Matt LaRoche was named Superintendent of the Allagash Wilderness waterway in the spring of 2009. His appointment was a dream come true for him, and for the public he serves, a natural-flowing evolution.

A Maine native and 1978 University of Maine graduate, LaRoche cut his Ranger teeth on the Allagash Waterway. In the early years, fresh out of college, LaRoche worked as a part-time Ranger on the Waterway. At that time his boss was Waterway Superintendent Myrle Scott.

Not long after, the lanky, soft-spoken conservation officer met the boss’s daughter, who was living with her family at the Superintendent’s camp at Umsaskis Lake.

As LaRoche recalls their courting days, his first date with Ruth was an afternoon of fishing. She was 16 and, by then, at ease in the woods and on the Waterway.

“Actually, Matt and I met the year before when I was 15,” Ruth said, with a grin. “He hardly noticed me then because I had a bad haircut, and hadn’t yet ‘blossomed.’ “

Later, LaRoche married Ruth. The couple raised five children.

For most of his career as a conservation officer, LaRoche spent 23 years on the West Branch of the Penobscot River regulating whitewater rafting companies and looking after state campsites.

Although LaRoche applied for the Allagash superintendent’s job a decade earlier, he acknowledges that things have a way of working out for the best. In a way, his conservation career groomed him for his new responsibility of overseeing the 92-mile long Waterway.

He figures that it is a good way to wind up his Ranger career. Working with him on the Waterway is a Chief Ranger, five full-time Rangers and a number of assistant Rangers.

“The Waterway usage has changed,” he observed. “We just don’t get the traffic we once did years ago.”

LaRoche went on to explain that, with changing times, one of his three management goals is to give the Waterway higher public visibility in hopes of enhancing public participation in the Waterway as a recreational resource. His second management goal is to see that the Waterway is operated in a user-friendly but professional manner.

His third goal involves greater attention to historical preservation of certain aspects of the Waterway. High on his list of historic preservation is the fabled tramway between Eagle Lake and Chamberlain Lake. The original cable tramway was built in 1902 to transport logs from one lake to the other.

Although rusting and scattered about in parts, the steam-powered tramway sits idle just waiting for some kind of historic preservation initiative. Atop the ground are 6,000 feet of large steel cable and cogs, along with the steam boilers and huge gears that once transported a half-million board feet of logs from lake to lake in a single day.

The tramway is located not far from another historical piece of machinery from the early Maine logging era: Two large, rusting steam locomotive engines that once hauled pulpwood on rails from Eagle Lake to Umbazooksus Lake. The locomotives, which nearly tipped over from sinking earth beneath them, were rescued and stabilized, a few years ago by innovative and hard-working volunteers.

LaRoche, before he puts on his uniform for the last time, is determined to see the tramway preserved for posterity. As one of the points of interest along the Waterway, LaRoche’s goal makes a lot of sense. Looking at the site and all that large, heavy industrial-age machinery that was hauled to the Maine wilderness, it strikes you that this was the essence of the early American entrepreneurial spirit. And what a pity to allow it to go to ruin, lost forever in the dust bin of history.

Listening to the enthusiastic LaRoche explain a potential tramway restoration process, the idea seems less formidable than the locomotive restoration and, in fact, very doable.

“We’ll need money, equipment and labor,” says LaRoche. According to one of the locomotive-restoration volunteers, Pete Smallidge, his group at one time was eager to tackle the tramway restoration.

“We actually had a detailed plan to save the tramway and we wanted to do it,” recalls Smallidge. “At the time, the whole Waterway was immersed in politics. Governor Baldacci put everything on hold. Most of us just got too old to do the work after a while.”

To view an artist’s rendition of what the tramway looked like before it fell into ruin, check out the image on the website: http://www.maine.gov/doc/parks/programs/history/allagash/tram.htm.

V. Paul Reynolds is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM-FM 101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected] and his new book is “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook.”