The passenger pigeon is one of the world’s most symbolic extinction stories. It’s a cautionary tale of how in just a few short generations, one of the wonders of the world could be completely eradicated.
But when that narrative was questioned in a popular book, 1491 by Charles Mann, what does the response tell us about the conservation movement as a whole?
In New England, the Waterman name is like mountain royalty. But beyond a tight circle of outdoors-people, they're not a household name. Today, we tell the story of one of the most influential voices in American wilderness philosophy, Laura Waterman, and how she has changed following the death of her husband.
Read MorePeople love fishing for trout. They love it so much that we are willing to go to insane lengths to catch them. But what should we make of the fact that much of that experience of fishing for trout is just a facsimile of what it once was… and may actually be BAD for the very same fish, that we so love to catch?
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But what happens when the evolution of a sport threatens the very thing that made it so attractive in the first place?
There's only one place in the world that you can find the axolotl—the Mexican salamander—in the wild. This creature is the living embodiment of Xolotl, the Aztec god of heavenly fire, of lightning and the underworld, and the renegade twin brother of Quetzalcoatl. But the wild axolotl’s fate might be bound to the Aztecs by more than myth: its life in 21st century could rely on the last surviving fragments of a landscape both very old and very human.
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Can you have your leopard rosette, and your little cat too?
Read MoreWilderness Therapy is a form of treatment that uses the natural world and wilderness settings to address behavioral and mental health issues in teens. With a history dating back to the nation’s earliest summer camps, the idea of nature as healer has deep roots. But with a tattered history of institutional abuse, patchwork oversight, and absent legislation, is this treatment option too wild to be trusted?
When Jake Duggan was fourteen, his parents sent him to sleep away camp. The camp included days-long camping trips which lasted from Thursday through Sunday. On one particular trip it rained non-stop from Thursday through Saturday. Jake remembers being soaked to the point there was no escaping it. Then, just as he and his fellow rain-soaked campers were setting up for Saturday’s dinner things started to clear.
That’s when it happened.
“I looked and I saw the sun setting and the clouds clearing, and this sounds like I’m making it up but I’m not, I turn around and there’s this giant, giant rainbow, the biggest rainbow I’ve ever seen,” Jake says. “And then a huge bald eagle flies right through the rainbow. I grabbed one of the guides and I was like, ‘This is the first time I’m feeling happy, in years.’”
For Jake, being happy was a big deal because this wasn’t an ordinary summer camp, and Jake wasn’t an ordinary camper.
“We tried different medications, which only made things worse. Whatever anyone would tell us to do, we would do.”
Jake’s mom, Erin Duggan, says when Jake was growing up he would spend a lot of time outside with his dad, Tim. They started hiking the 4,000 footers in New Hampshire and in the winter months would spend their weekends skiing together.
“To this day he is the best skier I’ve ever skied with,” says Tim. “He’s a natural, incredibly gifted skier.”
As Jake got older, he started skiing more with his friends and less with his dad. Then, the winter of his eighth-grade year, Jake didn’t want to ski with his dad or his friends anymore. A few months later he was spending all his time alone, locked in his room.
pHOTO: jIMMY gUTIERREZ
“For like one whole summer, the summer after eighth grade that’s all I did,” Jake says. “It would be days that I wouldn’t go outside because it was very tough.”
“We tried different medications, which only made things worse,” says Erin. “Whatever anyone would tell us to do, we would do.”
In February of 2013, everything came to a head when Jake was hospitalized after a skiing trip. A therapist told the Duggans, “You’re not a hospital. You can’t keep him safe.”
“As parents, you’re in the middle of it,” says Tim. “It’s not the kind of research activity you wish you could do as a parent because you don’t have the bandwidth to do that.”
A consultant offed a solution the family hadn’t tried yet: Wilderness Therapy. They were pointed to a program a few hours away in Maine called Summit Achievement.
