Planning Your Lake Champlain Vacation

Ask a Vermonter who owns Lake Champlain and they will say Vermont. Ask someone in the Adirondacks and they will say New York. The lake, lying in the long trench between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks, has never much cared. It runs a hundred and seven miles north to south, dips a border into Quebec at its top end, and keeps its own counsel. The French called it Lac Champlain, and it is still one of the finest stretches of freshwater in North America to build a few days around. Here is how to do it.

The lake itself

Lake Champlain is big. It covers nearly 500 square miles, stretches 107 miles from end to end, spreads 14 miles across at its widest, and drops to roughly 400 feet at its deepest. That shape, long and narrow and deep, is what gives the shoreline its character: quiet coves and working harbors on the flats, sheer rock where the Adirondack foothills meet the water. It is also what makes the lake so satisfying to see carved in relief, every sounding and depth contour stacked into its true form.

The lake takes its name from Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer who reached it in 1609 and, in the fashion of explorers, named it after himself. He was far from the first person to stand on its banks, but his was the name that stuck to the map.

The Great Lake that almost was

For a few strange weeks in 1998, Lake Champlain was the sixth Great Lake. A bill reauthorizing the National Sea Grant Program, shepherded by a senator from Vermont, quietly carried a line declaring Champlain a Great Lake, which would have opened the federal research money reserved for that club. The Midwest noticed. The uproar was fast, the line was struck, and Champlain went back to being a very large lake that is not a Great one. Local universities kept the funding to study it, which was the practical point all along. If the almost-sixth-lake story catches you, we wrote more about the actual five in fun facts about the Great Lakes.

A border older than the map

Champlain has spent its whole recorded history as a line between things. Today it separates two states, and at its northern end, two countries. Long before that it marked the frontier between the Abenaki to the east and the Mohawk to the west, a threshold the region knew as "the door of the country," the eastern gateway into tribal lands. That border role is why so much history collects along the shore, from Revolutionary War forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point to lighthouses like the Champlain Memorial on the New York side. You are rarely more than a short drive from something with a plaque on it.

Where to stay

Burlington is the obvious base. It is the largest city on the lake, with a walkable waterfront, a genuine food scene, and ferries across to the New York shore. If you would rather trade the bustle for porch-and-mountain quiet, the small towns down the Adirondack coast do that well. Keeseville, Willsboro, Essex, Lewis, and Elizabethtown each pack a lot of history into a few blocks, and most of them hand you a view of water backed by mountains without being asked. Cabins, inns, and bed-and-breakfasts are the usual stock. Take a minute with your host: the innkeepers here tend to know the local history cold, and they are happy to tell it.

What to do

The lake reinvents itself every season, so your plans depend on when you arrive. Warm months are for boating, birding, and finding a rock warm enough to sit on. Winter turns the same water into a platform for ice fishing and the surrounding hills into cross-country ski trails. Rock climbers work the cliffs along the New York shore most of the year.

Set aside a day for Ausable Chasm, a two-mile sandstone gorge often called the Grand Canyon of the Adirondacks. The rock walls went down something like 500 million years ago, and the place reads as a different park in July than it does under winter ice. It is the rare attraction that earns a second visit in another season.

Where to eat

The Champlain valley is farm country, and the restaurants show it. Menus lean farm-to-table and shift with what is in season: local cheeses and meats, produce from down the road, and plenty pulled from the water. Clam chowder, fish and chips, seafood platters, Maine lobster, and grilled swordfish all turn up, and the food trucks are worth chasing rather than driving past. Save room for dessert. Lake Champlain Chocolates has been making some of the best confections in the country for more than thirty years, and a box of them travels home better than most souvenirs.

Taking the lake home

You can only fit so much of a place into a camera roll. A Lake Champlain wood chart does something a photo cannot: it holds the real shape of the water, every depth contour cut into Baltic birch, so the lake you spent a week on has a spot on the wall the other fifty-one. It is our favorite way to commemorate a trip, and it keeps the next one within easy reach of the imagination.

Browse the full run of lake charts, or start with the Vermont collection and find your water.