Sixteen years in the making, the epic new Northern Forest Canoe Trail wends for 740 miles through some of the Northeast's most spectacular—and seldom visited—scenery. Jon Bowermaster plies the route, which officially opens next month, and reports on an environmental achievement not seen since the establishment of the Appalachian Trail a generation ago

Allagash, Missisquoi, Penobscot, Saranac. The names of the rivers crisscrossing the Northern Forest—twenty-six million acres of woods straddling Maine, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont—are a poignant reminder of who was here first. This is Indian country. Hundreds of years before European explorers, timber magnates, and such well-known white men as Benedict Arnold and Henry David Thoreau walked these woods and canoed these rivers, this was home to the Iroquois, the Mohawk, the Penobscot, and other tribes.

Big enough to fit ten Yellowstone National Parks inside it, the Northern Forest contains the headwaters of all of New York's and New England's major rivers, including the Allagash, the Connecticut, and the Hudson. Within its boundaries course thirty thousand miles of brooks and streams. These waterways were key to the first peoples' ability to navigate the dense forest and to explore and discover new riches. (No fools, the Europeans used them too, for exploration and trading, and later for power and to transport vast felled forests.)

Thanks to a recent, wildly imaginative effort—launched by a trio of visionaries—these historic waterways have a new lease on life as the Northern Forest Canoe Trail (NFCT), a 740-mile route linking Old Forge, New York, to Fort Kent, Maine. The watery equivalent of the Appalachian Trail, it is one of the great environmental and tourism achievements of this new, young century.

The idea of creating a single waterway tying those old trading routes together originated in 1990. Consulting colonial records and maps, along with Eric Morse's 1969 Fur Trade Routes of Canada, Then and Now, canoeists and guides Ron Canter, Mike Krepner, and Randy Mardres foresaw a modern usage of thousand-year-old travel routes that faded to obscurity when roads and railroads replaced water as the primary means of transport. Sixteen years later, their vision is an accessible reality. It begins inside northern New York State's Adirondack Park and roars down the Saranac River—with its Class III and IV rapids—to the big body of Lake Champlain. From there, canoeists and kayakers enter the Missisquoi River and, after a good deal of upstream paddling and poling, arrive at the Clyde-Nulhegan watershed of Vermont. Continuing on to the Connecticut River and then the Ammonoosuc—which cuts across New Hampshire's northern neck—the trail wends up the steep, spectacular Rapid River to Maine's Rangeley Lakes before ending at the Canadian border.

Like the Appalachian Trail, the NFCT is to be sampled. Divided into thirteen easily accessed sections, detailed in beautifully rendered new maps, it is the kind of thing you could commit the next decade to, one four-day weekend at a time. Some stretches are easily accessed and heavily paddled; others, like the Nulhegan River in Vermont, have been little-used—or seen—since the great log drives of the late 1800s. (So far only one person, Donnie Mullen, then an Outward Bound instructor from Northport, Maine, has traversed the entire route. In 2000, he paddled the trail in a sixteen-foot wood-and-canvas canoe, which he made himself. The trip took him fifty-five days.)