Corbin Park: An Exercise In Google Earth

I am originally from Newport, NH, a small town in Sullivan County on the western side of the state. While growing up there, I never really appreciated the vast wilderness which surrounds the community. Having been gone for a while, each time I return to visit friends and family, I find myself developing a better appreciation for the area. I've come to realize that there are small back roads snaking in every direction out of town, to long lost communities and homesteads that have been buried in time. It amazes me that these areas were once full of people and activity, commerce and agriculture and now they're just desolate footpaths on the fringes of society.

Before this gets more dramatic, I'll work my way to the point. I recently purchased a dual-sport motorcycle, a bike which is capable of being ridden on both paved and dirt roads with acceptable performance on both. With this, I plan to explore some of these forgotten areas of New England, starting with the area around my hometown. Being that I'm also a bit of a technology geek, I started pouring over Google Earth to note familiar trails and paths and to also discover new terrain.

There was one region of land in the Sullivan County area of New Hampshire that I have always known is expressly forbidden to the general public. So much so, in fact, that there is a 10' tall fence topped with barbed wire surrounding the property. The area? Corbin Park. Now I've always known about Corbin Park (or the Blue Mountain Forest, as it's officially known), but I've never really known about it. That is, I've never really considered the sheer magnitude of the park and what it means to Sullivan County.

First, let's give a little background on the park, what it is, and how it began. Most of this comes from Brian Meyette's Corbin Park Story and related pages. It started in the late 1800s when railroad and banking mogul (and Newport native), Austin Corbin, bought up over 300 farms for $1-$5 per acre and put up a fence around the entire property. Encompassing an estimated 25,000 acres, all existing roads and infrastructure inside this boundary would seldom be seen by public eye again. Corbin then began stocking the park with various non-native game animals from elk to wild boar to even bison. Corbin Park is now one of the largest (if not the largest) privately-owned nature reserve in the world, an exclusive hunting playground for members of the Blue Mountain Forest Association (BMFA).

Let's try to give it some perspective with a few statistics:

• Corbin Park comprises 7% of the total land area of Sullivan County (Corbin Park = est. 25k acres, Sullivan County = 353k acres), not including the sections of "buffer" land bordering the park which the BMFA also holds.
• Corbin Park is more than 1/2 the size of Lake Winnipesaukee (Winnipesaukee = 45k acres).
• Cornish and Croydon are neighboring towns, but you can't drive directly from one to the other. The shortest route from the center of one town to the other is 30 miles, despite them being only about 11 miles apart as the crow flies. Interestingly, Google Maps (but NOT Google Earth) thinks it's possible to drive through the park.
• Corbin Park encompasses Croydon Mountain, which at 2781 feet, is the tallest peak in Sullivan County. On its summit is one of the oldest manned fire towers in the US.
  

I'd never really given Corbin Park much thought growing up, but it recently hit me how cool it would be to find out more about this exclusive chunk of land right in my back yard. Since this land is rarely opened to public access, I was amazed to be able to aerially explore it with Google Earth. I began placemarking locations I knew and picking my Dad's brain for information he had about the area. Before I knew it, I had a rough area of the park defined, with several gates and important landmarks also noted. Check out what I created in Google Earth to see what this all looks like (the link is useless if you don't have Google Earth installed).

So here's my new spring project. Using Google Earth, my new motorcycle, and assistance from a GPS unit, I would like to map out all of the park gates and define as much of the park boundary as possible. With a little luck, I might even be able to get help/maps from the BMFA and possibly even permission to summit Croydon Mountain (on foot, of course).

Updates to follow...