Publications

AMC Outdoors, April 2003

The Grafton Loop Trail began as a vision — a trail-building vision similar to one you may have had while gazing from a scenic mountain lookout. This one, however, came from a man who bought the scenic mountain — then hiked it more than 450 times.

About 10 years ago, Robert Stewart of Cumberland, Maine, purchased 1,400 acres of land on 3,133-foot Puzzle Mountain. Rising above the hamlet of Newry on the Androscoggin River, Puzzle commands impressive views of the Mahoosuc Range. "I just love it up there," says Stewart. "It's a ledgy peak. I'd bushwhack up it all the time, then go off exploring."

Stewart's brush-crashing led to brush-clearing. "With a few friends, I started to build a trail system," he says. "Every time I discovered a new ledge, I just had to build a trail there — we ended up building 20 miles of trail going all over the place."

One of those paths led to an outcrop below the summit on the mountain's northwest slope. "It was here that I could see all of Grafton Notch," Stewart recalls. "I had climbed all of the peaks in view — I thought, wouldn't it be great to have a trail connecting them all?"

"I had no concept of what it would take to build such a trail," he admits. "But I was very optimistic that it could be done — and done quickly."

Stewart contacted Demrow, then the AMC's Director of Trails, and Landon Fake of the Outward Bound Hurricane Island School. "At first they thought I was nuts about the feasibility of the trail," he says. But Demrow and Fake didn't entirely discount the possibilities. After all, here was a private landowner offering a substantial piece of mountain real estate for the public's enjoyment.

"I thought [the trails] were problematic," Fake recalls. "They don't really go anywhere. [But] I started thinking about how we could connect them to the Appalachian Trail."

Stewart contacted Steve Spencer of the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands to look into that very query. The AT traverses eight miles of state reserve land in the Mahoosuc Range. The bureau had long studied the possibility of constructing new trails in the region. With Stewart's offer of Puzzle Mountain as a destination, an extended ridge trail began to look viable.

Further encouraging the prospects was that 8,000 acres of adjoining land belonged to Hancock Timber Resource Group (HTRG). The AMC had worked with Hancock before, to update and expand trails on lands the AMC once owned on Tumbledown Mountain, and they're very receptive to this type of project, says Demrow, who now runs his own trailwork consulting company.

Fake began thinking "this trail just might be doable."