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Afloat in the Woods: Blazing the Northern Forest Canoe Trail

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Photo by Jerry Monkman.

The Northern Forest Canoe Trail is a roiling, serene, deep, shallow, narrow, and broad “trail” that follows a tortuous (some would say “torturous”) route across five watersheds, comprising 79 rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds in four states and a tiny piece of Quebec. Its currents flow north, south, east, or west depending on where you are on the route, but in the final analysis it goes northeast 740 miles from Old Forge, New York, in the Adirondacks, to Fort Kent in Maine’s north woods, near Canada. In many sections, this trail, with hydro-dams, beaver dams, falls, rock gardens, and oxbows, resembles an obstacle course or corn maze more than a “trail.”

Yet it is, officially, a “trail.” And it opened three years ago, thanks to the determined efforts of a non-profit group, the blessings of the federal government and the states through which it flows, and, most important, the support or at least cooperation of myriad property owners. The trail, because it is long and has many facets, attracts all types of paddlers – from those who relish its white water challenges to those who simply like to float along on one of its many quieter sections on a sunny afternoon.

Truth is, many paddlers used parts of this trail long before its grand opening. It may have been used as far back as 8,000 or 10,000 years ago by some of the region’s earliest human inhabitants – a fact, along with other historic tidbits, that is touted by the trail’s organizers and overseers. A nonprofit group with the same name as the trail itself makes generous use of the adjective “historic” on its website, maps, and brochures, suggesting that one of the trail’s delights is the opportunity for paddlers to exercise their historic imaginations as they pass through landscapes that Native Americans would have recognized hundreds of years ago – though sometimes these days those thoughts can be interrupted by the rumbling of a jetliner or a honking car.

The trail organization, NFCT, notes that Native Americans from various tribes traveled along the waterway in their birch bark and dugout canoes; that French explorers and fur trappers traveled the trail’s rivers and lakes; that lumberjacks, with peaveys in hand, rode logs to sawmills down some of its rivers and tributaries; that rumrunners used two of its lakes – Champlain and Memphremagog in Vermont – during Prohibition. Big names in North American history traveled these parts, including Samuel de Champlain, who 400 years ago visited and eponymously named the lake; and Robert Rogers, who led his Rangers in attacks in the region against the British and their Native American allies in the French and Indian War; and Benedict Arnold, who, before he switched sides, unsuccessfully attacked the British in Quebec and then fled down rivers in what was to become Maine.

These were historic Native American routes used by the Iroquois of New York, the Abenaki of Vermont and New Hampshire, and the Micmac, Malecite, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy of Maine,” says Rob Center over a sandwich and coffee at a café near the NFCT office in Waitsfield, Vermont. He mentions the trail’s major rivers (from west to east) on which they paddled: the Raquette, Saranac, Missisquoi, Clyde, Nulhegan, Connecticut, Upper Ammonoosuc, Androscoggin, Rapid, Dead, Spencer Stream, Moose River, the West Branch of the Penobscot, and the Allagash. And the major lakes: Champlain, Memphremagog, Flagstaff, Moosehead, and Rangeley Lakes.

Center and his wife, Kay Henry, a former owner of the Mad River Canoe Company, win much of the credit for establishing the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. The couple took a novel but inchoate idea and turned it into reality after working for nearly a decade fund-raising, lobbying, marketing, and organizing at a grass-roots level. “The (canoe) business was sold, and we had time on our hands,” Center explains with a slight shrug.

“It all began when the phone rang one day in 1997; the call came from one of three fellows who had been paddling and researching Native American routes,” he says. Center, who at 57 retains an athletic bearing thanks to summer canoeing and winter skiing, says the trio of paddlers, college buddies at the University of Maryland in the 1960s, had canoed the Northern Forest region off and on over the years. The men were enamored by the waterways, and with topographic maps and exploratory trips, they outlined a possible trail. But they were looking to Center and Henry for help, in part because of the couple’s experience and contacts in the canoeing business. “They said they had neither the time nor the money to pursue the idea much further,” Center says of the three friends. “They invited us to take over.”

