MOOSE ALLEY, N.H. – This is where settled New England ends, where it rolls into the wilderness and lakes and ridges of the great North Woods.

David Houghton steers his truck down a hardscrabble road turned white. Flakes cling to the windshield and the black spruces sag, heavy with snow. A bog looms, stumps rising ghostly through the ice.

Soon Houghton hopes to buy a large chunk of this vastness.

“This is really the last great place.” Houghton has stopped his truck and waded through knee-high snow to the lip of an ice-covered lake. “We’re going to put a kind of box around this place, and preserve it in perpetuity.”

This is no woodland pipe dream. Houghton’s group, the Trust for Public Land, is engineering the purchase of this northern nob of New Hampshire from the International Paper Co. in one of the largest nonprofit land purchases in New England history.

The federal and New Hampshire governments, the Trust for Public Land and the Nature Conservancy plan to buy 171,500 acres of timberland and headwater lakes along the Canadian border, securing forever a home for coyotes and moose, for loons and bears.

The sale, which is expected to be completed by March, sounds another loud shot in the struggle between developers and environmentalists for control of the North Woods. This forest, the last great stretch of wilderness in the eastern United States, spans 26 million acres from northern New York, east across Vermont and New Hampshire, to Maine.

Conservation battles here differ from those in the Rocky Mountain West. Most Western lands are federally owned; the bulk of the Eastern woods is privately held. The American West resonates with the romance of limitless possibility; the Eastern forests are edged on every side by long-settled land.

The North Woods have been paper company land, by and large. But sugar maples and yellow birch grow slowly in these cold climes, the mills are antiquated, and many companies have overharvested and want to sell.

Potential buyers of North Woods land tend to hail from two camps. In one camp are developers and millionaires, who would build their designer kingdoms with runways and boat launches and who often fence off their land. The gilded 1990s poured fuel on this land rush: In Maine, land and corporate investors own about 15 percent of Maine’s timberland, up from 1 percent in 1992.

In the other camp are the land trusts and environmentalists, who would keep these forests as wild and unfenced as possible. They are in near-constant negotiation to purchase tens of thousands of acres each year.

“This is an extraordinary time for conservation of the North Woods,” says Jym St. Pierre, director of RESTORE: The North Woods, a nonprofit group that is trying to patch together a national park in the Maine woods. “Millions of acres of the last wild forest region in the East are changing hands more quickly than at any time in our history.”

As a boy, John Harrigan could run on snowshoes with surpassing speed. Give him a five-minute start from the forest and he could beat a snowmobile home.

He spends more time these days in the newsroom as editor of the News and Sentinel newspaper (motto: “Independent but not Neutral”) than in the gray-streaked winter woods on his farm outside Colebrook, N.H. Still, he’s insistent about the stakes in the land trust deal.

The farming soil is rocky and the mills are dying; nothing pays much here. But the ridges are haunting and one can hunt, fish and hike anywhere, and that has its compensating virtues.

“You have to be crazy or committed to live here,” Harrigan says over eggs at the Wilderness Restaurant in Colebrook. “On the other hand, we live in a temperate rain forest, a real fairyland.”

The paper companies recognized this and for decades allowed free access to their lands, even publishing trail maps. A trespassing sign was as rare as a neon sign.

That has begun to change. Developers and vacationers are moving north of the White Mountains – which draw more visitors each year than Yosemite and Yellowstone combined. They are putting up fences and posting signs. It’s time to buy and preserve, or prepare to bow and scrape before some wealthy landowner from Boston or Connecticut.

“It’s deeply embedded in our psyches,” Harrigan says, “that we can go anywhere without having to doff our caps or tug our forelock to some landed gentry.”

That conviction has set in motion a larger cultural shift. When International Paper announced it was prepared to sell its forests and lakes and the Trust for Public Land stepped forward to negotiate, many residents nodded a cautious assent.

The natives in this conservative corner of New Hampshire are not terribly fond of tree-huggers. But they preferred a dance with the environmentalists and government to the prospect of losing the land forever.

And the Trust for Public Land moved carefully to allay local fears. Houghton, the trust’s northern field director, emphasized that despite the group’s commitment to forest preservation, it would not try to make the entire 171,500 acres off-limits to logging.

Forestry may be dying, but the hulking Ethan Allen furniture plant in Canaan still employs 700 people.

“Conservation is not inherently a motherhood and apple pie issue here,” notes Houghton. “At first, people here feared an outsider plot. We had to earn their trust.”

The political establishment followed. Republican Sens. Robert C. Smith and Judd Gregg joined Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen in embracing the deal. They are committed to finding tens of millions of federal and state dollars to seal it.

The trust must close the deal to buy the land from International Paper by March. The total price would be between $42 million and $44 million, with the federal and state governments putting up as much as $12 million each. A new logging company, Lyme Timber, would pay another $12 million for the right to continue taking out some trees. And the Trust for Public Land and The Nature Conservancy would combine to contribute about $8 million.

“I’m truly proud of the way the region jumped on it,” says Harrigan. “It’s the last chance to save this great land of ours.”

A curious thing happened on the way to the deal: The Trust for Public Land wound up stirring more discomfort among some environmentalists than among residents of the north country.

The deal sets aside only 25,000 of the 171,500 acres as “ecological preserves,” which are pure wilderness. The participating timber company, Lyme Timber, will harvest trees on the remainder of the land and may clear-cut and spray herbicides on patches of the land, as long as it is done away from lakes and roads. Hunters will tramp across the hills, and a snowmobile trail will thread its way across a corner of an ecological preserve.

These compromises enrage Jamie Sayen, who lives in the north country and edits the Northern Forest Forum. The timber companies have spent more than a century, he says, cutting trees at two or three times the rate of regrowth. That has left a dwarfish and diminished forest that needs decades of uninterrupted healing.

It’s time to declare the woods off-limits, he says, and let the federal government subsidize the local economy until healthy trees return.

“This deal is Orwellian conservation,” Sayen says. “We’ve cheapened the word and the notion of land trusts. If the public knew what they were getting for their money, they’d be scratching their heads.”

Perhaps, though, as Harrigan notes, it is difficult to imagine the Trust for Public Land sealing the deal by arguing for the death and burial of the timber industry. And as land values rise, private trusts can no longer afford to buy such large swaths of land without government help.

“If we didn’t focus on creating a working forest, the wheels would have come off this deal,” says Alan Front, vice president of the Trust for Public Land. “It’s fine to say, ‘Don’t cut another tree,’ but if we didn’t buy now, we’d lose it.”