On the northern end of the White Mountain National Forest, Summit Achievement owns fifty acres dedicated to help struggling teens get out into wild spaces.
“I’ve lived up here in the White Mountains of New Hampshire since the 80s,” says Will White, co-founder of Summit Achievement. “People are starving for more time outdoors.”
Summit Achievement got its start twenty years ago in the mid-nineties and is considered a Wilderness Therapy camp, which means it’s more like counseling in nature than a summer camp with bonfires and s’mores.
Teens spend Monday through Wednesday on Summit’s campus attending classes and the rest of the week is spent in the backcountry camping, with lots of therapy along the way. There’s a variety of backgrounds at Summit including teachers, therapists, licensed social workers, and a labradoodle named Baxter.
“I don’t think I’d be here if it wasn’t for Summit Achievement.”
pHOTO: jIMMY gUTIERREZ
“Many of the people who started these programs were working in traditional environments,” says Will. “I’ve worked at mental health centers, I’ve worked at boarding schools, I’ve worked at public schools, and those environments were not as powerful as the one here.”
With a childhood full of summer camps and the boy scouts, it’s no wonder Will was drawn to the natural world’s potential for treatment.
“You interview parents who send their kids to summer camp and most of them will say, ‘Wow, he or she really grew up from that experience,’” says Will. “This is the same idea but it’s much more intense and much more therapeutically focused.”
And that’s where Jake Duggan went back in 2013: depressed, suicidal, out of options.
“When you’re out in the woods, whether it’s alone or with a group of people and you’re on a backpacking trip, you have such a purpose and you’re needed for everything that happens,” says Jake. “I don’t think I’d be here if it wasn’t for Summit Achievement.”
So what exactly was it that helped Jake get better? Was it teamwork? Top-of-the line counseling? Eagles soaring through rainbows? When it comes to the field of Wilderness Therapy, the science is still out on exactly how and why some kids get better in nature. There’s even a name for it. Experts call it the black box. And while Jake emerged from that black box seemingly healed, not all Wilderness Therapy camps are created equal.
Cynthia Clark-Harvey’s story read a lot like the Duggans – in 2001 she was the parent of a teen in distress, searching for answers, who was eventually pointed towards a Wilderness Therapy camp.
“Erica was just very bright, very talented,” Cynthia says. “We were all just kind of awed by her a lot of the time.”
Erica, the Harvey’s oldest, was an award-winning artist, competitive springboard diver, and weekly volunteer at the local animal shelter for years. Cynthia says things turned on a dime in the eighth grade.
The first sign of distress came when Cynthia and her husband, Michael, found out that Erica had begun cutting herself. Within a week they were in front of a psychologist.
“She was hospitalized just before her 15th birthday for suicidal ideations, suicidal thoughts, and suicidal behavior,” says Cynthia.
Over the next few months, Cynthia and Michael tried everything. They brought her to family therapy, a psychiatrist, entered her in a drug treatment program. Erica began to show signs of mild improvement. Then, a consultant nudged them to consider Wilderness Therapy. Cynthia dove into any published materials she could find.
“We got to the parking lot and told her she was going to a Wilderness Therapy program and she was distraught, hysterical.”
“We culled it down to three or four places, I think I at least talked to two of them,” says Cynthia, “and then we decided to send her to Catherine Freer.”
The Catherine Freer program was based in Nevada, a short plane ride from the family’s home in Phoenix. The staff advised Cynthia and Michael not to tell Erica about the camp, with fears she’d run away–something she’d never done before. So they told her they were taking a family trip to Lake Tahoe.
“We got to the parking lot and told her she was going to a Wilderness Therapy program and she was distraught, hysterical,” says Cynthia.
In 2007, then-California state Rep. George Miller called for a federal investigation into abusive youth programs at residential treatment facilities, which included a number of Wilderness Therapy camps.
