Memorial Camp. Originally Camp Pine Knot, it's now part of SUNY Cortland's William H. Parks Family Center for Environmental and Outdoor Education. As director Rhonda Pitoniak led us through beautifully preserved log structures fronted with fractals of twig-work, SUNY students sent up occasional whoops from the nearby ropes course. Pine Knot was the first Great Camp, she explained. Here, beginning in the 1870s, Durant sketched out a new architecture that came to define the American vacation itself: Before long, the brand-new National Park Service borrowed it for lodges at places like Yellowstone and Glacier.

Of all the sites we paddled to, none was so moving as St. William's on Long Point. In 1890, Durant built the Shingle-style church for his workers. A century later it was on the brink of collapse, said Sue Norris, the site's director (and wife of Kevin, who'd schooled me in local history at the Tap Room a couple of days prior). A group of friends and neighbors, including Jim Dillon of Raquette Lake Supply Co., formed an organization to restore the church and make it a non-denominational site welcoming the entire community for picnics, concerts, weddings and more; the house and bunk house on the property host vacationers and retreats.

Norris recalled how her husband and another local man shored up the foundation: "They removed the original stones and set them aside, then dug 4 foot by 4 foot by 4 foot holes by hand for all 40 stones." It's one thing to take an interest in local history and another to hurl your whole back into it.

I was coming to see the communities around these lakes as ecosystems as intricate and fragile as any we'd paddled through. We spent our last night at the Hedges on Blue Mountain Lake, a Great Camp founded by Civil War general Hiram Duryea in 1880. It was purchased in 1920 by the Collinses, Sagamore's caretakers, who turned it into a beloved resort.

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