DOWN EAST magazine • April 2022
In 1972, some sections of Great Northern Paper’s “West Branch Haul Road” were little more than a line on a topo map. Most access was traditional via canoe, as the Wabanaki navigated the woods for thousands of years, as Thoreau saw the country in the 1850s with his Penobscot guides, and as most recreationists still traveled up north prior to the ’70s. “Shifting from the log drives on the rivers to the log drives on the roads was a tectonic change for the half of Maine in the unorganized territories,” says Jym St. Pierre, who worked for the Land Use Regulation Commission from 1978 to 1989. “The whole network of roads that appeared with startling rapidity around that time really changed the character of the Maine woods….Even though it’s not as remote as it was, and even though it’s not virgin forest everywhere, it’s still extremely significant, on a national and global scale, to have that large an extent of virtually undeveloped forest.”