Jack Mountain Bushcraft & Guide Service
Box 61
267 Camp School Road
Wolfeboro Falls, N.H. 03896
603-569-6150
E-mail: tim@jackmtn.com
www.jackmountainbushcraft.com
Tim Smith runs this year-round business, teaching wilderness living and survival skills, and guiding canoe, snowshoe, and fishing trips. An authoritative, easygoing instructor, Smith is a Maine master guide and has experience on rivers in Alaska and Florida, as well as the Big Black, St. John, and Allagash rivers.
Pole & Paddle Canoe
705 Foss Road
Limerick, ME 04048
207-793-2402
E-mail: don@poleandpaddle.com
www.poleandpaddle.com
Don Merchant is a craftsman who sells handmade wood and canvas canoes, poles, wooden storage lockers, and other traditional gear. A Maine master guide, he leads canoe trips on request.
Maine Professional GuidesAssociation
Box 336
Augusta, ME 04332
E-mail: info@maineguides.org
www.maineguides.org/canoeguides.php
The website contains an extensive listing of individual guides and outfitting services, several of whom offer trips on the rivers of the St. John Valley.
North Maine Woods, Inc.
Box 425
92 Main St.
Ashland, ME 04732
207-435-6213
www.northmainewoods.org
The organization, composed of corporate and individual landowners, oversees access to nearly 3 1/2 million acres of privately owned land in northern Maine. The rivers of the St. John Valley run within this area, and the organization's website has extensive information on checkpoints and visitors fees for those planning to canoe on the rivers.
Northern Hideaway Guide Service
Box 54
Fort Kent, ME 04743
418-456-3221
www.mainerec.com/hideaway/index.shtml
Hunting and fishing camp tucked amid logging company land on the banks of the Big Black River. Master guide Rod Sirois is a former game warden who knows the history of the land and its people well. For an intimate account of his family's experience with two coyotes raised at home, click on the ''Our Logo" location of the Northern Hideaway Web page.
More information
''North Woods: An Inside Look at the Nature of Forests in the Northeast"
by Peter J. Marchand
(Appalachian Mountain Club, paperback, 1994)
An informative and highly readable account of the formation and evolution of the woods of the northeastern United States, from the end of the last ice age to modern times.
''Nine Mile Bridge: Three Years in the Maine Woods" by Helen Hamlin
(Islandport Press, 2005)
Hamlin lived in the St. John Valley in the 1930s, and her memoirs of that period give color to the daily lives and special events of the logging community that called the woods home. First published in 1945, and just recently reissued.