At a hearing before the House Committee on Education and Labor, legislators, advocates for and against the industry, and parents testified. Cynthia Clark-Harvey was among those who shared their stories.
“On May 27, 2002, the first full day of Erica’s Nevada wilderness trek,” Cynthia says, “Freer’s trusted team mistook a dire medical emergency for teenage belligerence and Erica died that afternoon from heat stroke and dehydration.”
The day after the Harvey’s dropped off Erica at Freer’s she collapsed multiple times during the camp’s daily hike. On her last fall, she collapsed face first off the trail into rocks and scrub brush. She laid there for almost an hour as staff idly looked on. By the time Erica received advanced life support, it was too late.
“Besides lacking a centralized database, the government found four widespread and specific issues from their case studies on the industry: untrained staff, misleading marketing practices, abuse before death, and negligent operating practices.”
“Our story is a personal tragedy but please remember, for each family that has suffered the ultimate damage, the death of a beloved child,” says Cynthia, “there are perhaps thousands of others who have suffered physical or psychological damage and abuse.”
The government’s investigation went on to unearth thousands of cases of abuse. For Erica, she was one of three teenagers who died that year at Catherine Freer camps.
“During 2005 alone, 33 states reported 1,619 staff members involved in incidents of abuse in residential programs,” Greg Kutz, Managing Director of the Government Accountability office, said at the hearing. “[We] could not identify a more concrete number of allegations because [we] could not locate a single web site, federal agency, or other entity that collects comprehensive nationwide data.”
Besides lacking a centralized database, the government found four widespread and specific issues from their case studies on the industry: untrained staff, misleading marketing practices, abuse before death, and negligent operating practices.
Another issue the investigation focused in on was the prices of these camps. Catherine Freer’s total cost was over $11,000 for 21 days back in 2002, or $523 per day. Even Summit Achievement, Jake’s camp, runs north of $500 per day - which brings his four months of treatment to approximately $60,000.
The explosion of Wilderness Therapy camps in the late 80s and early 90s were two-fold. First, was the increased demand for teen treatment after the closure of many inpatient psych hospitals and substance abuse treatment centers aimed at adolescents. Second was the draw of an industry with incredible profit margins, low overhead cost, and little barrier-to-entry.
Those inside the field like to delineate between two types of camps, therapeutic camps and harsher, boot-camp models, which often fall under court-ordered or adjudicated camps. While a core group of the industry only considers the therapeutic camps true Wilderness Therapy camps, there is no governing body.
So along with financial inequality in access to treatment, there’s also a wide racial gap when it comes to who attends the therapeutic camps versus adjudicated camps. In the higher-end, private Wilderness programs, like Summit Achievement, three quarters of clients are white males. At the harsher adjudicated programs, that same demographic makes up less than half the population.
These camps and programs hold appeal to parents of kids in desperate situations, with some branding themselves as camps or schools for “troubled teens.” This was an attractive option for Dynesha Lax, who, back in 2012 found herself in a position similar to the Duggans and the Harveys.
After making her 14-year old son Alonta wear a sign detailing his bad behavior, local news stations quickly picked up the story. Not long after that, multiple daily talk shows called the family to book Dynesha and her son on their shows. She decided to go on Dr. Drew Pinsky’s brief daytime show called Lifechangers with the hope he would have advice for how to corral her young teen.
That day on the show, another guest of Pinsky's was Ephraim Hanks, Clinical Director at Diamond Ranch Academy. That’s a boarding school in Utah that sells itself as: “The Top School for Troubled Teens.” And he was there to offer Alonta free tuition for a year at the school.
“I didn’t think sending him with two complete strangers who don’t know anything about him was helping him,” she says.
Dynesha didn’t send Alonta away and she said felt bamboozled. After the show, Diamond Ranch upped their offer, saying they’d take Alonta for up to two years. So when she got back to her hotel, she did what any curious person would do, she Googled the school.
“I didn’t think sending him with two complete strangers who don’t know anything about him was helping him.”
