It must have been the call of the loon.

Or so I thought as I stood on the shore at Great Camp Sagamore, watching the mist crawl over the lake at dawn. This mournful and timeless call, I thought as it died away into the grayness, is what drew people here in the first place. It had to be something compelling to drag the fabulously wealthy away from their elegant apartments in New York City and their mine-is-bigger-than-yours "cottages" in Newport, R.I. There had to be some powerful reason for the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, the Whitneys and the Astors to brave 12-hour train rides followed by teeth-rattling carriage rides to come to play in their Adirondack "camps" early in this century.

"Camps," though, is misleading. These industrialists and financiers were not sleeping in canvas tents or eating out of cans. Society's elite arrived with luggage enough to hold a different outfit for each meal; the best chefs; the best sherries; and a cadre of servants often outnumbering them 3 to 1. They came for the simplicity extolled by Emerson and Thoreau, but were not about to get their fingernails dirty in the process.

Today, in the shadows of pine trees and high peaks of the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, their legacy remains. Now, a new generation can drive a mere five hours north of New York City to find solace in the tousled forests and among the romantic loons -- and perhaps taste the lifestyle those millionaires enjoyed.

About 10 or 20 true "great camps" remain. Some, like Camp Santanoni, are tucked so far away you can reach them only by a four-mile hike. A few, such as Northbrook Lodge and White Pine Camp on Osgood Pond, the Sagamore in the town of Raquette Lake and the Point resort in Saranac Lake, still welcome guests, while others are private compounds where Vanderbilts still roam or kids come to summer camp. A few have been abandoned to the Adirondack winters that will one day ravage them back into dust.

"In the '50s and '60s, you could hardly give these things away," said Steve Englehart, director of Adirondack Architectural Heritage, a nonprofit group formed in 1990. "Why would anyone want the headache of all that maintenance?"

Sagamore had reached that point. Donated to Syracuse University, it was more trouble than it was worth. Only when historian and educator Howard Kirschenbaum gathered a few concerned friends and formed the Sagamore Institute in 1971 was the old camp plucked from abandonment. The half-dozen camps still open for business are extremely popular, and rent only by the week during the summer. But right after Labor Day, my husband and I managed to secure three nights at Sagamore and three more at Northbrook Lodge to get the flavor of more than one place.

As we turned off the main highway onto the four-mile dirt road to Sagamore, the trees got closer and clasped boughs over our heads. We left a wake of sun-twinged dust and headed back into another era.

The turn-of-the-century "pioneers," we realized right away, knew how to party. Off the parking lot is the bowling alley -- designed by the original Brunswick and still in use, if you don't mind setting the pins yourself. The ball return rack was even equipped with a brass cigar holder, solving the problem of what to do with those expensive smokes when it was one's turn to bowl.

Sagamore's saga

The Sagamore, built in 1897, was the third great camp by William West Durant, generally credited as the leading architect in the development of the Adirondack great camp style. William was the son of Dr. Thomas C. Durant, general manager of the Union Pacific Railroad, who early on saw the area's potential. He began buying land in 1848 at 5 cents an acre, eventually amassing 670,000 acres.

Thomas built a railroad here and sent for William, who had been "doing the continent," as young men did back then. William, calling in local master craftsmen, constructed buildings in a rustic style to echo the woodlands around them. The great camps were characterized by almost total self-sufficiency, with farms and woodsheds and ice houses and laundries and sewage systems and lighting and indoor plumbing, as well as dining rooms and guest cabins and great rooms.

Twenty-seven of the nearly 60 buildings remain at Sagamore. Most look like log cabins, but they were made of wood frame construction covered, inside and out, with tree-sized logs and peeled birch bark. Rustic gingerbread, made from perfectly matched branches or twigs, was the final touch. Sagamore provided the architectural prototype for many National Park Service lodge designs.

The main lodge, a dark brown chaletesque structure at the edge of the lake, today holds 24 guests. Back then, though, the three floors were intended for just one or two families and their entourages, with a nursery and servants' quarters on the third floor. Syracuse University reconfigured it to include more dorm-type rooms, with just one communal bathroom at the end of each hall. Looking past an open door to a room at the end of my hallway, I tried to imagine Gene Tierney standing in front of her mirror, putting on her frock for dinner.

The great room downstairs, however, remains cozy, with a giant, rough-hewn table for playing games, built-in bookshelves full of classics and a log fire popping and hissing in the hearth deep into the night.

By 1901, 26 years after his father's death, William Durant had driven his fortune into the ground and his sister was suing him for mismanagement. So the prodigal son sold his dear Sagamore to Alfred G. Vanderbilt, and the new owners expanded the camp to include several more buildings (the bowling alley was their idea), including the Wigwam guest cottage where the men of the party would sit on the porch overlooking the river to smoke cigars and drink.

