N.Y.-to-Maine canoe trail emphasizes history

BRUNSWICK, Vt. – This highway through the north country is shady and quiet, with tree limbs dipping low overhead and snapping turtles skimming through the shallow water.

It’s a rural, winding section of the Connecticut River, part of a 740-mile water trail that was used for hundreds of years by American Indians and European settlers. Now, a Waitsfield nonprofit group and a legion of volunteers are re-establishing the trail for recreation.

The Northern Forest Canoe Trail stretches from Old Forge, N.Y., to Fort Kent, Maine, with about half the mileage in Maine.

It starts off with the Saranac River in the Adirondacks, and takes travelers across Lake Champlain and up the Missisquoi and Clyde rivers and down the Nulhegan in Vermont.

The trail passes through Lake Memphremagog, taking paddlers into Quebec, and then goes into New Hampshire on the Connecticut, Upper Ammonoosuc, and Androscoggin rivers, and into Maine on the Rangeley lakes, Moosehead Lake, and the Penobscot, Allagash and St. John rivers.

In between are dozens of other less-known rivers and lakes and 62 spots where paddlers must carry, or portage, their boats for a total of 55 miles. The paddling ranges from novice to expert.

“If you want to do the whole thing, you’re going to have to do your work,” said Ross Stevens, a volunteer who is responsible for a section of the canoe trail in Vermont and New Hampshire, as he paddled a canoe down the river on a hot day earlier this month.

Stevens, who is the director of the Northeast Kingdom Conservation Service Corps in East Charleston, has the job of coming up with signs marking points of historical interest on his section of the trail, helping the directors of the trail design a map for the section, and organizing maintenance for the section.

Ultimately, every section of the trail will be maintained and mapped. The first maps – one for each end of the trail – are due to come out in September. Organizers would like someday to have campsites established every 10 or 15 miles as well.

Reviving the Northern Forest Canoe Trail was the idea of three paddlers in the 1970s. In the late 1990s, the founders of Mad River Canoe in Waitsfield, Rob Center and Kaye Henry, sold their company and decided to make the re-establishment of the trail their next project.

Center and Henry started a nonprofit organization that raises money and coordinates the mapping and signage for the trail. Henry expects work on the trail to be finished in two years.

Meanwhile, volunteers like Stevens are exploring their section of trail and talking with local historians and others to determine what features should appear on signs and in maps.

On his recent trip down the Connecticut, Stevens chatted with some fishermen who were standing in the thigh-deep river and watched for moose. The Vermont sections of the trail are heavily agricultural with a few passes through towns such as Island Pond. From the river, farmers could be seen at work in their fields.

Stevens, a native of Island Pond, is drawn to the history of the trail. American Indians traveled in birch bark canoes from the interior, where they had done their trapping, to the salt water in Maine, where they would trade their furs for fish.

Later, the French and the English settlers used the trail for travel. Settlers built homes and villages along the waterways, and used the water for commerce such as mills and logging. The trail takes travelers past many vestiges of that history, including 45 towns and a working paper mill in Gilman. The trail goes under a hotel in Island Pond.

The trail organizers know of one person, Donny Mullen, who has traveled the whole length.

Mullen, 32, did the trip four years ago in a home-built, wood-and-canvas canoe, sometimes with friends, other times alone. It took him 50 days.

“The perspective is very different,” said Mullen, a former Outward Bound instructor who lives in St. George, Maine. After passing through an urban area such as Plattsburgh, N.Y., or Newport, “it doesn’t take more than a couple of bends in a river to put you out into the woods and make you feel like you’re out there and removed,” Mullen said.

The longest portage, in Maine, was a little less than five miles. Much of the paddling was upriver.

“It was a neat trip; it was very difficult,” said Mullen, who is writing a book about the experience. “To be out on a 50-day trip had its own challenges; to be on your own had another set of challenges.”

Like Stevens, Mullen was drawn by the history of the route.

“I have this enjoyment thinking about how these routes were paddled by people and what they had to go through,” Mullen said. “It wasn’t that long ago when, if you were going to northern Maine, that’s how you were traveling.”

Several canoe trails have been established in recent years in North America. The Northern Forest Canoe Trail is different because it emphasizes the history of the area, and because it was set up in part to help the struggling towns of the north country, said Kate Williams, the nonprofit group’s executive director.

“Part of our purpose is to celebrate the history and settlement along the trail,” Williams said. “We don’t always pick the route that’s the most wilderness.”

Center sees the Northern Forest Canoe Trail as a water-based version of the Appalachian Trail, the famed 2,174-mile hiking trail that runs between Georgia and Maine. As such, most people are expected to do it in sections, not all at once.

That’s what Stevens expects he’ll do. His job and family probably wouldn’t make a 50-day trip practical, he said. But “I’m intrigued by the whole idea,” Stevens said. “I love the idea that any section I’m on, I could keep going.”