WiseguyCreative.com photo
CHOCORUA’S BRIDGE FROM PAST TO FUTURE In the 21st Century, a Local Land Trust Stewards Land and Community By Juno Lamb
A
spring morning on the cedar-railed Narrows Bridge that divides Chocorua Lake from the Little Lake, in Chocorua, NH. Across the lake, the lower flanks of Mount Chocorua are painted with the intense green of newly leafed-out trees. The upper reaches of the mountain shade from gray-brown to blue up to its granite point. Behind and to the west, the undulating line of the Sandwich Range is a paler blue against a cloud-strewn sky. Along the shore, tall evergreens crowd the lake edge. In the circle of their embrace, the water on this still morning contains a perfect
reflection—upside down—of trees, mountain, and sky, so that the lake, like the sky above, is strewn with clouds. It’s not here by chance, this tranquil view across a shallow lake with undeveloped, wooded shores, no house in sight, to the famous mountain tipped in bare rock. These shores remain wooded, the water of the lake oligotrophic (pristine, ideal for swimming and fishing), the land and trails around the lake protected and stewarded, and 40 percent of the shoreline accessible to the public—more than any other New Hampshire lake excluding state parks, at no cost to visitors or to local or state taxpayers—all because of a small and hardworking land trust, the Chocorua Lake Conservancy, or CLC. “Land and water stewards since 1968,” their tagline says, and now, in 2020, the CLC owns close to 1,000 acres, including much of the shoreline,
14 MWVvibe.com