Alfred Vanderbilt died in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. But Margaret Emerson, his second wife, continued to come to Sagamore every summer. Margaret, a member of the Croquet Hall of Fame, did not want for guests. Among her visitors were Tierney, Gary Cooper, Lord Mountbatten and Madam Chiang Kai-Shek.

Meals then, as now, were announced by the call of a triangle. On a paneled wall at the end of the dining room is a photograph of Vanderbilt and his well-dressed comrades relaxing over dinner. Turn around, and the room remains, eerily, almost identical. But dinners are more informal nowadays, with chafing-dish buffets and bus-your-own plates.

My husband, Paul, a hiker by avocation, had discovered the joys of canoeing, and we went out before breakfast and after dinner every day, paddling in the mist on Sagamore Lake. We made a few day hikes, and one rainy day drove into the town of Blue Mountain Lake to visit the terrific Adirondacks Museum, offering a marvelous overview of the park and, yes, even the great camps.

Paul paddled around Sagamore Lake while I drove the back roads and little towns shopping for a classic Adirondack chair for him. Many of Sagamore's guests were there for Family Week, which included a full schedule of hikes, games and picnics. Another dozen or so had come from as far away as California for the rustic furniture and blacksmithing workshops.

One of Sagamore's missions is to keep alive the rustic Adirondack traditions, and there is a definite sense of education about the place. Summer interns lead intensive two-hour tours twice a day.

An undiscovered treasure

White Pine Camp on Osgood Pond also offers daily tours. In fact, Kirschenbaum, instrumental in saving and restoring Sagamore, is part-owner of White Pine, and calls it a museum as well as a lodge. He'll point out the asymmetrical buildings and use of windows in unexpected places, as well as the whimsical, roughly hewn "brainstorm" siding (so called because Ben Muncil got an irresistible flash of inspiration for its design) used in their construction.

Across the pond from the elegant tea house at White Pine Camp is Northbrook Lodge, where we stayed for our last three nights. We were met in the parking lot by a shaggy dog named Huxley, and owner Laura-Jean Schwartau, both of whom accompanied us to our room.

When we opened the door, we got a mental whiff of why people came to the Adirondacks. The room was enormous, with log walls, a big fireplace and bay windows overlooking the porch, thick trees, and the lake beyond. Sunlight warmed the crocheted cloth over a small table with a dainty fringed lamp. Two rocking chairs on the braided rug pointed toward the fireplace.

If Sagamore is the grand poobah of great camps today, Northbrook is the still-undiscovered treasure.

Laura-Jean, a bespectacled young woman with a ready smile, emphasizes the lack of organized activities here. As she and her brother did growing up at Northbrook after their dad bought it in 1952, visitors make their own fun. Northbrook was built in 1918 by Wilfred McDougald, a surgeon and member of Canada's parliament. McDougald was involved in a conflict-of-interest scandal over a water power project on the St. Lawrence River, and smuggled alcohol during Prohibition. Laura-Jean can show you where he hid his contraband in the cellar, behind an enormous combination-lock door.

All the guest cottages have private baths and most have working fireplaces and refrigerators. Our room was so comfortable we had to drag ourselves away from it for meals, shopping excursions in Saranac Lake and a trip to Lake Placid to go bobsledding on the Olympic runs.

But at night, after the fabulous meals in the dining room, the great room beckoned. Here families retired en masse; the kids played board games and teen-agers shot pool; and parents and grandparents snuggled with a book on a couch under the soft light of an antique lamp. A group of newly made young friends might be swinging on the large sofa suspended in front of the fireplace.

And late each night, many of us would bundle up and go outside to watch the stars, looking into the Milky Way, just the way Emerson and the Vanderbilts and McDougald had done. The only difference is that today, an occasional satellite slowly floats across the face of the constellations.

On our last night, we took a canoe out and paddled away from the warm lights of the lodge. On Cranford Island, a family was gathered around a campfire. For a while we could hear their soft laughter, and the cold night air was filled with the delicious scent of burning logs. Finally, we were away from all vestiges of civilization, floating to a halt in a small pondlet whose shoreline we could barely see in the near-moonless night.

"Ploooosh!" An enormous plunging sound split the silence.

I braced as the canoe rocked, and thought, "Bear! I didn't know they swam." We sat, holding our breath and our paddles, straining to see what Loch Ness creature might be coming toward us.

Nothing.

Then we heard another splash, closer and sharper, on the other side of the canoe. We looked quickly, but saw only ripples. The water stilled, and then, directly in front of us, a flat black tail rose up and smacked out the Riot Act, warning of trespassers on beaver family property.

We were surprised at the beaver's reaction. You'd think that by now they'd be used to humans desperately trying to get back to nature. But then nature, especially in the Adirondacks, never gets used to such things.

