We want to share a wonderful new book released by the Allagash Wilderness Waterway Foundation (AWWF) titled This Extraordinary Place. Thousands of Chewonki alumni and staff have enjoyed the inspiring beauty of the Allagash River while on a canoe trip, and the AWWF has done a tremendous job capturing the history and ecology of that remarkable watershed in this 105-page travel guide.
The guide features writing and artwork from dozens of contributors, including the principle writing by Janet McMahon, Paul Johnson, and Don Hudson, AWWF president, and Chewonki Foundation president emeritus.
We reached out to Richard Barringer, the lead editor of This Extraordinary Place to learn more about how this inspiring project came to be. Dick served as the Director of Public Lands, Commissioner of Conservation, and Director of State Planning before founding the Muskie School of Public Service at USM, where he taught public policy and community planning for 25 years.
Richard Barringer writes:
“In 1966, after a prodigious citizen mobilization effort, the people of Maine voted a great gift to current and future generations – a 92-mile long, narrow ribbon of land either side of the headwater lakes and river course of the Allagash. Later, in 1970, it was to be designated a National Wild & Scenic River.
A half-century later, in 2023, the Allagash Wilderness Waterway Foundation (AWWF) published first ecological assessment of the Waterway, the two volume report, A River in Space and Time, by Janet McMahon with the assistance of Paul Johnson and Ben Meader. The report establishes the Waterway as a dynamic system of complex ecological inter-relationships that extend throughout the watershed as a whole, and define its character.
This Extraordinary Place brings this remarkable research to life; offers the reader an accessible guide to the ecological riches of the Waterway; and explains the system dynamics that shape it through time. The guide is lovingly edited by Richard Barringer and Peter Weed, and beautifully illustrated by Alison Carver.
Together with the AWWF’s earlier pocket-guide, Allagash Explorer – a historical and cultural guide to the Allagash since European settlement – This Extraordinary Place will deepen the traveler’s knowledge and understanding of the Waterway’s ecology and riverine dynamics, as well as its needs going forward in the face of climate change and forest management practices throughout the watershed.” (Richard Barringer, July 30, 2025)
This Extraordinary Place can be purchased online at the Northern Forest Canoe Trail website, at select Maine bookstores, including:
- Bogan Books in Fort Kent
- Bridgton Books in Bridgton
- Devaney Doak & Garrett Booksellers in Farmington
- Green Hand Bookshop in Portland
- Golden Road Crossing in Millinocket
