Pisgah State Park — with its 13,000+ acres of beautiful trails, pristine ponds, diverse wetlands, historic sites and long sweeping views to Mount Monadnock and the Green Mountains — is a precious jewel in the New Hampshire state park system. Pisgah is a place perfectly suited to public outdoor recreation and wilderness experiences — the original purposes for which the park was founded. In recent y
ears, in direct conflict with the park’s original federal and state funding agreement, the state developed a management plan for Pisgah that allows for commercial logging in up to 8,638 acres (64 percent) of the park. Pisgah Defenders, an organization created by a group of concerned citizens who love and value the park, was formed to ensure that the park’s future use is in keeping with its founding, recreation-focused principles. Pisgah Defenders strongly disagrees with the current management plan’s scope of commercial timber harvesting and its impact on the park’s primary outdoor recreation mission, ecological values, and historic resources. Although logging is an important part of New Hampshire’s economic and cultural heritage, we feel that the scale of logging happening in Pisgah State Park now, and planned for the future, is not in keeping with the park’s original purpose. The State of New Hampshire and the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act originally stipulated that the primary purpose of Pisgah was as a recreational park.
