By Gillian Burnes

"The Mahoosucs are one of the few places you can go and not hear machines, and the variety of environments you move through to get up into the range is incredible," says Ginger Lawson, a Shelburne, New Hampshire, resident since 1994. "I remember one crystal-clear autumn day; it was warm in the valley but there was a dusting of snow on the ridge. [My husband and I] hiked up a little trail and then joined the AT (Appalachian Trail), which looked like a fairy path, dusted with snow and winding through the brown woods. We had lunch on top of Goose Eye Mountain with the sun streaming down on us, and the trees were in the brilliant red, yellow, and orange of fall. Then we set off down the trail. We'd stashed a bicycle in the woods so I could ride to our starting point to get our car. ... The Mahoosucs are special because they're both rugged and isolated. We didn't see another soul all day that day--some mysteriously large footprints in the snow on the AT, but no people. There's just something about that place that gives it a sense of magic."

Tracey Wilkerson, 34, runs the school farm at Gould Academy in Bethel, Maine. In late 2006 she got an e-mail from a friend about a meeting at the Bethel Inn Conference Center to talk about an intriguing group project: everyone was invited to draw his or her favorite outdoor places on maps, and the maps would be collated into a master picture of the best of the region. "They were careful to say, 'Don't worry, we're not giving away your favorite fishing holes,'" Wilkerson recalls. An avid canoeist, she marked the Androscoggin River valley and other wildlife-rich river corridors, as well as the open farmland around her home.

In the 12 towns and townships along the Mahoosuc Mountains on the Maine–New Hampshire border, in a triangle within Routes 2, 16, and 26, something is happening: a well-organized and deeply grassroots subversion of standard land-development patterns. With advice from a multi-group alliance called the Mahoosuc Initiative, these mountains have become a laboratory where dozens of strategies are being tested in hopes of preserving what people love about their area: natural beauty, small-town life, forest jobs, and the chance to hike and hunt and fish and ski in the unspoiled Northern Forest.

The Mahoosuc Range, roughly 40 miles of mountains running north from White Mountain National Forest to Andover, Maine, was for two centuries the nation's wood yard. Today it's a poster child for American manufacturing in decline. Eighty-five percent of the land is privately owned; in 1980, five companies shared the region, employing managers and loggers, taking wood to mills, and making paper. The pay was good, and the land was stable and generally open for recreation—hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, camping. Now the vertical integration is gone, those five companies having left or dissolved into smaller entities. Many of the new corporate owners are interested in faster payback, through liquidation logging, then real estate development. (Boston and Portland can send second-home owners north by the hundreds, the prospective developers believe.) As land gets more valuable with each transaction, the spiral of sale and subdivision gets tighter and tighter, and the incentives to sell and develop intensify.

But Mahoosucs residents—business owners, foresters, biologists, ordinary life-long locals—are exploiting the resale chaos to conserve the critical lands that sustain local forest products businesses and attract visitors and new residents. They are getting technical, outreach, and economic development help, as well as legal and financial advice, from the Mahoosuc Initiative, which is made up of The Wilderness Society, the Mahoosuc Land Trust, the Androscoggin River Watershed Council, the Tri-County Community Action Program, the Northern Forest Alliance, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land, and the Appalachian Mountain Club.

When conservation opportunities arise, the Initiative is there to help local people develop plans to take advantage of them. Since most of those opportunities involve buying the land from willing sellers, the Initiative works in Augusta, Concord, and Washington, D.C., to enlarge the pot of public money for purchases. In Grafton Notch, Maine, for example, The Wilderness Society helped organize the diffuse local support for protecting land adjoining the state park, getting chambers of commerce together with snowmobile clubs, helping community leaders make their case to federal appropriators, and flying a Newry, Maine, selectman to lobby the Interior Department in Washington for funding. Grafton Notch garnered $2 million from the Forest Legacy Program, and a 3,600-acre parcel below Old Speck Mountain became part of the state-managed Mahoosucs Unit.

The outreach was extensive. At town fairs, at garbage dumps on Saturday mornings, and outside supermarkets, passersby drew 781 places they love onto Mahoosuc Initiative maps. The Center for Community Geographic Information Systems in Farmington, Maine, then crunched the annotations into a multi-layered, color-coded master map. It showed the favorite hiking trails, climbing rocks, dogsled routes, swimming holes, birding spots, historic sites—the most valuable places to preserve. "People know the important areas in the range," says Lake Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge Manager Paul Casey.

