The Champion Lands

The Champion Lands

The former Champion Lands of Vermont consist of 132,000 acres in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The Northeast Kingdom of Vermont has some of Vermont's most extensive areas of relitively remote and wild lands. A substantial portion of the Champion Lands are located in the the Nulhegan Basin, an extensive area of northern lowland forest and wetlands ringed by hills and mountians of moderatr elevation and drained by the Nulhegan River. The Champion Lands of Vermont are part of a larger system known as the Northern Forest.

Stretching 400 miles from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean, the Northern Forest covers more than 25 million acres across New York's Tug Hill plateau and Adirondack Mountains and includes nearly all of northern Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. The forest reaches north and east into Quebec and the Maritime Provinces of Canada. This extensive regional forest contains a range of forest age-classes, from early successional to, in a few isolated locations, mature forest, but it is by and large young forest, less than 100 years old. It provides important habitat for the large mammals native to the extensive northeastern deciduous, coniferous and mixed forests. These include black bear, bobcat, deer and moose.

The lands are divided into three different ownership parcels, each area has its own unique features and area of interest

The West Mountain WMA lands are dominated by three major features: in the center of the parcel, West Mountain rises to an elevation of 2,733 feet above sea level; to the north and east the land drains into a series of small ponds in the Wheeler Stream drainage, while to the west and south Paul Stream drains an area dominated by Ferdinand Bog. These two stream drainages, which are tributaries of the Connecticut River, contain what is thought to be the greatest concentration of glacial ice-contact deposits in Vermont. The result is a highly varied terrain containing kames, kame moraines, eskers, and kettles surrounding the resistant granite of West Mountain. Notch Pond Mountain, part of the Nulhagan Basin mountainous rim to the north of West Mountain, separates the Wheeler Stream and Paul Stream drainages from the Nulhegan River. The mountains and high hills on the West Mountain WMA are strongly dominated by northern hardwood forests, while the stream drainages are dominated by red spruce-hardwood forest or lowland spruce-fir forests, and a variety of wetlands and ponds. The wetlands are predominantly northern white cedar swamps, spruce-fir-tamarack swamps, and alder-beaver meadow complexes.