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

A kayaker launches in downtown Saranac Lake

DEAD RIVER, MAINE
The next morning I'm back in the Land Cruiser, crossing into Maine at the southern edge of Umbagog Lake, where the scenery grows wilder with each mile and "Moose Crossing" signs begin.

Mid-afternoon I am standing in my kind of church—the 250-acre Cathedral Pines campground, surrounded by towering, 100-foot-plus old growth red pines. There are scores of them, rising high, their shadows falling over man-made Flagstaff Lake. As the sun sets I paddle peacefully down the Dead River and onto the reservoir. Other than a few bank fishermen, I don't see anyone during a two-hour stretch. Once through Flagstaff Lake, the Dead picks up again and drops in a dramatic falls near the Old Dead River Dam, a definite portage.

This is the "other" Maine. Most tourists—thus most tourist money—end up on the Atlantic coastline. Here the summer season is short, just eight weeks, and tour operators of all kinds need to hustle to make 70 percent of their annual money in those two months. Seemingly every pickup truck has a canoe on its rack.

The following day I drive to Moosehead Lake, the biggest in Maine. A spur trail from the town of Greenville at the south end joins the main trail at the Kineo Peninsula about halfway up the lake, near the site of the Mount Kineo Hotel, which burned down five different times over the years.

John Willard, 56, is almost a true Mainer, having lived on Moosehead Lake since he was 18. In 1969, his father bought The Birches, a rustic 12-cabin lodge on the lakeshore, and John now runs it. A former raft guide, he's spent weeks and months on the back roads and rivers of these woods; today he owns 15,000 acres of forest, with an eye on both future development and conservation. He is on the board of directors and an enthusiastic promoter of the NFCT.

"It was the canoe trail that reopened my eyes to just how beautiful, and just how connected, these wildernesses are," he says. "By tracing sections of this wilderness, by staying on the water, it has reminded me—though I've lived here for nearly four decades—just how spectacular this part of the world is." During the course of two days spent exploring by canoe and small plane, Willard keeps returning to his own surprise, sometimes sounding almost bewildered by the spectacularness all around. "Can you believe how beautiful this is?" he shouts from the stern of our canoe.

The scene takes us back to Henry David Thoreau, who tramped these woods and rivers for years. "Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed and forever untamable Nature, or whatever else men call it," Thoreau wrote more than a century ago. "Nature here can be something savage and awful, though unbelievably beautiful."

MISSISQUOI, VERMONT
At the end of my five-hour paddle, dark clouds gather and begin to spit rain, but now I could care less if the sky is blue or grey. My hands are stiff from the cold water, my face is sunburned; I'm good-tired and happy as I slide the kayak onto the top of the car. Starting the engine, I let it run for a few minutes as I tighten cam straps, letting the heat inside ratchet up. Home is just two hours away.

As I cinch down the kayak I'm already thinking about which chunk of the NFCT I'll bite off next. Reaching into the Land Cruiser I get out the NFCT's map #6—the section of the trail that slices briefly into Quebec—and lay it across the hood. Next weekend? Why not Lake Memphremagog, which looks both unpronounceable and very, very tempting?