By AUDITI GUHA/VTDigger
About 20 years ago, Susan Shea and Ted Vogt went for a hike on a remote and wild piece of land off Journey’s End Road in Jay, Vermont.
Over the years, the two Brookfield residents have hiked, camped, spotted bears and bought up parcels of it in hopes of preserving it for posterity.
The Journey’s End Wilderness Preserve now permanently protects more than 340 acres adjacent to the Long Trail corridor and Jay State Forest, the Northeast Wilderness Trust announced in a press release Monday.
The land was ripe for protection and connectivity, said Shea, a retired conservationist who was formerly director of land conservation for the Green Mountain Club.
The duo enjoyed many joys on that undeveloped land, from spotting bears and moose tracks to discovering the “very pretty Mountain Brook” with cascades of clear, cold, pure water, according to Vogt, a retired lawyer.
“You just see all kinds of beauty — and in every season. I got up there in the springtime when the snow is melting, and water is running everywhere, and the flowers are emerging, and it’s just glorious. So we are lucky to have that and we need to appreciate it,” he said.
Which is why they were eager to conserve it beyond their lifetimes and make it “forever wild.”
A few years ago, they reached out to the regional land trust based in Montpelier that specializes in re-wilding conservation land. And they sold all 342 acres to the trust for $100,000, according to Jon Leibowitz, president and CEO of the Northeast Wilderness Trust.
Forever wild areas — which may also be called wilderness areas, natural areas or ecological reserves — are legally protected tracts of land left to nature to evolve over time. Logging, extraction, development and other forms of active management are prohibited. They boost Vermont’s wilderness acreage with well-established benefits to wildlife, humans and the climate, Leibowitz said.
They also meet Vermont’s goal to conserve at least 30% of the state’s land by 2030 and 50% by 2050.
Although about 25% of the state’s land base is conserved, according to the Vermont Agency of Natural Resource’s database, only about 3.5% of it is protected as forever wild, Leibowitz said.
That means a majority of the state’s preserved land allows logging and active management. While forever wild areas may still be open to recreational use by the public, “every time that a place is protected as forever wild today, it means that it’s an old forest of the future,” he said.
Northeast Wilderness Trust is a 23-year-old private land trust that also owns the 350-acre Bram Hall Wilderness Preserve south of the Long Trail in Bridgewater. The trust has protected more than 19,000 acres across Vermont as “forever wild” land and more than 103,000 acres across the Northeast, according to the trust’s Monday press release.
For Vogt and Shea, the permanent protection is a dream come true.
“Because what happens is, over time, the land heals itself,” said Vogt, who has hiked the entire Long Trail and was a volunteer for the Green Mountain Club. “All of the trees grow back, things return to a kind of more natural state. And 100 years from now, if that forest is left alone, that will almost be like an old growth forest in certain respects.”
Shea said conserving the land was particularly important for wildlife as the climate changed.
“Besides being great for a back country hiking trail, it’s very important for wildlife to be able to move to travel, especially with climate change, as some of them need to move north. This land is adjacent to already conserved land so that made it particularly important to conserve,” Shea said.
Journey’s End is also a great example of how the land trust model works, Leibowitz said.
“In this case, the landowners who have owned this property for many years and have a personal connection to the Long Trail itself, called us,” he said.
The 272-mile Long Trail follows the main ridge of the Green Mountains from the Massachusetts-Vermont line to the Canadian border. The 8,242-acre state forest includes conserved land in the towns of Jay, Montgomery, Richford and Westfield.
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This story was originally published by VTDigger and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
