ISLAND POND, Vermont — The Clyde is a small river as it courses through this remote Vermont village. It flows directly underneath the clapboard-sided Clyde River Hotel, built in 1866, and wends through increasingly wild country to the north and west.
Exploring the Clyde on this late summer day are Rob Center and Kay Henry, who paddle their canoe deftly among overhanging alders in the more narrow reaches, gracefully slipping over a beaver dam at one point, plunging into the quick water below. The river opens into a broad lowland valley, mountains in the distance, osprey and kingbirds overhead, purple spikes of pickerelweed on either side of the channel.
It is an enchanting afternoon, and five miles of the Clyde’s spruce-fringed scenery, both urban and wild, amounts to a microcosm view of the emerging Northern Forest Canoe Trail, perhaps the most ambitious new waterway trail in the United States.
After nearly four years of hands-on work, much of it done quietly and without publicity to avoid controversy, the 740-mile trail from New York through Maine is no longer a vision but a tangible, if still fragmentary, reality. Whole sections are in place, and, with measurable progress this summer on portage routes and primitive campsites, it appears to have achieved critical mass.
Center, executive director of the trail project, said it is on schedule for completion by the summer of 2005, at a total projected cost of about $1 million, the great bulk of the money from corporate and individual contributions. “Momentum is definitely on our side,” he said.
It is a project of impressive scope, involving public and private institutions throughout the region. Progress is measured one access point, one portage trail and one campsite at a time.
The trail extends from Old Forge, New York, in the Adirondacks, east across Lake Champlain, through Vermont, into Quebec, back into Vermont, into New Hampshire, and, finally, through Maine.
It runs through some of the nation’s most famous and historic waters, including parts of the Saranac River, Lake Champlain, the Connecticut River, the Rangeley Lakes and the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.
In all, it comprises 22 rivers and streams, as well as 56 lakes and ponds, and links them together with 62 portage routes totaling 55 miles. That is 55 miles with canoe or kayak over your head and gear on your back. Nearly half the trail is in Maine, much of it through wild country.
In part because the new trail piggybacks on some already popular canoe routes, including the Saranac and the Allagash rivers, the entire trail can be paddled today, though you might have trouble finding campsites and easily identifiable portage routes along less popular waterways. It is free to anyone with a boat, the will and the skill.
In places, the trail is dominated by long stretches of lazy flowing flat water that even a novice canoeist or kayaker would find comfortable and safe. Parts of the Clyde are like that. But elsewhere there are challenging rapids and falls, and, on the large lakes, the possibility of huge waves during stormy weather.
Anyone planning to do the whole trail should be skilled in whitewater paddling, able to pole a canoe upriver, able to manipulate a canoe through dangerous water from shore with a rope and be willing to carry a canoe and gear long distances along the portage routes.
After honing every boating skill, conditioning will be important. “When they get home from work they should put a boat over their head and run around the neighborhood for a bit,” Center suggested. “And when they get done with that, put a pack on their back.”
Doing the whole trail in one grand outing would certainly be grueling. Travel in either direction means paddling upriver on some of the streams, which can be arduous, especially if the water is high. Crossing Lake Champlain can be dangerous on all but the calmest days. And some of the portages will test the will of almost any traveler: After ascending the North Missisquoi into Quebec, paddlers face a 6.9-mile portage, known fittingly as the “grand portage.” The portage between the Upper Ammonoosuc and Androscoggin Rivers in New Hampshire is 3.5 miles along a state highway.
Perhaps the only comparable water routes are those of Lewis and Clark, who 200 years ago this year paddled up the Missouri on their way to the Pacific by waterways and trails, or the long fur-trading canoe routes of the voyageurs of the Great Lakes region and Canada.
Eric Eckl, director of media affairs for American Rivers, a national conservation group, said canoe trails are an increasingly popular way to encourage people to explore and protect rivers, but the Northern Forest Canoe Trail appeared to be in its own league.
The Clyde, which flows out of Island Pond and empties into Lake Memphremagog on the Canadian border, demonstrates neatly the philosophy of the Northern Forest trail, which not only celebrates waterways for their inherent value but emphasizes the history and culture associated with them.
Center, a former executive with Mad River Canoe, and Henry, his wife, a founder and former president of the company, have gone canoeing all over the world. She is chairwoman of the board overseeing the project, and both she and her husband devote considerable energy to its completion. They already have paddled about a quarter of it.
“What I’ve been most intrigued with is the kaleidoscope of experiences one can get from paddling sections of this trail,” Center said.
The trail passes through cities and towns, through national wildlife refuges, state parks, private preserves and dense wilderness areas, some with campsites and portage routes already in place.
The idea for the trail was hatched by three friends, Mike Krepner, Randy Mardres and Ron Canter, in the late 1980s.
“We decided it was time to put together some sort of recreational canoe route that could be used for educational purposes that could demonstrate to people the convergence of history and geography,” Krepner said. He now is president of Native Trails, a nonprofit organization in Waldoboro, Maine, which identifies, documents and, when possible, works to preserve “pre-mechanized” travel routes.
“In the really early stages, it was going to be a canoe trail across Maine,” he said. But by the early 1990s, as big forest-products companies began selling off huge tracts of land in northern New England and upstate New York, the fate of what came to be called the Northern Forest emerged as an issue.
Krepner suggested that the trail be expanded west into the Adirondack Mountains of New York, considered the western boundary of the Northern Forest thick with spruce and fir trees. From the first, the idea was to piece together historic canoe routes used by American Indians.
Old Forge, New York, is the trail’s western terminus. The eastern terminus, Fort Kent in Maine, is a remote town on the Canadian border.
The historical associations with the trail are rich. Much of the route in the area of the Moose River, Moosehead Lake and the Penobscot River in Maine was heavy with American Indian canoe travel, Krepner said. Lake Champlain was the scene of Revolutionary War fighting. Rogers’ Rangers used the valley of the Clyde and the nearby Nulhegan as a travel route during the French and Indian War.
Here in Island Pond, about 280 miles from the western end of the trail, a major international rail yard emerged in the 19th century, complementing the area’s logging economy, said Cliff Biron, past president of the Island Pond Historical Society.
Already, the trail is likened to the Appalachian Trail, perhaps the best known hiking trail in the United States, and there are similarities.
But Krepner, noting that some hikers approach the Appalachian Trail as a physical feat, to be done in one season-long hike, said it is more important that paddlers on the canoe trail take the time to appreciate the surroundings.
“Get out there and see the stuff,” he said. “... It is much more important to do it and learn what is there, see what is there.”
Center said trail organizers did not actively seek publicity because they wanted first to establish a relationship with people along the route who will be critical in ensuring that the trail is welcome in their communities. An extensive network of local organizations supporting the trail is now in place. (The Web site for the project is www.northernforestcanoetrail.org.)
Planners, meanwhile, pored over maps trying to identify logical points for campsites, taking into account the difficulty of river travel. Unlike the Appalachian Trail, which has three-sided shelters available, campsites on the canoe trail are simple, in part because any riverside structure faces destruction in the event of a major spring flood.
Most people are expected to paddle the new trail in segments over the course of many seasons, but a few will try to do it in one back-breaking summer.
Donnie Mullen, 31, of St. George, Maine, a writer and instructor of the Outward Bound organization, has done it all, in a 16-foot wood-and-canvas canoe he built himself. It took him 50 days, not counting a six-day layover when he cut his foot badly while splitting wood at a campsite in Maine.
