From the air, the Roach Ponds Tract in Maine’s 100-Mile Wilderness is all greens and blues.
The greens are a mixture of trees that blend into the surrounding properties, obscuring the boundaries that make these 29,500 acres a critical link between protected lands. The blues are the nine large ponds on the property, which reflect an expanse of sky that is broken only by the majestic Katahdin, 25 miles in the distance.
After a four-year process, AMC recently finalized the purchase of this tract from Plum Creek Timber for $11.5 million. The land connects to AMC’s 37,000-acre Katahdin Iron Works (KIW) property, purchased in 2003, and provides a wealth of additional recreation, conservation, and education opportunities. The significance of the purchase goes well beyond the boundaries of AMC’s land, however, as the Roach Ponds Tract helps to connect a patchwork of conserved land in an area long threatened by development and forest fragmentation.
AMC’s
Maine Woods Initiative has developed more quickly and effectively than expected, says AMC Deputy Director Walter Graff, who has been overseeing the project since its inception. “We never would’ve thought that within six years of this project that we’d have three wilderness lodges and camps, that we would have protected 70,000 acres,” he says. “It’s pretty remarkable.”
Much still remains to be done to restore AMC’s land to a more wild state and to work with local partners to ensure the protection of surrounding areas, but in the meantime two AMC lodges are open, with a third scheduled to open in 2011, and the entire property remains open to the public.
“My sense is that, increasingly, people want to experience a remoteness that they don’t get in their everyday life,” says Gerry Whiting, AMC’s project manager for the Maine Woods Initiative. “[Maine offers] a different character of backcountry experience that you don’t find at other AMC destinations.”
A CONSERVATION PRIORITY
Lily Bay Road runs north along the eastern edge of Moosehead Lake from Greenville toward the small village of Kokadjo (“Population: Not Many,” a road sign declares). A right turn just before town leads down a dusty road along First Roach Pond. Private camps and cleared lots line the shore, evidence of the increasing rate of development in this area.
By contrast, a right turn just beyond Kokadjo leads toward Second Roach Pond, where just one cluster of buildings is nestled on the otherwise pristine 12.5 miles of shoreline. Medawisla Wilderness Lodge and Cabins has been under AMC management since 2006, but until now was surrounded by Plum Creek forestland, limiting AMC’s ability to develop a trail network around the lodge. Now, Medawisla represents the northern anchor of AMC’s property, which measures 20 miles north to south.
The size of the property not only lends itself to extensive recreational opportunities, but also allows for the long-term survival of wildlife in a way that smaller tracts of land would not. “Maine’s North Woods offer one of the greatest opportunities in the eastern U.S. for conservation on a landscape scale,” says Mike Tetreault, executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Maine. “That means there is still the chance to preserve largescale, functioning ecosystems—wetlands, forests, and rivers that are rich in species and viable for the long term.”
For decades the 100-Mile Wilderness region, so named for the final, remote stretch of the Appalachian Trail (AT), has been anchored by Katahdin and Baxter State Park. The only other protected land in the area was the narrow AT corridor, which snaked through a vast industrial forest. In recent years much of that forest changed hands: Between 1997 and 2007, 6 million acres of forest—more than a quarter of Maine’s land—changed ownership. This rapid turnover within the largest forest ecosystem east of the Mississippi River made the 100-Mile Wilderness an area of focus for state-based and national conservation organizations.
When AMC, The Nature Conservancy, the Forest Society of Maine, and Plum Creek announced in 2006 a plan to conserve nearly 400,000 acres in the Moosehead Lake Region—part of a larger concept plan presented by Plum Creek to Maine’s Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC)—it included the right for AMC to purchase the Roach Ponds Tract upon the plan’s approval. (AMC later negotiated to be able to complete the purchase regardless of whether the LURC decision is appealed.)
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