One of the Initiative's most powerful tools is its compendious two-volume Mahoosuc Region Resources Report. Volume one treats the Mahoosucs' history and the regional, national, and global economic forces at work on the land today. Volume two gives the results of the participatory mapping project, plus maps from state programs that catalogue important habitats and wildlife species. It also summarizes scores of strategies for conserving the area and identifies funding sources.

"I've hiked the Mahoosucs many times," says 45-year Shelburne, New Hampshire, resident Ben Werner, a retired professor. "I actually prefer them to the White Mountains; they're a little wilder. But it was really when I saw the results of the mapping project that I saw what a varied place it is—the wildlife, the natural beauty, the general ambiance of the place." Werner and six neighbors are putting "a few thousand acres" they own into a conservation easement.

The stakes are high. With more than 60,000 roadless acres, the Mahoosucs are home to 17 rare plant species. Bobcats, pine martens, and Canada lynx prowl the deep woods. Deer overwinter in the lowland spruce. Northern leopard frogs chorus in the low wetlands. Osprey, eagles, American woodcock, and a panoply of warblers can be found at Lake Umbagog and the headwaters of the Androscoggin River. The cottongrass-heath-alpine bog community, a wetland type found only above 2,900 feet, harbors the extremely rare northern bog lemming. This complete cross-section of Northern Forest ecosystems is unusually well connected for the East, and Initiative activists are working to make the contiguous wild blocks even bigger while they have the chance.

The Mahoosucs are still a long way from turning into a giant suburb, thanks in no small part to the wood-products industry. For example, Hancock Lumber, in Bethel, leads the nation in Eastern white pine production, sawing 42 million board feet annually and selling 90 percent of that as millwork, paneling, and other finished products. (Hancock is about to start turning its mill waste into fuel for the kilns, saving 400,000 gallons of oil a year.) The report lists numerous smaller mills and plants that make furniture, dimensional lumber, biofuel, dowels, and more. In fact, the Mahoosucs are among the busiest areas in the five-state Northern Forest region for wood-products manufacturing. According to the report, every 1,000 acres of the region's forestland supports between 1.2 and 2 forest-based manufacturing jobs (and between 0.6 and 2.3 forest-related tourism and recreation jobs). The Initiative economists' best estimate of wood-products jobs in New Hampshire's Mahoosucs towns is 1,077, or about 11% of the workforce. (The data are not available for a similar estimate about Maine.)

But the Mahoosucs' future depends more on outdoor recreation. Thirty miles of the Appalachian Trail extend through the Mahoosucs, including the famous "toughest mile" in the boulder-strewn Mahoosuc Notch. The trail has been an economic generator since the 1930s. The report lists innumerable recreation businesses, from Sunday River ski resort to small and mom-and-pop outfits like Maine Mineralogy Expeditions, which takes people gem hunting, and Mahoosuc Guide Service, which goes canoeing in summer and dogsledding in winter.

Initiative members see a chicken-and-egg scenario: "To protect open space, it greatly helps to have an economy that relies on open space," says Jeremy Sheaffer, Maine projects director at The Wilderness Society, which is also involved with a parallel project, the High Peaks Initiative, covering Maine's scenic Rangeley Lakes area. (The Mahoosuc and High Peaks Initiatives are the two halves of the organization's broader Maine Mountains Campaign.) "With the loss of forest jobs, the Mahoosucs economy could shift away from an open-space-reliant economy—but it doesn't have to. Deliberately stimulating an economy that values the natural heritage of the Mahoosucs is the key."

Asked how she'd like the region to look 30 years from now, Robin Zinchuk, executive director of the Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce, says, "I'd like to see the region similar to how it is now, with a mixture of uses between forest products and recreation. I'd like to see slow, steady development but not so that it compromises the forest-products industry, which we need, or recreation for both local people and visitors. At the core, recreation and the beautiful scenery are why people come here."

"I remember what happened in New Jersey, how it was completely overrun by development," says Ginger Kelley, a Bethel grandmother and part-time Mahoosucs Land Trust staffer who moved to Maine in the early 1970s. She distributed many of the blank GIS maps. "And I love these mountains. It's so important that we preserve them for the next generation—and people said the same thing when they filled out the maps. They want their children and grandchildren to see what wilderness is like."

Gillian Burnes is a freelance copy editor in Gardiner, Maine. She has produced stories for Outside, OnEarth, and WUNC-FM Public Radio.