The Northern Forest has been called the country's first forest, as well as one of its last great forests. It spreads across 26 million acres from the western reaches of the Adirondacks through northern New Hampshire and Vermont to Maine's Atlantic coast. Naturalists, novelists, historians, journalists, and backwoods storytellers—some of the country's finest writers among them—have considered the landscape, the culture and history, and the future of the Northern Forest.
The following books can be considered essential reading for anyone interested in the Northern Forest. This list was compiled from suggestions by booksellers, editors, and librarians. There was such a remarkable degree of agreement among the experts that it's tempting to call these books classics.
You'll find some of these books in bookstores, others in libraries. Read one, collect the entire library, or select gifts for the North Country-lovers on your holiday list. As Thoreau, who tops the list, once said: "It is the safest to invest in knowledge, for the probability is that you can carry that with you wherever you go."
The Maine Woods. Henry David Thoreau. 1864.
Thoreau's lyrical, pointed musings on wild nature are based on three trips he took into Maine's interior between 1846 and 1857. For much of the writing about the Northern Forest, this collection, infused with a deep sense of wonder and loss, is the source—and, some say, better than Walden.
This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. Christopher Johnson. 2006. The Adirondacks: A History of America's First Wilderness. Paul Schneider. 1997. The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry. Thomas Starr King. 1859.
Two narrative histories—each focused on an outsized, romanticized landscape—address our complicated relationship with the Northern Forest and the "problem of wilderness" in the Northeast, where most of the forest has been cut at least once and long been affected by human activity. The White Hills is an ambulatory 19th-century history brimming with careful observation and rhetorical flights of fancy. The book, which includes chapters on the botany of the White Mountains by Edward Tuckerman, for whom Tuckerman Ravine is named, played a role in the history of the North Country by helping fuel the nation's desire for wild places.
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. William Cronon. 1983.
Cronon's consideration of early New England ecology is an acerbic corrective to Thoreau's lament for "primeval nature," reminding us that humans have lived in and acted upon the Northern Forest for millennia.
White Mountain Guide. Compiled and edited by Gene Daniell and Steven D. Smith. 2007. Forest and Crag. Laura and Guy Waterman. 2nd edition, 2003.
Two definitive trail guides: The AMC's White Mountain Guide's gemlike trail descriptions touch on geology, natural history, and changing approaches to the Northern Forest's best known mountain ranges. Forest and Crag unflaggingly tracks the history of hiking and trail-making, from mountains as "daunting terrible" to recreational playgrounds.
Not Without Peril: 150 Years of Misadventure on the Presidential Range of New Hampshire. Nicholas Howe. Tenth Anniversary Edition, 2009.
"Mountains were invented in the 19th century," writes Howe of the new interest in recreation that propelled people into the White Mountains—and created the Appalachian Mountain Club. Howe's chronicle of mountain tragedies begins in the same century, each tale a reminder of the deadly grandeur of the Northern Forest's crowning mountain range.
Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival. Bernd Heinrich. 2003. Nature Guide to the Northern Forest. Peter Marchand. 2010.
Heinrich's intimate portraits of animals that make their homes in the frozen woods of the North, such as the golden-crowned kinglet, become metaphors of "adaptability under adverse conditions." Marchand's recent book, updating and expanding on North Woods (1994), is a stand-alone reference.
Spiked Boots: Sketches of the North Country. Robert E. Pike. 1959. We Took to the Woods. Louise Dickinson Rich. 1942.
Two minor classics depict daily life in the North Country in a bygone era and the efforts humans make to adapt to the harsh economics of the North Woods.
The Survival of the Bark Canoe. John McPhee. 1975. An Adirondack Passage. Christine Jerome. 1998. A Walk in the Woods. Bill Bryson. 1998.
Three travelogues: Longtime New Yorker contributor McPhee floats his trip narrative, which intersects with Thoreau's journeys in Maine, on one tree in the Northern Forest, the white birch. Jerome follows in the wake of the century-old ghost of Nessmuck, a legendary Adirondack paddler. Bryson doesn't step into the Northern Forest until page 200, but his Appalachian Trail odyssey offers a geographical, and at times hysterical, perspective.
Second Growth. Wallace Stegner. 1947. Disappearances. Howard Frank Mosher. 1984. The Wisest Man in America. W. D. Wetherell. 1995.
The North Country becomes a character in three novels. Stegner sets his in a northern community that can no longer sustain itself without an annual influx of "summer folk." A pivotal scene in Wetherell's novel involves a chase across the Presidential Range in the middle of winter. The North Country, says one of Mosher's characters, was "not only a hard place to live in, but a treacherous place as well, full of unexpected and unavoidable horrors, including some that had nothing to do with furious winds and deep cold winters and swamps and mountains." In practically the next breath, he also calls it a "place of wonders."
Wandering Home. Bill McKibben. 2005.
A meditative walk from Vermont's Champlain Valley to the Adirondacks reveals lessons from New England on how to successfully inhabit a land, and from New York on how to leave it alone.
The Northern Forest. David Dobbs and Richard Ober. 1996.
Narrative journalism that profiles both the resilient North Woods and the resourceful people who inhabit them—while pointing toward a renewed, sustainable relationship.
Some of the country's finest writers have considered the landscape, the culture and history, and the future of the Northern Forest.
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