“I started reading how one kid had died there and one kid wrote how his shoes and his clothes were taken from him,” Dynesha recalls, “and how they were ridiculed by the staff and couldn’t have outside function with their family or anything.”
The year after Dynesha refused their offer, a camper committed suicide while attending Diamond Ranch. This past February, a staffer was charged and sentenced to twenty-two and a half years in federal prison for producing child pornography.
Diamond Ranch didn’t return our calls requesting comment, but a court of law has never found them guilty of abuses, and their website is filled with positive testimonials. But in that moment, none of that mattered to Dynesha. She read the negative reviews and was confident she had made the right decision.
The term “troubled teen” is usually a catch-all for kids dealing with behavioral issues, mental health issues, and/or substance-misuse issues. It should also be a warning sign. One common problem found with programs using this term is a catch-all approach to services provided, instead of an individualized approach, which is crucial to long-term improvement.
“The thing I always recommend when parents contact me,” says Maia Szalvita, author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, "is, start with a complete psychiatric evaluation by somebody who is not affiliated with any program or anything like that.”
She says the term “troubled teen” reveals a lot about how the industry is structured, but it tells us nothing about the issues these kids are dealing with.
“We know that if you isolate vulnerable people, people with disabilities, children, away from society you will end up with institutional abuse. And so the only reason to use a residential facility is when you have no alternative.”
“If your child has a specific problem, you want to get help for that specific problem,” says Szalavitz. “Basically, if you are going to work with troubled teens that genuinely need residential care, there is absolutely no way to make a profit if you hire professionals that are appropriately qualified.”
She argues that nature in and of itself is not meant to be used as a primary treatment option since there’s no science proving its efficacy. She also says that the proliferation of these camps and schools leads to more serious systemic issues.
“We know that if you isolate vulnerable people, people with disabilities, children, away from society you will end up with institutional abuse,” says Szalvitz. “And so the only reason to use a residential facility is when you have no alternative.”
While she concedes that there is science behind the restorative properties of green space and time spent in nature, she says the industry of Wilderness Therapy is still too wild to trust.
“In the current unregulated environment where you can’t have unannounced inspections, and where there isn’t enough people to even do that oversight in the states that do have some regulations,” says Szalvitz, “you’re going to end up with the same problems repeating themselves.”
But what is a parent to do when they’re out of options and are trying to save their child?
“A lot of times parents feel like when someone offers them some place to go, that’s the right way to go,” says Dynesha. “But I can’t really say that, because even after the show, Alonta did go into placement for a total of 14 months and it actually made his life worse.”
When it comes to the field of Wilderness Therapy, people inside the industry believe there’s been honest change since the government’s investigation a decade ago.
“I do think that report was a kindling to say, wow, we need to do better,” says Dr. Anita Tucker. “We’re not perfect, we know we still have such a ways to go, we’re just in such a holistically different place than we were ten years ago.”
Doctors Mike Gass and , the Association of Experiential Education’s 2016 Distinguished Researchers, are professors at the University of New Hampshire. They’re also the leadership behind the Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare Center (OBHC), which was established in 2015 to improve the field through best practices and evidence-based research.
Last year the center published 20 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals–even in some journals that wouldn’t have touched the industry a decade ago. They’ve also put together an 85-page analysis of what a healthy wilderness program looks like. It’s the most comprehensive benchmark in the industry today. The OBHC includes twenty-two wilderness programs that have met that standard.
“We’re not perfect, we know we still have such a ways to go, we’re just in such a holistically different place than we were ten years ago.”
Today, one of the most pressing issues for the OBHC and its programs is cost. They envision Wilderness Therapy as a primary care option with broad acceptance and for that to happen, more people need access to treatment.
“It’s heartbreaking to see families spend their [child’s] college tuition to pay for these programs or mortgage their house,” says Gass. “It would be great if we could turn this around and it could earn the type of reimbursement that I believe should happen for third party payments.”
