GREENVILLE (AP) – Trekking 200 miles through the Maine woods on snowshoes while hauling toboggans loaded with more than 200 pounds of food and equipment may not be everyone’s idea of the perfect honeymoon.

But it was just the ticket for Alexandra and Garrett Conover, who now plan to celebrate their 25th anniversary by retracing the route they took during the winter of 1980-81. This latest adventure has been dubbed Winter Walk for the Wilds 2005.

“We’re hopeless romantics,” said Garrett, 49, who plans to complete the journey in Allagash, near the Canadian border, on Feb. 12, two days before Valentine’s Day.

Conover and his 51-year-old wife, who live in a tent in Willimantic without electricity or running water, share a love of nature and the outdoors. They run North Woods Ways, a guide service that specializes in canoe and snowshoe excursions in Maine and Canada.

The Conovers plan to depart Jan. 15 from this tourist village on a route that puts them on ice for all but four miles of their journey.

They will spend much of the first week traversing 40-mile-long Moosehead Lake, which buzzes with snowmobiles in winter, but the remainder of the trip will be spent largely amid the solitude of the northern Maine woods.

The hike is more than simply a celebration of the couple’s silver anniversary. They hope to use it as a vehicle to educate children about the wonders of winter in the outdoors and the pleasures of snowshoeing.

The Conovers plan to talk about their adventure with school children in Greenville. Once the trek has begun, the couple will use a satellite phone to post daily updates on a Web site – www.winterwalk2005.org – detailing what they have seen and experienced. They also will answer questions that the kids post on the site.

Their route, which includes portions of the Penobscot River and a 90-mile stretch of the St. John, follows a corridor used by Indians for thousands of years after the last ice age ended and people started moving into the exposed land, Garrett Conover said.

The couple will be keeping their eyes peeled for changes in the forest landscape.

The honeymoon trip coincided with the beginning of the intensive timber harvests linked to the salvage of forests infested by spruce budworm, Conover said. That era also saw the introduction of huge machines that could clear-cut large tracts faster than ever before.

Conover is interested in revisiting what he recalled as a “massive and ugly” stretch along the North Branch of the Penobscot that was stripped bare of trees. Now, he said, “there might be a 12-foot fir forest coming back.”

His optimism reflects gains made in recent years by conservationists, who have been able to protect much of Maine’s North Woods through land purchases and easements.

The Conovers’ trip will traverse portions of two of the biggest projects – the Nature Conservancy’s land purchases along the St. John and the Forest Society of Maine’s West Branch conservation easements.

“The thing that’s visionary about those huge land parcels that have fallen into conservation organization hands is that even if they’re a maze of liquidation harvests and roads now, they’re going to be good in another human generation and get exceedingly better as time passes,” Conover said.

The couple plan to snowshoe about 8 to 10 miles a day, but could log as many as 15 miles, if necessary, to make up for any day in which they get caught in a blizzard and are forced to hunker down.

Although the Conovers will be alone for most of the trip, a handful of companions will join them for the middle segment, between Pittston Farm and the Baker Lake Outlet.

While it is not unusual for others to snowshoe portions of the route, Conover doubts whether anyone else in recent decades has undertaken what he and his wife completed on their honeymoon and are now getting set to do again.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we were the last ones to do it 25 years ago,” he said.