The unique camp-to-camp skiing opportunities have already helped AMC enhance the winter recreation season. Eric Stirling, a fourth-generation owner of West Branch Pond Camps, says that his family didn’t bother opening in the winter for nearly 15 years, but that changed in 2004. “[There’s] been a tremendous increase in the interest,” he says. “Having destination skiing seems to really appeal to folks.”
Other top priorities for the Roaches include designing and promoting single- and multi-day paddling trails. Second, Third, and Fourth Roach ponds, along with Trout Pond, are linked by the Roach River, and provide one of the tract’s most spectacular natural resources. An easily accessed campsite already exists on the eastern end of Second Roach, and a campsite on Third Roach can be reached from the water. Several additional primitive campsites could be set up as early as next year. With 38 miles of shoreline on the property’s nine large ponds, flatwater paddlers will have days—if not weeks—of exploration options.
The ponds and rivers are also a valuable fishing resource. Brook trout, land-locked salmon, lake trout, and splake (a brook/lake trout hybrid) are either native or stocked by Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. While fly-fishing workshops and excursions are a relatively new addition to the AMC calendar, angling is a familiar pastime for many members. “What we’ve discovered is that we have this whole contingent of people who love to fish,” says Graff. “So we’ve tapped into this other segment of our organization.”
A GREEN ENDOWMENT
The unique nature of the Maine Woods Initiative—the single largest conservation and recreation investment in AMC history—has inspired significant financial support, and in the future the organization plans for the project to be self-sustaining.
With the Campaign for the Maine Woods celebrating the $45 million mark, AMC is working to raise an additional $7 million in order to fund the acquisition of the Roach Ponds Tract as well as for the stewardship endowment. “The Maine Woods Initiative has inspired and energized our members,” says Don Dolben, campaign chair. “Many see it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to protect and make accessible a wild, vast, and varied landscape.”
In addition to providing funds for land purchases, the capital campaign will endow the project, supporting AMC’s ongoing land management, trail maintenance, and facility upgrades, as well as its Moosehead Schools Project, a commitment that every student in Piscataquis County will have three outdoor experiences with AMC before graduating.
Another aspect of the long-term plan involves timber harvesting. Through a careful inventory and planning process, AMC and its forest management consultant, Huber Resources Corp., will develop a plan for harvesting on the Roach Ponds Tract, as they have been doing on the KIW property for six years. “Our management is considerably different [than commercial management] in that we certainly do want to get an economic return, but at the same time we are trying to do it in a way that, over the long term, leads to the restoration of a more mature forest,” Publicover says.
BUILDING A LEGACY
Nearly a century ago Congress passed the Weeks Act, clearing the way for the creation of the White Mountain National Forest in an area that was being threatened by overharvesting and forest fires. AMC and its members played an integral role in shaping that legislation, and in making the Whites a recreational destination. Today, the Maine Woods Initiative is building a similar legacy.
Hunters and anglers have been venturing into the Maine Woods for decades, but over time many of the sporting camps that hosted them went out of business or were closed to the public. “We’re modernizing that [tradition] to say that the sporting camp is also for hiking, skiing, canoeing, all the other human-powered sports,” says Graff.
That modernization, which includes renaming AMC’s three camps as wilderness lodges, is part of a vision of sustainable tourism that aims to revive the tourist economy in the 100-Mile Wilderness. “We’ll measure success by the number of people coming to recreate in this forest, and its look and feel,” says Graff. “And I think 100 years from now people will look back, as they do today with the White Mountain National Forest, and rejoice in another vast protected landscape.”
By realizing this vision, AMC is providing visitors with a front-row seat for one of the most significant conservation efforts in Maine history. On a mountain bike ride from Medawisla, the scars that would have represented the future of an unprotected 100-Mile Wilderness are visible. Narrow fingers of cleared land reaching into the forest are evidence of the last industrial logging performed here, yet vibrant new growth is already on display, proof of the forest’s remarkable ability to heal itself.
At the top of a long climb along Shaw Mountain’s eastern slope, a look to the north reveals a welcome sight: A sea of greens and blues, now protected for future generations, stretches all the way to the jagged outline of Katahdin on the horizon.
