The Best Way to See New England's North Forest Canoe Trail

first appeared in Canoe & Kayak , March 2008
story by Jon Bowermaster
photos by Suzy Allman

The North Forest Canoe Trail is a 740-mile water trail that follows Native American travel routes from Old Forge, New York, across Vermont, Québec and New Hampshire, to Fort Kent, Maine. In addition to being a paddling route, the Trail celebrates the history of the Northern Forest.
According to Jon Bowermaster the best way to see America's longest water trail is one piece at a time.

MISSISQUOI, VERMONT
I'm paddling against a slow current, moving easily up the wide delta and into the 6,600-acre Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge. A 500-nest heron rookery is here, sheltered amidst the reeds and tall grass. Migratory blue heron come and go, ignoring me. Mergansers, Canada geese, and kingfishers head south in big V's. The winter ice is still a couple months away.

I feel myself starting to unwind.

Under the front bungee is a laminated map of this stretch of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. Map #4 (of 13) guides users along the 63 miles from Champlain to Enosburg Falls, Vermont. Since I'm alone I'll do a five-hour up-and-back route. If I had a week I'd be more than content to follow the water trail as it meanders through Vermont, across northern New Hampshire, and slices briefly into Quebec before paralleling the Maine/Canada border on its way northeast.

Over the past five years I've paddled sections of the 740-mile NFCT in each of the four states. I keep coming back to it for exactly the reasons its founders envisioned, treating it like a waterborne Appalachian Trail. I'm never going to take on its full length in one swoop; that's for others (about 12 people to date). I prefer to bite off a chunk here, a segment there—to drop in each year and see something new. The big new signs marking the start of many trail segments make this approach easy, as does the series of maps, perhaps the best in all my outdoor experience. Each map is a trove of interesting and essential information—how long each portage should take, where to find the lean-tos, an accounting of the animals that inhabit the woods and water, a brief history of the first people here and the lives they led.

The trail makes changing moods and attitudes easy. Which is exactly why I've come this day. Looking for easy.

OLD FORGE, NEW YORK
The NFCT officially begins at a nondescript dock behind the Chamber of Commerce parking lot in Old Forge Pond, New York. I launch there for a paddle in 2005 along the Fulton Chain—eight contiguous lakes named without breaking any pencil lead (First, Second, Third, etc.). This is the most populated part of the trail. For several hours each day I paddle past small cabins and elegant homes, all surrounded by a landscape of tall pine, hemlock, beech, and birch forests. These rivers were once major "timber highways," used to float logs to mills in the St. Lawrence and Champlain valleys. It's amazing to think that just 100 years ago all of this land was clear-cut. Now it is again covered in thick forest, and paddling this section through the 2-million-acre Adirondack Park is to bear witness to one of America's greatest environmental renovations.

One thing I love about this part of the country is the history that is all around. Native Americans left their names, if not their mark. Allagash, Mollidgewock, Saranac, Androscoggin, Mooselookmeguntic, Penobscot, Umbazooksus are all poignant reminders of who was here first. Timber magnates followed, as well as personages like Benedict Arnold and Henry David Thoreau.

Prefer the history of rivers to man? The Northern Forest is more than 10 times larger than Yellowstone National Park, and contains the headwaters of every major waterway in New England and New York, including the Connecticut, St. John, Penobscot, and Hudson rivers. Within its boundaries run 30,000 miles of brooks and streams.

Passing First and Second lakes, the human population winnows, then disappears. Connected by short water passageways, one lake spills easily into the next, until Fifth and Sixth, which require short overland portages. On the two-mile Brown's Tract Inlet, a curving brown stream created by beaver dams, I am quickly beyond sight or sound of man for an hour … until emerging to a cacophony of both on the southern end of Raquette Lake, where a renovated steam ship is filling with weekenders out for a white shoe booze cruise.

The next night it dumps buckets of rain, which I hope will help ease the August heat. I choose a spot in tall grass near the end of Brown's Tract and fall asleep, lulled by the pattering rain on my tent roof and flashing glow of a neon Rolling Rock sign in a nearby tavern window. I feel strangely at home.

After a short visit, I'm ready to float. Sliding my 42-pound Kevlar kayak onto the Androscoggin just beneath the bridge, I turn southwest. The river is wide and mostly flat, running past a wayside park where I pitch my tent. While tourism is the main draw today, it's not hard to imagine the scene here a century before, when all of these northern rivers were choked with logs. The Androscoggin, like the nearby Connecticut, used to run so thick with cut trees that you couldn't even see the water. Lively river towns boomed, hard-living loggers flocked to the region, and signs on the doors of the numerous taverns cautioned the lumberjacks to remove their spiked boots before entering. Today, I line my tent up alongside a rowdy group of college students tossing a Frisbee, out for a weekend paddle.

LONG LAKE, NEW YORK
My first trip on the NFCT, in the fall of 2002, I put in an hour's drive north of Old Forge. I'd been invited by two of the trail's biggest promoters, Rob Center and Kay Henry, to join a small group for a weekend paddle.

