“The Northern Forest Canoe Trail is the sweetest line on the map of the north country, and these magnificent photos show exactly why. I defy you to spend an evening with this book and not want to pick up a paddle.” --Bill McKibben, author, The Bill McKibben Reader
Smith, an award-winning landscape photographer, takes readers on a remarkable visual tour of the 740-mile Northern Forest Canoe Trail, an historic waterway that traverses four Northeastern states and the Canadian province of Quebec -- from Fort Kent, Maine, near the Canadian border to Old Forge, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains.
The route was first used by Native American paddlers, who used their birchbark canoes to move goods and people from one settlement to another and to communicate among them. Then came the European fur trappers transporting their pelts to market. Those water routes, of course, eventually gave way first to roads and wagons, then later to railroads and trucks.
Nowadays, the wild areas of the Northern Forest are paddled mostly by recreational canoeists and kayakers. But the ancient routes have been researched and mapped by the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, an organization devoted to preserving and celebrating the ancient routes.
Clyde Smith is an unabashed devotee of the Trail. “We’ve got some tremendous places in New England, and they’re most easily penetrated by canoe,” he says. “I want people to be aware of the things that are out there in the wild places.”
Smith’s wildlife and landscape photographs have graced the covers and interiors of magazines and books for nearly 40 years. Northeast Passage is his twenty-first book.
Northeast Passage is 112 pages with more than 100 full-color photographs. Tom Slayton, editor emeritus of Vermont Life magazine wrote the introduction. It is distributed by Enfield Publishing and Distribution, of Enfield, NH. 603/632-7377, info@enfieldbooks.com.
Northeast Passage, by Clyde H. Smith, 112 pages, hardcover, retail $24.95; ISBN: 978-0-9705511-4-6
Phone: 603.632.7377
About:
Thistle Hill Publications is a small, independent book publisher that specializes in art and photography books and other works about or of interest to the people of northern New England.
