A wetland at the foot of Dorr Mountain, right beside the road.
Look out your right side, at that open wet ground below the mountain. That's the Great Meadow, at the foot of Dorr Mountain. It looks like nature left alone, and it isn't. For most of a century a three-foot culvert under this road choked the stream at its outlet, and in twenty twenty-six crews replaced it with one twelve feet wide. You're looking at a wetland this road reshaped, just starting to get its natural flow back. Holding back water is normally a beaver's job, but beavers were gone from this island by the middle of the eighteen hundreds. In nineteen twenty-one George Dorr tried to bring them back, with one animal, and it died that first winter.
Photo: NPS photo, public domain · Public domain