When Schroon Mountain is compared to many of Thomas Cole's wilderness paintings, the landscape here is more open, less constricted and less shadowed.  Combined with the use of warm colors, it creates a lighter, more welcoming ambiance.  His distinctive twisted and gnarled trees are there in the foreground:  one tree leads the eye upwards toward the right ridge, and the other accomplishes the same towards the left ridge - all lines joining at the pyramidal summit of the mountain.  

The mountain, itself, is only lightly shadowed.  It doesn't loom dark and menacingly, and its lower slopes are illuminated by scattered rays of sun - particularly between the two prominent foreground trees - which highlight the reds and golds of fall foliage.  This is still clearly wilderness.  It's not a pastoral outdoor scene that might be painted by an Old World artist, but Cole's brush strokes have fashioned an inviting wilderness where one is drawn in by the colors, beauties and forms of the natural world.