The North Country is a region of the U.S. state of New York that encompasses the state's extreme northern frontier, bordering Lake Ontario on the west, the Saint Lawrence River and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec on the north and northwest, and Lake Champlain and Vermont on the east. Generally speaking, the North Country is understood to be that portion of northern Upstate New York which lies outside the Adirondack Park and consists of mostly level lands or the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, but is not within the Adirondack range itself. New York's North Country shares with Ontario the Thousand Islands, an archipelago within the Saint Lawrence River. The region is the most sparsely populated but is also the geographically largest, in New York. At the 2010 United States