Arthur and Christie Johnson Memorial Forest In Pittsburg NH

The Great North Woods

The Northern Forest runs 26 million acres from the Adirondacks through northern Vermont and New Hampshire to the Maine woods — the largest continuous forest east of the Mississippi, and almost entirely privately owned. It has stayed whole through easements rather than federal designation: most notably the 2003 Connecticut Lakes Headwaters easement, which holds 146,000 acres in Pittsburg, Clarksville, and Stewartstown as permanent working forest.

The 800 acres of the Arthur and Christie Johnson Memorial Forest in Pittsburg NH closed one of the gaps in that map, linking Vermont to Maine. Individually it is a modest parcel. Collectively, parcels like it are the difference between a connected forest and a set of islands.