Starting this July, OBHC’s billing code officially kicks in, which will allow for third party reimbursements for selective camps. And unlike the industry’s fly-by-night history of the past, Gass says this process took ten years of highly-detailed documentation.
While major inroads to credibility are being made, the center still has to contend with unpacking the black box and answering the question: What role does nature play in mental healthcare?
“We’ve got a good idea that it’s got a lot to do with the group work that’s done and a lot of work that the adventure brings and using that as a change function,” says Gass. “But, then we kind of go, is it nature, is it exercise, is it good food, is it mindfulness? We don’t really know what concepts are responsible for the types of changes were seeing.”
And until that happens, it may be a hard-sell towards legitimizing the field against a backdrop of abuse, absent legislation, and patch-work oversight.
Outside/In was produced this week by Jimmy Gutierrez with help from: Sam Evans-Brown, Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Hannah McCarthy, and Logan Shannon
Special thanks to Dr. Nicki Bush of ASTART, Alpinist Grant Stathem, and outdoor risk management expert, Ross Clouthier.
Music from this week’s episode came from Sometimes Why, Montplaisir, Blue Dot Sessions, Podington Bear, and Uncanny Valleys.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
If you’ve got a question for our Ask Sam hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
A quick note: this episode previously appeared in our podcast feed back in the spring of 2016, as an individual segment in one of our hour-long episodes we produced to air on New Hampshire Public Radio. So you might have already heard it, but…you might not have!
Sam is going to take us all hunting this week. Not hunting for animals, but instead, hunting for the secret of what’s behind that 26-mile fence cutting through the woods of New Hampshire, and why some people want it to stay a secret.
From my very first days as a reporter in New Hampshire, I started to hear about a place hidden up in the woods of New Hampshire. A place full of unfamiliar animals from other places, but fenced off from the rest of the state, and kept quiet. I never heard about it directly — it was always through a guy who knew a guy, who had been inside — but the more I heard about the place, the more unbelievable it seemed.
This massive, private park was called a “millionaires hunt club” and “the most exclusive game preserve in the United States” and yet there were many people I know who had lived their entire lives in this state, but had never heard of it. So what is the secret of what’s behind that 26-mile fence cutting through the woods of New Hampshire, and why do some people work so hard to keep it a mystery?
Helen M. Derry at corbin park central station, courtesy brian meyette.
Officially it’s called the Blue Mountain Forest Association, but everybody who knows about it calls it Corbin Park. (Seemingly shortened from Corbin’s Park… we’ll get to the origin of the name.) It’s near the border with Vermont and it’s huge, though its exact size seems to be something of a mystery. Regardless, at somewhere between 24,000 and 26,000 acres this park is actually bigger than something like 60 percent of New Hampshire towns.
You can find the chain-link fence that encircles the entirety of the park at the end of any number of long rough dirt roads that lead to locked gates. It feels almost like like stumbling across a military base full of UFOs or some similar secret. The fence itself looks sturdy, if slightly weather-worn, and at regular intervals features small signs reprinted hundreds of times, “the enclosed park fence and signs are protected by a special law of this state and any person trespassing herein or in any way violating that law will be prosecuted.”
I got my introduction to the park from a man named Brian Meyette, a retired database administrator, who lives in an off-the-grid home, right next to the fence. “In the fall it’s cool, because you get elk bugling in here,” he said as we walked down his icy driveway, “I actually even came down here once because I could hear one and it sounded like he was bugling just inside the fence.”
Elk, in case you didn’t know, are a Western thing. We don’t have them in New Hampshire. Except on the other side of this fence. And that’s not the only thing that’s over there.
“Any time people come up here to work or anything, they always say, ‘oh did you see the pigs?’ said Brian, laughing. When he says pigs, he’s referring to Eurasian wild boar, imported from Germany into New Hampshire. “And no,” Brian continued, “normally you come down here and it’s just you see a bunch of trees, that’s all you ever see.”
