It’s a frigid March morning in the Battell Preserve, one of the last vestiges of old-growth forest in Vermont’s Green Mountains, and the hemlocks are sounding off. Clinging to the slopes of a steep escarpment, the towering trees crack and split against the cold, shattering the cryogenic silence. The intermittent bursts are a decidedly vocal display for a swath of forest that’s gone largely undetected for 400 years. For decades, hikers on East Middlebury’s Abbey Pond Trail have passed by this ancient stand without so much of a clue to its existence. “Most people have never seen trees this large outside of the Discovery Channel,” says Steve Trombulak, a biology and environmental studies professor at Middlebury College. “These are honking big trees.”

The preserve was once part of a 30,000-acre tract that landowner-turned-conservationist Joseph Battell bequeathed to Middlebury College in 1915. He left strict instructions for his alma mater. In his last will and testament, Battell requested that the lands be preserved in their primitive state: specifically, no cutting. Instead, Middlebury foresters harvested nearly everything in sight, logging the old growth and clear-cutting large sections of mountainside. The Battell Preserve is all that’s left of his vision—109 acres of what could have been. “It’s difficult to overemphasize the rarity of old growth in Vermont,” says Trombulak. “These are conditions that people almost never see today. It’s like taking a look at a lawn and assuming that’s what a meadow looks like.”

Fortunately, someday we will look at a lot more meadows. In November Congress passed the New England Wilderness Act, adding 76,000 acres of public land in New Hampshire and Vermont to the National Wilderness Preservation System. This included the new 12,437-acre Battell Wilderness in the Green Mountain National Forest. It came a century late, but Battell got what he was after. Local Wilderness advocates even used his will to help make their case to Vermont’s congressional delegation. “The preserve is a wonderful ecological stepping stone,” says Jim Northup, executive director of Forest Watch, a Vermont-based advocacy group. “It shows people what the Battell Wilderness will look like one day, on a much grander scale.”

Federal Wilderness provides permanent statutory protection for the nation’s wildlife refuges, national parks and forests, and other public lands. Under this designation, wild lands are allowed to revert unimpeded back to their primitive states; logging and all mechanized equipment—for work or play—are verboten in Wilderness areas. The same rules apply to backcountry recreation; no mountain bikes, ATVs, or snowmobiles are permitted on lands with this protective overlay. (Management agencies are permitted to use motorized vehicles when human life is at risk.) Even trail work, the kind of dirt-under-the-fingernails labor perfectly suited for a chain saw, must be done by hand. “This keeps it wilder,” says Julie Wormser, AMC’s director of policy and the former Northeast regional director of The Wilderness Society. “If you’re using motorized equipment to manage a trail, you’re going to groom it more. If you’re using hand tools, you’re not. It has a real impact on the wilderness experience.”

Wildlife biologists make a compelling case for letting nature manage itself, a central theme of federal Wilderness. Old-growth forests are considered the most resilient and biologically diverse parts of the landscape. Worked over by natural disturbances like wind, fire, and insect damage, they contain a complex mix of live and dead trees, large snags, and blowdowns in various stages of decay. Think of them as outsize compost piles. The soil is richer. Many species of wildlife—from woodpeckers and warblers to pine marten and bear—are more at home in a forest left to its own devices. “That doesn’t mean they can’t survive in younger forests,” says AMC Staff Scientist David Publicover. “But old growth provides a type of habitat preferred by many species in our region.”

What little old growth remains provides scientists with valuable research opportunities. Less than one half of one percent of the Northeast’s original forests escaped the axe. Remnants like the Battell Preserve are windows into this past, providing researchers with a better picture of forest ecology as well a baseline by which they can measure humans’ impact on the landscape. Old-growth forests even inform today’s sustainable forestry practices; land managers are increasingly leaving mature forest habitat on lands used for timber production. “There are still biological processes in the forest that we don’t understand and won’t have the tools to understand for some time to come,” adds Peter Smart of Friends of Sandwich Range, a citizen advocacy group instrumental in passing the New England Wilderness Act. “Unless we leave some places undisturbed, we’re not going to have that resource.”

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