Henry set out to raise money from corporate interests and to seek grants from the National Park Service, while Center began approaching landowners – both government and private – along the proposed waterway route. The couple established the NFCT organization in 1999, and with help from Senators Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, received a critical $500,000, four-year Federal grant for planning and organizing. The grant was justified on the grounds that a trail would help promote the Northern Forest as a recreational destination and help local economies along the way.

In the early 2000s, Center traveled to meetings in the four states to gain the support of Chambers of Commerce (the trail passes through nearly a dozen small cities), electric utilities with dams on rivers, and timber companies. The discussions were especially delicate with timber interests in Maine, explains Sarah Medina, land use director for Seven Islands Land Company in Bangor, which manages more than 800,000 acres, primarily for the Pingree family, which has owned timberland in Maine since the 1840s. She says many timberland owners were wary of giving their imprimatur to the project for fear that allowing their land to appear on a river trail map might some day increase the likelihood of restrictions on their own use of the land through legislation or eminent domain.

“He had to use his persuasive powers,” Medina says of Center, whom she describes as “enthusiastic” and a good listener. “We want the public to use the land (as paddlers had always been allowed to do), but we wanted to be sure that this would not come back to bite us.” Timber harvesting requires logging roads, bridges, and use of heavy equipment that some paddlers might find disturbing. NFCT, as a result, has stressed on its website, literature, and maps that paddlers should consider themselves guests on the private land and should act responsibly and appreciatively while portaging or camping.

The NFCT office is located in a clapboard building on Route 100 in the center of Waitsfield’s tiny downtown. Running the office is Kate Williams, the full-time executive director, who is aided by three other staff and an annual budget of $300,000. Williams operates the website, deals with state agencies, answers queries from paddlers, works on membership lists, produces a newsletter, monitors campsites, works with property owners, and supervises some 300 volunteers who help maintain the trail.

Williams says NFCT’s programs are financed largely from foundation grants, with the rest coming from individual and corporate contributions, and some grants from the four states. The trail’s relationships with the states can best be described as “partnerships,” Williams says.

Williams says she has canoed perhaps a quarter of the trail. She and her husband have taken the kids, ages 6 and 9, through river sections in the Adirondacks, on Flagstaff Lake, on Rangeley Lake, and down a piece of the Connecticut. “We have found canoe camping to be the ideal family activity,” she says enthusiastically. Others apparently agree: NFCT studies indicate that in 2006, roughly 90,000 paddlers used sections of the trail, though a large majority did not know at the time they were on a canoe trail. Twenty-two people have traveled the full 740 miles in one trip.

I think the diversity of experiences and geography, and the (realization) by people that they are in a waterway with so much history … that they are paddling in 2009 what in the 1700s was exactly the same … is pretty compelling.” Williams says.

But for some, the big draw is the physical challenge the trail presents. Nicole Grohoski, 24, a cartographer from Burlington, Vermont, described herself as stubbornly determined when, in 2006, shortly after the trail opened, she and a friend, Tom Perkins, set out from Old Forge for the 740 mile journey to Fort Kent. It took them 48 days. They stayed at designated campsites (every 10 or 12 miles) along the way, and once, in Plattsburgh, New York, in a hotel. And, as experienced canoeists might imagine, the long trip had ups and downs.

One downer was the trash they encountered in populated places: not just plastic Coke or Clorox bottles, but big stuff, like rusting cars and refrigerators stuck in the banks. “Some people see rivers as trash dumps,” Grohoski observed.

On the Saranac in New York, she and Perkins faced a near calamity: they nearly lost their 17-foot Royalex canoe and gear when they wrapped the craft around a rock. But they managed to edge it off and pop it into shape. They had a bigger scare during the seven-mile, open-water Lake Champlain crossing, when they encountered strong winds and big waves. Had they capsized, they likely would have perished in the cold water, Grohoski said. “It was hairy.”

But there were glorious days of glass waters, blue skies, and bright sun.

One major “up” was traveling through communities and meeting people, many of whom wanted to learn about their adventure. In Saranac Lake, New York, they were interviewed by a newspaper reporter and invited in to quaff beers at a local pub. A few weeks later in Groveton, New Hampshire, they talked about their trip to a class of third-graders.

