(HOST) Writer, storyteller and commentator Willem Lange and some friends have been exploring the Northern Forest Canoe Trail.
(LANGE) The main attractions of camping are that no two campsites are alike, and most campsites are lovely. Canoe campsites are especially nice because you can carry more amenities in a canoe than on your back. And when you add to that a day like today, of almost perfect weather, with no mosquitoes or black flies – that’s almost too much to expect.
Four or five friends and I are camped this evening beside the Missisquoi River in the Town of Sheldon. We paddled down from Enosburg Falls today, through several riffles of white water and a half-mile-long boulder field that would have been more pleasant with a few more inches of water, But it doesn’t matter; we’re here, and our tent is so close to the river that we’ll have the rapid’s soft bubbling as background all through the night.
We’re paddling a section of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, a newly established water trail that runs 740 miles from Old Forge, New York, in the Adirondacks, to Fort Kent, Maine, on the Canadian border. It follows old Native American travel routes through several watersheds and across Lake Champlain – sort of a liquid version of the Appalachian Trail. Several canoeists already have thru-paddled it from one end to the other.
The Missisquoi isn’t a very big river; it’s less than 80 miles long. It rises east of the Jay Range, and you can tell it wants to go west; but it can’t because of the mountains in its way. So it runs north into Canada, finds a way around the mountains, and finally flows west into Lake Champlain. The valley is an arm of the old Champlain Sea; there are layered banks of clay and sand above the current river level, and the fields on both sides are flat and fertile. Blue steel silos punctuate the horizon.
Therein lies the root of a problem: phosphorus pollution of Missisquoi Bay. During the past couple of years noxious algal blooms in the bay have closed bathing beaches and even been toxic to pets who drank from the lake. The pollution results from inadequately enforced buffer strips between the river and fertilizer-treated fields. The good news, besides that the river’s quality is being monitored by local volunteers, is that Governor Douglas’ recent dustup with the EPA has brought the problem more into the public eye, and soon there may be increased vigilance and remediation as a result.
Everyone here around the campfire here is involved with the Canoe Trail, the Missisquoi River Basin Association, or the Vermont River Conservancy, so there’s no shortage of expertise in this group. But, with the sparks from the fire snaking up into the twilight, the stars beginning to come out, and the chuckle of the river beside us, nobody feels like a heavy discussion. Best to sip a cup of hot coffee and zip our fleece shirts against the cool night.
This is Willem Lange up in Franklin County, and I gotta get back to work… tomorrow.