But while you might not see them, there are elk bugling and Eurasian wild boars hustling around behind those fences.
But why?
The trouble with finding the answer to that question is that no one inside of Corbin's Park wants to talk about it. Corbin’s Park is a member’s only club. If you are a reporter, and identify yourself as such, not only do the employees of the park not want to talk to you, but the members don't want to talk to you, the people they have invited as guests don't want to talk to you, even some regular folks in town don't want to talk to you.
Basically the only way to talk about Corbin's park today is to start by talking about Corbin's park 100 years ago. The farther back in time I went, the easier it was for me to find people who wanted to talk about this place, which is what brought me to Larry Cote. Cote is a retiree, and chair of the Newport Historical Society, which is where all the historical documents about Corbin’s Park have come to be kept.
“This is our 4th year and you’re the first person who’s asked about it, so I’d say it’s pretty rare that somebody’s got a lot of inquisitive-ism,” Cote told me as we dug through binders full of photos and letters.
Here are the outlines of the history of the park. It starts with a guy named Austin Corbin born in 1827, grandson of the town doctor in Newport, New Hampshire, who left home to go to Harvard as a young man. He then he went to Davenport, Iowa where he fell into real-estate and banking, and became one of the founders of the American banking industry alongside giants like J.P. Morgan.
After making a lot of money in the midwest, he then headed out to New York, where he invested in some swampy property out in an underdeveloped borough: Brooklyn. “He drained the swamp, he tore down the shacks, he built two hotels — the Oriental and the Manhattan — and that’s how Coney Island got started,” said Cote.
But as he was amassing his fortune, part of him just wanted to go back to New Hampshire. So he hired an agent to start buying up farms in the towns around his childhood home. In so doing, he didn’t exactly endear himself to the locals. “There’s people that say he was a robber and all that stuff,” said Cote, who was quick to defend Corbin, saying the farmers got fair prices for their land. Even so, there was even a rhyme that people in Croydon — one of the towns bordering the park — started saying about this time:
“Austin Corbin, grasping soul,
Wants this land from pole to pole.
Croydon people bless your stars,
You’ll find plenty of land on MARS.”
Corbin bought sixty some-odd farms, (again, in New Hampshire, this is the size of an entire town) and he set about building his very own dream game reserve.
“The elk cost him $5,000 dollars. The Moose $1,500, the buffalo $6,000, deer and antelope $1,000, wild boar pigs $1,000 dollars, and then additional other animals were another $5,500,” said Cote as he read from a ledger from the park’s archives. Caribou, reindeer, big-horned sheep, pheasants, Himalayan Mountain goats. The park contained animals from all over the world, like an exotic, cold-weather safari.
But just when the park was really starting to shape up, Austin Corbin and his son decided to take some new horses for a day of fishing and picnics by a nearby lake. His driver hitched some new horses to the buggy, but didn’t give them blinders and when Corbin opened a parasol the horses spooked. The carriage was overturned, and both Corbin and his coachman were killed.
For a few decades, the park was operated by Austin Corbin’s son (charmingly but confusingly also named Austin Corbin) and these are what you might call the ‘Golden Years’ of the park. Famous people like Teddy Roosevelt came to hunt, and a world renowned naturalist takes up residence in the park to make observations and take notes. The park’s buffalo were — at least according to some — instrumental in restoring Bison to the American West.
In the early days, the park was open to the public. Every Wednesday, they were invited in to explore and there was even a winter carnival held there when the townsfolk came in for a deer hunt, ski jumping, a ball, and a banquet.
But after Austin Corbin the senior died, his fortune slowly began to ebb away. Austin Corbin the son can’t quite replicate whatever business magic his dad had, and Cote said that the when Corbin the son died in 1938, he was more or less penniless. That same year, a massive hurricane blew down huge amounts of the fence that kept the park enclosed, and boar and elk escaped in large numbers. The park fell into disrepair, until eventually in 1944 his family gave it up and a group of wealthy hunters took it over.
