Our stay at Camp Pinecone was near ideal. My wife and I, our two adult children and spouses, and one grandchild, were easily accommodated at the house. The house itself lacked nothing that we needed or wanted., and was very comfortable.
We spent a lot of time on the dock, swimming, having dinner, just hanging out, and as an adequate docking place for our 19 ft power boat. Sunsets were beautiful from that location looking out over Fish Creek Pond.
There are plenty of places to canoe right from the dock, as Fish Creek Pond ties into several other ponds and creeks..
There is a shallow but adequate channel that connects Fish Creek to the far larger Upper Saranac Lake for some "serious" tubing, skiing, etc..
Plenty of hiking in the general area; we prefer the Lake Placid area hiking trails, about 50 minutes away.
If you're looking for a clean, relatively modern house on the water to stay at, I can easily recommend this. We hope to turn this into an annual trip to gather the whole family together.
It's difficult to find fault; the worse I can do is note that despite the fact that there's a terrific fire pit in the back yard and plenty of wood, there was no ax to split large hunks of wood, and we had to borrow one from the neighbors..
Lastly,if anyone is planing on bringing a boat, I do not recommend using the association's launch.for anything over perhaps 12 ft long.. There's 2 issues; first the area is very hilly and the road is narrow, and getting the boat to the launch was somewhat difficult. Secondly, the lake bed at the launch is very uneven and the bed slopes considerably from one side o the other, making it difficult to load the boat back onto the trailer.
This is NOT the fault of Camp Pinecone, but I just want to make boaters aware of the difficulty. In the future, I would use the launch on the other side of the pond at Hickock's Boat Livery and drive the boat over to Camp Pinecone from there.
All in all, a very enjoyable experince