BETHEL — When Ken Wille was a child the forest was his savior.

“It is a sense of being and a sense of place… You can’t pick it up from reading about it or watching TV. It’s a whole different thing to feel the cold, feel the rocks, the mosses, the decades of leaves under your feet. It’s all a different kind of tactical connection that many people don’t ever get.

“If they do trails, they do the ‘Whites’, I’m guilty of it, its gorgeous, it’s spectacular but you’re walking on trodden land all the time and you know it.

“This is wild. It’s different.”

Wille’s 200 acres that he sold to Mahoosuc Land Trust (MLT) will be paired with other donations from abutters. Together, the 295-acre parcel on Flint Mountain is the first “forever wild” property for the Bethel trust who partnered with Vermont-based Northeast Wilderness Trust. (The land abuts a conservation easement that with another 180 MLT acres, brings the total contiguous conserved area to close to 500 acres).

The vast majority of MLT’s 20,000 acres allow management – timber harvesting, farming, and creation of trails for mountain hiking and biking, said MLT Executive Director Kirk Siegel. Unless prohibited by the terms of the deed, Mahoosuc allows hunting on nearly all of their other properties. Similarly, snowmobiles are permitted if the prior owner allowed for them.

The property on Flint Mountain is different. “Forever Wild” allows minimal impact, non-mechanized recreation only. Hiking and skiing are allowed, but not intensive recreational sports.

Hiking

The group heads out on a path blazed by Wille and his neighbor, Paul Haussman, the trail goes over the mountain and connects their properties. MLT Land Steward, Spenser Williams said he will use some of their trail to create the Mahoosuc trail. He stresses that anything off-trail will not be groomed.

Under the ‘forever wild’ designation they are allowed one trail head. It will likely be on Sawin Hill, says Williams. He feels that most of the recreational value is hiking the cliffs. Out to the summit and back will be between a four and six mile loop. With the help of volunteers he expects to complete the trails by 2025, but says they will be accessible later this year.

“It has some spectacular views,” says Wille who began buying property in Albany Township in 1984. Having been actively farmed by five families in the 1800’s so there are old foundations. Much of the mountain was sheep pasture.

” [There are] spectacular cliffs growing moss and lichens for years,” says Wille.

Williams adds, “This land is 50 years ahead of what a ‘forever wild’ designation would do to recently logged land. There are already signs of older growth of a more distant logging history, like large diameter downed logs The technical term would be  coarse woody debris, things over 16 inches.”

“Messy forests are healthy forests,” Williams says, as he scans wavy topography on the down hill. The bumps are hummocks or “cradles and pillows,” says the former outdoor instructor. He crouches down, digs out an Indian cucumber tuber growing from a downed tree, then eats it.

Some of the trees are the largest of that species that he has ever seen, like Hophornbeam, Ash and Sugar Maple. In an area he is calling, “Wow” are a cliff of large boulders, a hummock and further down the hill, a rock pasture wall.

“It stops you in your tracks. It’s beautiful both recreationally and ecologically,” says Williams.

About preserving Flint Mountain, Siegel said, “I think in 20 years people will look back and be so grateful that some of these special places have been set aside.”

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