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Bog Brook Cove is Maine’s Coast at its Most Pristine

Maine Coast Heritage Trust protected it. Now you can escape to it.

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From the craggy ledges along the Chimney Trail at Bog Brook Cove Preserve, you can see humpback whales breaching offshore, the green silhouette of Grand Manan, and a coastline strewn with secluded shingle beaches. What you won’t see are strips of residential development. 

Maine Coast Heritage Trust began eyeing this stretch of Down East coast for conservation back in the late 1980s, and the organization worked for 30 years to assemble the nine parcels that now make up 1,770-acre Bog Brook Cove Preserve, straddling the town line of Cutler and Trescott, in Washington County. 

Enter for a chance to win a getaway at Bog Brook Cove!

Win a Getaway at Bog Brook Cove MCHT’s rustic, two-bedroom cabin has easy access to beach and trails — a perfect spot for hikers, birders, or anyone who wants to escape to a remote stretch of the Maine coast. Enter to win a three-day, two-night stay at the Bog Brook Cove cabin in the summer of 2021. You pick the dates. Visit mcht.org/contest for details and an entry form. Submit your name and email address, and we’ll pick the winner at random in December of 2020.

“We knew that any incredible place like this along the coast would eventually be developed if we didn’t preserve it,” director of stewardship Jane Arbuckle says. 

Together with MCHT’s neighboring Western Head, Boot Head, and Hamilton Cove preserves and the state’s Cutler Coast Public Reserved Land, Bog Brook helps make up the largest contiguous area of conserved Maine coastline outside of Acadia National Park. 

The properties form a 15,000-acre corridor where bears, moose, bobcats, and fishers thrive and bald eagles, yellow rails, upland sandpipers, and kestrels nest. On some 80 acres of wild blueberry barrens, MCHT manages an organic commercial harvest. 

“These bigger chunks of acreage are more ecologically valuable, long-term, for a whole suite of wildlife, plants, and trees,” Arbuckle says. “Especially since a warming climate and rising seas pose such a threat to habitat.” 

Nearly 6 miles of trail crisscross the preserve. From the southern trailhead, in Cutler, hikers can wend through woodlands, over granite outcroppings, and along a marshy pond on the 2.4-mile Norse Pond Loop. A steep spur trail leads to Bog Brook Cove Beach, where mid- and low tide reveal a sweep of natural polished stones. 

“You can picture thousands of years of waves coming in and eddying the rocks, carving it into these smooth unusual shapes,” regional steward Melissa Lee says. 

From the north end of the preserve in Trescott, an 1,100-foot, universally accessible path leads to a ledge with views of Canada’s Grand Manan Island across the channel, in the Bay of Fundy. Sure-footed hikers find their way to a series of rugged beaches or pick up the Ridge Trail, a steep 1⁄4-mile loop that rises to a spectacular lookout with 360-degree views. 

“Standing up there, you feel like you’re on top of the world,” Lee says. “The preserve is just this extraordinarily stunning place with so many different kinds of terrain. People constantly say, ‘I had no idea there were places like this in Maine.’”