[boom!]
The firing of cannons maked the official opening of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail earlier this month.
A ribbon cutting ceremony was held in Groveton, on the banks of the Upper Ammonoosuc River.
The river forms part of the Trail, a seven hundred forty mile network of historic waterways, stretching from Old Forge, New York to Fort Kent, Maine.
During speeches by the organizers, canoers, local officials and residents huddled inside a covered bridge to escape the rain and chill.
Lamphere: I think that the weather gods are actually blessing our trail today because we need this water to run these trails so I think it’s an appropriate baptism for the beginning of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail.
That’s Jen Lamphere, assistant director of the Trail.
For the past five years, her small team has been organizing efforts in four states and two countries.
They’ve mapped waterways, developed trail guides, built campsites, and gained permission to cross private property.
The trail has a history that reaches back thousands of years, serving as trade and hunting routes for Abanaki and other native American groups.
Coos Economic Development Director Peter Riviere says the paddling died out when the mills took over the water ways.
Riviere: The tanneries dumped their dyes, paper mills dumped their sludge into it, every community dumped their sewage into it. This river literally you couldn’t see there. There were things suspended in the water. It wasn’t very enjoyable.
Riviere says waste water treatment plants and environmental protection laws have turned what was once called the most scenic sewer in New England, into majestic, pristine trout waters ideal for paddling.
Though the trail might represent history and culture, or economic promise to some, for three friends from Maine, the waterways define one of the most extraordinary adventures of their lives.
New Hampshire Public Radio’s Kerry Grens met up with some paddlers who are traveling the entire length of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail.
And has this update on their trip.
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[ ♪ music ♪ ♫]
Musicians Slattery and Stewart play to a dwindling group at the trail’s opening day festivities.
The chilly drizzle chased many home, abandoning their paddling plans for the afternoon.
But three people at the event, wearing parkas, water sandals, and deep tans seem perfectly at home in this weather.
TP: You need water to fill the rivers, so that’s how it goes.
That’s Tommy Perkins.
On May ninth, he, his sister Pam Perkins and childhood friend Nicole Grohoski set out to paddle the full length of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail.
TP: It was good the first couple days, two weeks it rained pretty much every day. It got good for a little while and now it’s been raining lately again.
They started out in Old Forge, New York, and so far, have paddled and portaged more than three hundred miles: across the Adirondacks, Lake Champlain, and what Pam Perkins calls the Grande Portaaage.
PP: Which is nine miles up a mountain. We thought nine miles. It’s something like 6 to 9 miles of portaging.
Which means they had to pull their canoes out of the water and carry them.
The trip through the Northern Forest Canoe Trail is ambitious.
It takes two months, includes 55 miles of portaging, and many sections of uphill paddling.
From the beginning, Pam Perkins explains, the trip has been a challenge.
PP: A couple days leaving Saranec Lake, when we first start hitting white water. Nicole and I going along, we’re doing ok, it’s not a particularly difficult section of white water, it was probably class 2 white water we were running at the time.
But Perkins says she and Grohoski didn’t communicate as well as they should have, and they ended up slamming into a rock.
PP: And the boat bent in half around the rock and I was just devastated bc this is a week and a half into the trip and the boat is bent in two. And we’re just…I felt like the whole trip is over, what are we going to do. But Tommy comes bounding up the river…
And like a white water super hero, Tommy Perkins popped the canoe off the rock, with hardly a scratch on it.
Perkins’s training as a rafting guide has been essential to the trip.
Some sections of the trail he wouldn’t recommend to people who don’t have swiftwater training—like the passage upstream on the Clyde River.
TP: It was pretty dangerous. We were going up class two rapids for about 3 miles continuously. As challenging as it is, but there was a lot of blow downs and strainers on the sides of the river and places where you couldn’t line. Nicole was attempting to walk over strainers with current going through them.
Perkins calls strainers—which are trees with water flowing under them—one of the most dangerous hazards on the river.
Ultimately the women decided to portage their boat.
NG: Sometimes I think maybe I bit off more than I should have. But other times I know I’m not going to give up. So I just do it.
Nicole Grohoski says that there have been just as many pleasant moments as unpleasant ones.
Like passing a heron rookery at the Mississquoi River delta, spotting a swimming weasel, and being greeted by cows along the way.
Grohoski: I think my favorite thing really is the diversity of it. In its whole. I can wake up one morning and it will be sunny and we’re cruising across a lake. But then later in the day it’s raining, we’re going up river, I’m seeing animals all over the place. Every day is like 6 to 10 days to me. The way that I look at time now is totally different. I can’t pin down what’s a minute, what’s an hour. You just keep moving. And I like that.
Before the trip, Nicole Grohoski worked as a cartographer.
Along the way she’s been sending data to the Northern Forest Canoe Trail—letting the staff know if a portage isn’t marked well or if ledges haven’t been mapped.
Pam Perkins is also using the trip to put her skills to work.
As part of her senior project at College of the Atlantic, she’s developing lesson plans based on their experiences, and posting them on a website.
PP: The first lesson plan I’ve done so far was on navigation, compass use and maps. This coming week we’re doing river sciences and invasive plant species. Native American trails, fractals in nature, and river writers. There’s a little bit of everything.
In about a month, the trio expects to float in to Fort Kent, Maine and back to their normal lives.
Nicole Grohoski recommends that if people are looking for an intense, authentic adventure, this is it.
Grohoski: Yeah, you could go to Alaska and you can do the Yukon, but heck you’re going downstream the whole time. How hard can that be? People have asked me a lot, because I biked across the country last summer, how this compares. And, I think it is ten times more challenging. You know you’re going to be on a road, you know you’re going to hit a town, you know that road will not be any steeper than 7-10 percent grade and you’re going to get over it if you keep spinning your legs around. This is a whole other…here you never know what you’re going to hit around the bend. It’s not going to be pavement.
But, much to their relief, their final stretch through Maine is expected to be downstream.
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