From Westport on Lake Champlain is one of the favorite routes into the Adirondacks. The name of this dark region originally came from the Mohawks, who applied it in derision to the less fortunate savages that inhabited the forbidding forests. The luxurious Mohawk, living in fertile valleys growing plenty of corn, could see nothing for his dusky enemy in this dismal wilderness to eat, excepting the dark trees growing on its mountain sides, and therefore the Mohawk called these people the Adirondacks, or "the bark and wood eaters." The actual derivation of the word is thought to come from the Iroquois root "atiron," meaning "to stretch along," referring to the mountain chains. Starting from Westport, we penetrate the region by a steep road into the Raven Pass, known as the "Gate of the Adirondacks," going through one of the ridges, among juniper bushes and aspen poplars, and thus get to the pleasant valley beyond, where flows the lovely Bouquet River. Here are a bunch of red-roofed cottages surrounded by elms contrasting prettily with the green fields, with boarding-houses and hotels interspersed, making up the village of Elizabethtown, the county-seat of Essex, which is hereabout called E-Town, for short. It spreads over the flat bottom of a fertile valley, encompassed around by high mountains. Circling all over the valley and yet concealed in deep gorges is the Bouquet River, which flows out to Lake Champlain, near the Split Rock. To the westward rises the sharp bare granite top of Mount Hurricane, nearly thirty-eight hundred feet, and to the southwest the towering Giant of the Valley, over forty-five hundred feet. Cobble Hill, rising two thousand feet, closes up the western end of the main village street, its ball-like top being a complete reproduction of a huge cobble-stone. Out to the northward goes a wild mountain road, through the Poke o' Moonshine Pass, leading to Ausable Chasm, twenty-three miles away.