WHEN YOU GO

About the area: In 1885, the New York State Legislature created the Adirondack Forest Preserve. The law was strengthened in 1892, and again in 1894, with a law dictating the ground-breaking concept that the forest should remain "forever wild."

The original 681,374 acres of the forest preserve have grown to include more than 2.6 million acres of public land; 6 million acres altogether. Most of the park is privately owned, but it is subject to stringent development laws.

There are no real cities in the park. The biggest are Lake George, at the southern end of the park, and Lake Placid, a popular year-round resort area. Otherwise, tourism clusters around some of the 2,500 lakes that dot the region.

Getting there: American Eagle offers round-trip flights from BWI to Albany, with a changover at JFK, starting at $160 plus tax. United has nonstop flights from Dulles International to Albany starting at $208 round trip including taxes, and US Airways Express flies nonstop from BWI to Albany starting at $170 round trip including taxes. Directions from the airport to Sagamore: Take Interstate 87 north to state Route 28 West. Raquette Lake is just off Route 28, about 60 miles from the interstate.

Lodging:

* Northbrook Lodge, P.O. Box 246, Paul Smiths, N.Y. 12970; 518-327-3379. The 16 rooms, several with fireplaces, are open mid-June through mid-September. Rates start at $140 a night, three-night minimum.

* The Point, HCR No. 1, Box 65, Saranac Lake, N.Y. 12983. Originally called Camp Wonundra, and the summer camp of William Avery Rockefeller. Catered winter picnics are held on the lake, formal meals are served on fine china in a fabulously rustic great room and there's breakfast in bed. The Point has been cited by Zagat as the finest small resort in America. All this luxury does not come cheap: Rooms range from $900 to $1,600 a night, but that includes all meals. Call 800-255-3530; fax 518-891-1152; www.thepointresort.com; e-mail: info@thepointresort.com.

* Sagamore Institute, P.O. Box 146, Raquette Lake, N.Y. 13436. Guided tours daily, July 4 to Labor Day, and weekends only Labor Day to Columbus Day. Programs are offered throughout the summer, including an Elderhostel Grandparents' and Grandchildren camp, and sea kayak building. Rates run about $100 per night, per person, including all meals. Call 315-354-5311; www.sagamore.org.

* The Wawbeek, 553 Panther Mountain Road, Route 30, Tupper Lake, N.Y. 12986. A turn-of-the-century great camp on 40 acres. Only two of the original buildings are left -- the Mountain House Lodge and the Wawbeek Restaurant; the others were destroyed by fire. Open year-round, with cross-country ski trails and a beach for the summer. Accommodations include a five-bedroom lodge plus several cabins. Rates range from $145 (per room) to $390 (for a cabin) per night during high season. Call 800-953-2656 or 518-359-2656; www.wawbeek.com.

* White Pine Camp, White Pine Road, Paul Smiths, N.Y. 12970; offers lodging and tours of the great camp, which was also the 1926 summer White House of Calvin Coolidge. Rates range from $175 to $260 per cabin per night, $600 to $1,450 per week. In high season, cabins are rented by the week only. Meals are not available. Two cabins are open year-round, the rest mid-May through mid-October. Call 518-327-3030; www.mountain-air.com/whitepinecamp.

Must see: Absolutely spend a half-day, or more, at the wonderful and extensive Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake; 518-352-7311; fax, 518-352-7653; www.adkmuseum.org.

Shopping: Spend the day shopping in the college town of Saranac Lake, a manageable and unpretentious place with some nice restaurants (Casa del Sol is our favorite for Mexican food). The Pendragon Theater offers professional productions year-round.

Activities: Nearby Lake Placid is home to two winter Olympics; here are numerous sports facilities, such as skating rinks and the bobsled run, that the public can use. In winter, there's dog-sledding on Mirror Lake or beyond, and skiing on Whiteface Mountain.

Cruising: Head down to the charmingly unpretentious town of Raquette Lake and take a narrated cruise aboard the W.W. Durant on the lake (largest natural lake in the Adirondacks), where you'll get to check out the back yards of other great camps. The modern ship is beautifully appointed in gilded-age style, and serves better-than-average day-cruise fare. Raquette Lake Navigation Co., P.O. Box 100, Raquette Lake, N.Y. 13436; 315-354-5532; www.raquettelakenavigation.com; e-mail: rlnav@telenet.net.

Information:

* Adirondack Architectural Heritage, 1790 Main St., Keeseville, N.Y., 12944, offers tours of various great camps in the summer. Call 518-834-9328.

* Adirondack Regional Tourism Council, P.O. Box 51, West Chazy, N.Y. 12992; 518-846-8016; www.adirondacks.org.

Pub Date: 03/14/99