The Northern Forest Canoe Trail is giving residents of New Hampshire hamlets a reason to believe

Right around the time dwindling sunlight ignites a forest fire of reds, oranges, and yellows in the Umbagog Wildlife Refuge, the 285 residents of nearby Errol, New Hampshire, start seeing an abundance of an entirely different color: White.
That’s the shoe and hat color (and many times the hair) of the folks—Q-Tips, as locals call them—who ogle the leaves from automobiles ambling at 20 miles per hour.

These leaf peepers give the surrounding economy—once bolstered by the paper and timber industry—a temporary boost. But as quickly as the leaves turn, they shed. And while towns like Errol have snowmobiling—which has already suffered from rising gas prices—to stabilize the local economy, they don’t have much else. But they do have hope from another natural resource: the Northern Forest Canoe Trail.
Errol, located near the midpoint of the 740-mile water trail, will soon be coordinating with 47 other trailside communities in New Hampshire, New York, Maine, Vermont, and Quebec to build an economy through paddling tourism. Stimulating rural economies is one of three goals the Northern Forest Canoe Trail established when it was incorporated in 2006.
In an area stuffed into an economic hole, when corporate bottom lines have shut down factory lines, when gas prices are keeping urban snowmobilers closer to home, the Northern Forest Canoe Trail offers a way out.
Thirty-eight local outfitters—a number the NFCT board plans to grow dramatically—are now running trips along the 22 rivers and streams, 56 lakes and ponds that make up the trail that spans from Old Forge, New York, to Fort Kent, Maine.
“If we can get locals to buy a canoe and start guiding, making money out of their own area, that’s a great thing,” says NFCT founding president Kay Henry.
The trail won’t completely fill the monetary void that closed paper mills have left behind, but it offers locals tangible hope.
“When you drive up [in northern New Hampshire], you look at the homes and you see people have delayed doing work on their homes,” says Patrick Malfait, owner of Concord’s Contoocook River Canoe Company. “People are more concerned about getting their car from point A to point B than re-painting their house or fixing a ruined porch. That extra income isn’t there.”
It wasn’t always this way. Berlin, New Hampshire, on the Androscoggin River about 30 miles south of Errol, had two paper plants and was once considered the paper capital of New Hampshire. On May 7, 2006, however, Fraser Papers shuttered Berlin’s last working mill. This left 250 mostly second-generation employees jobless. It happened at the Wausau Paper Corp. too, where Richard Gilbert had worked for 30 years—many of those years in charge of the chemical composition Wausau sprayed on their products. But on December 31, 2007, that plant shut down as well, and he and 300 other employees were put out of work.
Now he works as a bellman at the Balsams Resort, toting the luggage of leaf peepers.
“Oh well,” he says. “We keep moving. You make due.”