For thousands of years, the waterways of the Northeast Kingdom provided the best travel routes across a rugged landscape, with Lake Memphremagog serving as a hub linking Lake Champlain, the St. Lawrence River, and, by way of the Clyde River, the Connecticut River. The lake has also long been at the heart of the Western Abenaki homeland, where Abenaki families hunted, fished, and traveled, and its waters later carried Rogers' Rangers, smugglers, sightseers seeking the serpent called Memphre, and local residents. Following ancient Native American travel routes, the Northern Forest Canoe Trail passes through communities founded by European settlers and landscapes shaped by agriculture and forest-based economies, tracing ten thousand years of human settlement from subsistence and exploration through wars, industrial development, and conservation. Across the Northern Forest, the route spans twenty-two rivers and streams, fifty-six lakes and ponds, and more than a dozen watersheds in a boreal landscape where forests have long stood at the center of ecology, culture, and economics. Waterways once carried birchbark canoes used for hunting and trading, then drew European explorers inland, powered growing communities and industries, and floated logs from forest to mill to supply northeastern cities, while later they brought city-dwellers into the wilderness for rejuvenation and sport. Today these waterways continue to support recreation, livelihood, electricity production, and wildlife habitat, with Lake Memphremagog offering broad views but demanding preparation for wind and waves, the Clyde River descending through wetlands, lakes, ponds, farms, villages, and hydroelectric turbines, and South Bay providing calmer paddling and habitat for animals including mink, beaver, river otters, moose, birds, turtles, and fish.