TOWNSHIP D — Robert Martin of Peru is upset that something wasn’t done to protect Franklin County’s popular Angel Falls trailhead from logging this winter. But the landowner said the area will be seeded and cleaned up, hopefully before Memorial Day.
Fed by Mountain Brook, the scenic “hanging” falls is 17.6 miles south of the village of Oquossoc. When the water flow is just right, the falls resemble an angel.
Angel Falls is among Maine’s highest waterfalls, with the longest single drop at 90 feet. A one-mile hike on a trail northwest of Byron off the old railroad bed known as the Bemis track provides access to the base of the falls.
“It kind of riled me up,” Martin said Wednesday when a friend told him recently that loggers had flattened the trail-head area. “I work in the (Rumford paper) mill and I support logging 100 percent, but they could have left a buffer zone. I’m sure visitors this summer are going to be livid. The (Maine) Department of Conservation needs to purchase this land and protect it, so this never happens again.”
Martin said he wrote to the Department of Conservation and its Bureau of Parks and Lands five years ago, telling them to buy the land around Angel Falls to protect it from timber harvests. He also wrote to the Nature Conservancy, the Mahoosuc Land Trust and other land conservation organizations, but he hadn’t heard from any of them.
The land is owned by investor Bayroot LLC of New Hampshire and managed by its agent, Wagner Forest Management, Wagner regional manager Scott Rineer said Wednesday in Errol, N.H.
Rineer said their logger cut 100 acres of mostly hardwood trees this winter in the vicinity of the parking area for the access trail.
“They may have cut a little timber near the head of the trail, but they never crossed Berdeen Stream, which is 2,000 feet from the falls,” Rineer said.
He said the logger wouldn’t leave the cut-over land as is without improving it when the area is dry enough to return.
“We have plans to go back in early summer and install water bars and seed the area and clean it up,” Rineer said. “We will try to get the land cleaned up by Memorial Day.”
Martin said that according to his friend who hiked the trail this spring, when walking down off Bemis Road at the parking area, trees “were hacked down where the big rock is that kids climb on for pictures.”
Martin said he learned that the landowner intends to log much closer to the falls next winter and to build roads and bridges across the Swift River to cut timber from Angel Falls up the valley and along the hillside to Bemis Cove on Mooselookmeguntic Lake.
Rineer said another hardwood timber harvest will be done next winter but not necessarily close to the falls or as far as Mooselookmeguntic.
He said Bayroot bought the land 11 years ago from former Rumford mill owner MeadWestvaco. Bayroot owns all of the land in Township D, which is several thousand acres. The last time timber in the Angel Falls area was harvested was 20 years ago, Rineer said.
Martin said the area surrounding the falls is still recovering from that old logging cut and eroding sediment still flows down a skidder trail parallel to the falls. As a result, he worries that the plan to flatten the area beside the falls “will be catastrophic.”
“That much sediment and erosion sliding off the steep hillside will decimate the ecology of (Mountain Brook), as well as the branch of the Swift River below,” Martin said.
Rineer stressed that the timber company will install erosion-control measures to protect the land and clean up the mess left behind.
He said there are no easements or formal agreements in place protecting Angel Falls and its access trail other than whatever zoning the Maine Land Use Planning Commission has established. Calls to the commission in Augusta and Farmington were not returned.
Township D is considered an unorganized territory that falls under the purview of the commission.
Martin said he and his family hike up to the falls at least twice a year.
Rineer said Wagner and Bayroot have always left Angel Falls open to the public and will continue to do so. “It gets a lot of visitors from up in the Rangeley area in the summer months,” he said.
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