Answer your questions on paddling the NFCT at their website -

Our second night's camp is alongside Raquette Falls, requiring one of the more difficult portages on the trail. Though just 1.3 miles along a good path, the first quarter-mile leads straight up a steep incline. The last 100 yards is, thankfully, a gentle downhill, and our camp is marked by an Igloo cooler filled with icy beers we feel we've well earned.

The camp cook during this trip turns out to be one of the NFCT's founders. On a rainy morning alongside the Raquette River, his graying ponytail tucked into the back of his rain jacket, Maine guide Mike Krepner tells me his story over coffee and pancakes.

The idea of re-creating a water trail linking the old trading routes that cut across the Northern Forest originated in 1990, when Krepner and a pair of college friends, Ron Canter and Randy Mardres, realized that nearly all of the Northern Forest could be traversed the old way, by canoe. Krepner took the lead and began scouting the carries and connections in northwestern Maine, and then talking up the idea with local representatives of the National Park Service, through its Rivers and Trails Conservation Assistance Program. Soon he had mapped and blazed a 50-mile section in Maine, from Rangeley through the Richardson Lakes and down the Androscoggin River to a campsite called Mollidgewock.

Using colonial records and maps, spurred on by reading Eric Morse's 1969 Fur Trade Routes of Canada, Then and Now, the trio dubbed their idea simply Native Trails, a kind of waterborne trail that people could follow by canoe and kayak, a modern linkage of thousand-year-old travel routes faded to obscurity when roads and railroads replaced water as passageway. "It may have seemed illogical to others, to try and recreate something that had always been there," says Krepner. "But to us it was the most logical thing of all."

In the late 1990s, Krepner passed the organizational torch to former Mad River canoe execs Center and Henry, who capitalized on decades of business relationships to marshal scores of volunteers across all four states. Although the waterways are all public, many of the access points, portages, and campsites along the trail are privately held. In a six-year effort, Center, Henry, and coordinators for each of the 13 regions visited civic organizations, land trusts, municipalities and even family farms to secure access and campsites. Organizers erected more than 200 signs along the route, and with an "if-it's-in-writing-it-must-be-true" strategy, they printed maps detailing the route. At last, on June 4, 2005, (National Trail Day) the NFCT officially opened.

"Our goal now, our challenge," says Center as we paddle up the Raquette under a light drizzle, "is to go back to these communities, whether it's Inlet, New York or Eustis, Maine, and try and coordinate efforts among B&B's, inns, outfitters, restaurants, canoe and kayak rental companies." The idea, he says, is that people coming up from, say, New York City for a four-day weekend can easily access those resources. These days, the NFCT Web site is a virtual travel directory for paddlers. With a few clicks you can book a boat rental, a night's stay, and even find out where to check your email along the route.

Our takeout on a Sunday morning comes just before the entrance to the sprawling Saranac Lakes system. Before pulling our boats up a graveled ramp at Axton Landing we are surprised on river left by the appearance of one of the region's most prolific but clandestine citizens: A sizable moose munches grass as we float quietly by.

ERROLL, NEW HAMPSHIRE
The further north and east you get along the trail, the more wild and unpopulated it gets. The section in New Hampshire dips south from North Stratford before bottoming out along the Upper Ammonoosuc River and then heading north up the Androscoggin River towards Errol. The scenery along these big, once-heavily industrial rivers is equal part New England charm (read: bed and breakfasts with year-round wreaths on the door) and abandonment (tumbling wooden barns next to double-wides next to corn fields). The paddling is easy because you are mostly going with the current. It leads through big state parks and protected watersheds, including the beautiful, 20,500-acre Lake Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge. Any western-biased Americans out there with the impression that the only wild places left in the States are on the far side of the Mississippi deserve to come east for a couple weeks, with canoe or kayak, and have a peek.

Errol sits near the northeastern corner of the tall, narrow state. The put-in on the Androscoggin River flows beneath Route 26 and in the summer of 2005 I pull over at a picnic table above the beautiful, wide river. As I spread lunch out on the table, Ned McSherry sits down across from me, taking a break. He'd picked this spot for one of his small sales-and-rental shops on purpose: Marked by small riffles, this has been a perfect spot for whitewater rafters and kayakers for a couple of decades.

After a short visit, I'm ready to float. Sliding my 42-pound Kevlar kayak onto the Androscoggin just beneath the bridge, I turn southwest. The river is wide and mostly flat, running past a wayside park where I pitch my tent. While tourism is the main draw today, it's not hard to imagine the scene here a century before, when all of these northern rivers were choked with logs. The Androscoggin, like the nearby Connecticut, used to run so thick with cut trees that you couldn't even see the water. Lively river towns boomed, hard-living loggers flocked to the region, and signs on the doors of the numerous taverns cautioned the lumberjacks to remove their spiked boots before entering. Today, I line my tent up alongside a rowdy group of college students tossing a Frisbee, out for a weekend paddle.