The area north of Millinocket is a vast sweep of forest, dotted with lakes and ledge, and cut by one of the most fabled rivers in Maine, the West Branch of the Penobscot.

This is Thoreau country, the setting for the journeys described in Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods. It is a land rich in human and natural history, and nowhere more so than at Big Eddy, where the Penobscot River finally slows after a 5-mile tumble through the rapids of Ripogenus Gorge.