Suzy Allman for The New York Times  The Class III Permanent Rapids on the Saranac River provide challenging white water. A Class V rapid awaits farther along the river at Teft Pond Falls.  THE northern boreal forest once stretched unbroken from Maine to Minnesota, a vast, mossy sea of trees, punctuated only by archipelagoes of rocky mountaintops and thin ribbons of water. To early European visitors who came in ships to its fringes, the great north woods were even more impenetrable and mysterious than the real ocean of water they had just crossed to get to it.  But impenetrable and unbroken did not mean it was trackless, or even a pure wilderness. The Algonquins, Iroquois and others who lived there traversed the region in canoes and on foot, and the paths they used to carry their boats between major water systems  from the Hudson River to Lake Champlain, say, or over the so-called Indian Carry from the Raquette River to the Saranac Lakes  were worn more than a foot deep in places by centuries of traffic. It was all a part of the Great Longhouse, as the Iroquois of upstate New York called it. It was home.  Toward the end of the 20th century, after a half millennium of change left not much of either the forest or its network of watery trails intact, three recreational paddlers  Mike Krepner, Ron Canter and Randy Mardres  came up with a seemingly audacious idea. Calling their project Native Trails, they set out to recreate what they could of those ancient routes, charting for modern travelers a new contiguous water trail from the top of Maine to the bottom of New Yorks Adirondack Park.  This past June, after a decade and a half of exploration, infusions of cash and new partnerships, the officially designated 740-mile Northern Forest Canoe Trail was finally dedicated. With festive ribbon-cuttings in four Northeast states, the event was a bit like a blockbuster art opening that redefines a genre. The major segments were familiar to paddlers: some, like the Adirondacks and the Allagash, are legendary. But when entwined with lesser known pieces, like Lubber Lake and Pensioner Pond in Vermont or the two short dips into Quebec, a new singularity emerges that seems both obvious and brilliant. The canoe trail, which some have compared to the Appalachian Trail, is more closely akin to the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, the Everglades Wilderness Waterway in Florida or the Maine Island Trail for kayakers. As such, it may be the most important thing to happen to the northern eco-tourism trade since the invention of gorp.  Not long after the official opening, I paddled out onto Middle Saranac Lake on a breezy summer afternoon, having been driven to the put-in by the folks from St. Regis Canoe Outfitters in the town of Saranac Lake, where I had traded my rental car for a rental kayak. There were plenty of reasons to choose the heart of the Adirondack Park for a launch.  As a purely practical matter, this is the portion of the trail best equipped with guides and outfitters capable of supplying travelers with as much or as little as they may need in the way of boats, equipment, food or even instruction, making it relatively simple to put together a comfortable voyage.  As a purely personal matter, it was a chance for me to revisit the scene of voyages I had undertaken during the writing of my first book, a history of the Adirondacks, and fill in a few blanks in my own map of the park as well. The Adirondacks are where Americans in the 19th century invented the idea and language of wilderness recreation as both a business model and a restorative activity. The park is New Yorks greatest environmental (not to mention bipartisan) achievement, a place bigger than the entire state of Massachusetts where forever wild forests range over high and low peaks and right down to the waters edge in the form of great gnarled giants clinging by serpentine roots to boulders left by long gone glaciers.  It is the birthplace of eco-tourism, a treasure that The New York Times in an 1864 editorial called a tract of country fitted to make a Central Park for the world.  Ask you, how went the hours? wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in his poem about the philosophers camp, a trip he took to the Adirondacks in 1854 with the scientist Louis Agassiz and eight other luminaries. Up with the dawn, they fancied the light air that circled freshly in their forest dress made them to boys again.  With no intention of making it all the way to Maine, I whiled away happy hours poking up into deserted coves, pushing up streams to the foot of beaver dams, lunching on sunny rocks, trolling for fish and pulling up sweet memories of other trips and other times. Upper, Middle and Lower Saranac Lakes are not the wildest stretch of the Adirondacks, but theyre surely among the most beautiful. There are constant views to the high peaks and, in stretches where the protected Adirondack Forest Preserve gives way to private land, I paddled silently past the huge and fanciful twiggy great camps of bygone financiers and industrialists.  In the late afternoons I pitched my tent on thimble-size islands that I had all to myself and was not at all offended to find that the state had provided a little firewood and, down a short path, a tidy outhouse. The idea of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, after all, is not to go where no one has gone before. Along its way, the trail incorporates some waters well known and well traveled by local paddlers. The 347 miles in Maine include the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, the West Branch of the Penobscot River and the Rangeley Chain of Lakes. The 72-mile New Hampshire section includes portions of the Androscoggin and Ammonoosuc. In Vermont there is a fairly long open passage on Lake Champlain that can be full of sailboats. One night on Lower Saranac Lake I heard the sounds of a family of campers on another island, but more often it was only a bona fide loon singing like a madman across the water.  Paul Schneider, a frequent contributor to the Travel and Escapes sections, is the author of The Adirondacks: A History of Americas First Wilderness.
Some 15 years ago, three recreational paddlers dreamed of linking a series of lakes and rivers from New York to Maine, creating an Appalachian Trail of waterways. That dream is now a reality.