Grohoski remembers stunning rainbows and sunsets, swims “to freshen up,” a birthday celebration, and wildlife that seemed to grow more varied and abundant as they went farther east into more remote sections. They saw myriad waterfowl, bear cubs, beavers, eagles, fox, deer, and moose – 40 moose, in fact, over a three-day stretch on Maine’s Allagash.

Grohoski laughingly reports looking across the Allagash toward another campsite one morning and seeing what she thought were two fox standing, oddly, on a picnic table. Soon, approaching the campsite in their canoe, she and Perkins realized they were baby moose standing on spindly legs behind the table.

“I liked the variety,” of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, says Grohoski, who now guides trips along sections of the trail and says she may take the whole route again some summer if she can string together enough weeks.

Northern Forest Canoe Trail Map
Photo by Jerry Monkman.

Notes From the Trail

If you have stamina and time, by all means paddle the entire 740 miles of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. If you are busy, with only a day to spare, consider paddling short sections of the trail. Like the lucky child at the candy store, you will have many flavors from which to choose.

I sampled two sections of the trail last fall, on two very different afternoons, offering two very different experiences. My trips on the Nulhegan River in Vermont and the Saranac River in New York presented welcome challenges, neither relating to white water.

On a warm and sunny day last September, a fellow journalist from Montpelier, Vermont, and I set out on the tiny Nulhegan from a spot along Route 105, where it flows from its boggy source, Nulhegan Pond. It drains the Nulhegan basin, a patch of boreal woods and marshes. The Nulhegan is a barely navigable meandering stream – only eight feet wide in spots – that offers something cherished by the first European traders and trappers to visit this region: beavers.

We didn’t glimpse one, but in a mere eight miles, my colleague and I crossed 15 beaver dams, many with branches still holding leaves, suggesting the dams were newly constructed or repaired. On our four-hour trip, we portaged around these creations, sometimes pulled or pushed over them, grunting and groaning and generally bemoaning our fate.

I imagined beavers, as cartoon caricatures, hiding in the alders, watching our strained efforts, sniggering.

We also contended with mini-sandbars, fallen trees, and oxbows so pronounced I entertained the thought that the Nulhegan, to be even more contrary, had changed its mind during our trip and decided to empty into Lake Champlain to the west rather than the Connecticut River to the east.

Our trip ended in late afternoon with a climb up a steep bank to my truck parked near a bridge. We celebrated our accomplishment with soggy ham sandwiches and water from our water bottles, and we saluted the Nulhegan beavers, whose engineering skills matched their eagerness. They had not stopped us, however.

The Saranac trip occurred two months later, in mid- November, just before ice would be forming along the shoreline but weeks after fall’s colors had disappeared. My partner on this short kayaking journey was an old college friend, who suggested we put in just below the Village of Saranac Lake, not far from his home. So, on a cloudy afternoon, with temperatures in the 40s, we set off.

We had company: truck drivers along river sections that parallel Route 3, but also, for a stretch along the riverbank, three deer, their white tails waving to us until they bounded across marsh grass into the woods. A merganser led our little parade for a while, occasionally diving when we came too close.

This is a good fishing river, my friend asserted at one point, mentioning that he had hooked a 36-inch northern pike near rocks we had just passed. But the fish broke his line, he confessed, which suggested to me that: a) he was an inept fisherman; b) he didn’t know a submerged log from a pike; or c) he was lying. I asked how he could determine the length of a fish he hadn’t landed.

Wearing wool and windbreakers, we noted patches of fresh snow in the woods, viewed snow-covered Whiteface Mountain, passed bent birches that I guessed had been weighed down in their formative years by the epic ice storm of ’98.

In summer, my friend said, this stretch of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail is crowded with grown-up canoeists, kids in inner tubes, teens in bright yellow rubber rafts. Cheerful voices, song, and laughter echo down the river in mid-July, he said. We took our little trip in the cold quiet season, glad for the solitude, but mindful that a November dunking can be hazardous to health. Neither of us caught a cold.

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