Exploring the North Maine Woods
We talk a lot about overland adventures and travel, but where do we actually go? Overland travel can mean a lot of different things to different people. For some people, it means staying mostly on-road and traveling in order to experience different places and cultures, in essence, long-term road trips while camping. Some people like to travel more off-road and in more remote places like the outback of Australia or the glaciers of Greenland. We are closer to the latter. While in general, at least to date, we explore North America, we love to explore the roughest and most remote places possible. One of these is right in our backyard, The North Maine Woods.
The North Maine Woods
The North Maine Woods (NMW) is an area in the northern geographic area of the state of Maine. It is massive, covering 3.5 million acres. To put that into perspective the entire state of Rhode Island is about 776, 960 square miles. It’s almost twice the size of the state of Massachusetts. It is almost entirely private commercial forest land and is owned by a group of timber companies.
Map of The North Maine Woods
While mostly private, there are some areas of public lands and wilderness areas, with the biggest being Baxter State Park, the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, and sections of the Appalachian Trail. There are no towns or paved roads, none. Very few people live there, this includes only a small number of people have private camps either grandfathered in or on land leased from the timber companies, workers at lumber camps, or workers supporting the Maple Syrup industry. The lumber companies do allow you to visit for a fee. The NMW sees over 100,000 people every year that come to explore, camp, fish, hunt, and snowmobile. The only other people you will see are an occasional Border Patrol Officer or Game Warden. It is a lonely area.
As you can imagine, it is remote! Even though it is enormous there are no services, no gas, no food, no AAA (that we are aware of). There are one or two outfitters or lodges like Pittston Farm that offer some food and fuel, but that’s it. If you want to go you will need to be self-sufficient and be prepared. Did we mention that there is no cell signal? Even though you can often be a stone’s throw from Canada and there might be services right over the border, there are no border crossings in the NMW except for commercial and logging operations.
It’s absolutely beautiful, and even more stunning in the fall when the leaves change.
So what is there? Miles and miles of trees, streams, rivers, ponds, and lakes. All 14 of Maine’s highest mountains, all over 4,000 ft including Mt. Katahdin. All of Maine’s largest rivers start there: the Androscoggin, the Kennebec, the St. John, the Penobscot, and the St. Croix. It hosts the entirety of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. Every type of wildlife that Maine has to offer, deer, moose, bears, turkeys, pheasants, Canada Lynx., common loons, coyotes, and bobcats. Maine has the largest population of Moose in the lower 48 and the nation’s largest population of Canada Lynx in the nation, most of them are in the NMW. With the exception of the lumber companies, it is one of the largest uninterrupted examples of nature at its purest in the nation.
Over the last few years when we said that we went camping this is where we went. There are over 350 maintained campsites spread out across the NMW. Sites vary, but most of them have picnic tables, (some covered), fire pits, and vault toilets. Unlike National Forests and BLM land you can’t camp anywhere, you need to camp in a defined spot. These are first come first serve but most have multiple spots, we like to be alone though and if someone is there we often look for another campsite. Some, but not all are on lakes, ponds, and rivers. If you want to camp there is a separate camping fee do fo along with the day-use fees.
The NMW can be busy with logging traffic most days. In reality, very few sections are being logged at any one time but there can still be decent traffic transporting logs out for processing. We mostly travel on weekends and around holidays, so we rarely see active logging operations. Truthfully we rarely see people at all. It might be days until we run into someone and by then it is actually a little startling when you see another vehicle. We see way more wildlife than we do people. Moose are more frequent sightings on roads than cars or trucks.
You need to be careful and pay attention though because accidents do happen. We suspect the water truck below hit a moose in the road and bet that it didn’t end well for either of them. I would love to see the Craigslist posting for the vehicle, “lightly used commercial water truck, that needs a little work. Handyman’s special!”
We have traveled all over the NMW woods including to the very northernmost tip of Maine, there are very few areas that we haven’t explored. We have captured hundreds of trails, and waypoints including campsites, checkpoints, animal sightings, and other points of interest. Offroad GPS maps and the Maine Gazetteer Map are relatively good, but we have found that they aren’t always accurate. Trails and roads they say are there but aren’t, roads we find that are not on the map and campsites that are supposed to exist but don’t. If you want the most accurate map of the North Maine Woods check out our store for The Complete Unofficial Backroads Mapbook of the North Maine Woods.
Most of the roads are dirt and can be traveled on even a stock vehicle. Most of them are in terrible shape though as the logging trucks really chew them up. But there are offshoots and trails that can get sticky and more difficult with the addition of rocks, mud, and flooding. Some of them should also be classified less as roads and more as game trails or goat paths and are tight and overgrown. These are the trails that we look for. I think part of it is that we like to challenge ourselves, and I think that there is a special feeling when you are able to go somewhere that most others couldn’t get to. We love the idea of going where very few have gone before.
We love the North Maine Woods. It’s peaceful, quiet, stunningly beautiful, and lets us escape. It’s also challenging, you need to pay attention. This all makes it easier to be mindful, get centered, and stay in the moment, and it doesn’t hurt that you have no notifications, email, internet, or easy access to the outside world. It recharges us. But we also like to explore and see new things, and we are starting to run low on new areas of the NMW to explore as we have spent the better part of four years exploring it. That is one of the reasons that we are looking to travel more broadly and find fresh areas to explore.
We highly recommend it, but if you go, go prepared! We will soon be releasing an extensive guide to the NMW, as well as more info on how to get prepared and self-sufficient. So stay tuned.