As time went by, the park dropped further and further from the public eye. Today, most people I talk to who are from New Hampshire have never heard of the place.
These days, whatever’s going on in Corbin’s park, stays in Corbin’s park.
Except for when not everything stays inside.
“Back in 1987 we believe,” Sonny Martin began explaining to me over the phone, before his wife shouted from the background (“Eighty-six!”), “Oh now, my wife corrected me, ‘86.” Martin is the now retired former owner of a hardware store in Lancaster, New Hampshire — some 70 miles north of Corbin’s Park.
“So, somewhere, 1st of November, I was sitting in my tree-stand. It was getting dusky, I always call it next to dark,” said Sonny, falling into the rythms of a story he’s obviously told more than a few times, “Well, the next thing I knew, out comes this wild boar, and he just moves out into the middle of the clearing. He reminded me like a train, the way his legs moving, you know, I’ve always said that. And he just stood there, and does this ‘take your best shot.’”
Martin did take his best shot, and he mounted the head of the boar that he killed that day and for years it hung on the wall behind the register at his hardware store.
gate around corbin park, photo by sam evans-brown
Wild boar can weigh more than 200 pounds, and need to eat more than 4,000 calories a day. They’re aggressive, a nuisance to farmers, and they reproduce like crazy. It’s not unusual for one sow to have six piglets per litter, and sometimes they have two litters per year. To top it all off, they’re smart and wiley. One federal wildlife control official I interviewed said once they design a fence that can hold water, it will be strong enough to hold a pig.
“I mean it was kind of… it was a little bit unbelievable to see something laying there,” Martin said of the animal.
Martin is not the only one to have killed one of the escaped pigs of Corbin park. Technically, the wild boar that escape Corbin’s Park are property of Corbin’s Park, and hunters outside the fence aren’t allowed to shoot them without permission. But the park is liable for any damage to crops or lawns that an escaped boar might cause, so from what I’ve gathered from talking to locals and neighbors, they’re fine with letting local hunters clean up the problem for them. State Fish and Game doesn’t want to issue permits to hunt the pigs because they don’t want to create a demand among hunters for a species that in other parts of the country has become an invasive pest. (Now that you know to look for it, you’ll start to regularly see headlines about men arrested for transporting and releasing wild boar to new places to get new populations going.)
So, with this unregulated hunt, there’s something of a symbiotic relationship going on: local hunters experience the thrill of hunting exotic game without being a part of Corbin’s exclusive club, and they take care of one of the park’s more troublesome issues. I’ve spoken with several people who say they’ve hunted pigs outside the fence, including one who said he shoots multiple ones every year, but none of them agreed to be interviewed in front of a microphone.
It’s another layer of secrets. Not only is what happening inside the fence shrouded in mystery, but some of the activities outside the fence are happening under the radar too. Secrets within secrets: a Russian matryoshka doll of secrets.
I tried for a very long-time to talk to someone who is a member of Corbin Park. I called the president of the park. I called the superintendent a bunch of times. I called two other members whose names I managed to find. I even eventually wrote a letter to the park’s general address.
image courtesy brian meyette
No response.
I did succeed in talking to a number of people who have been guests and hunted inside the park and even managed to talk to a current member, but none of these folks wanted to be interviewed in front of a microphone. I was also able to pull the park’s tax returns, because it’s a non-profit, and they file numbers of how many animals are shot each year with Fish and Game.
So here’s what I learned.
There are 30 members. We know who some of these folks are, because their names show up as directors of the park on the tax-forms: one is the CEO of a plastics company that makes things like spout on a can of whipped cream; there’s a self-made millionaire whose company built a stealth boat they’re trying to sell to the US military; there’s the owner of a major gun manufacturing company, who also happens to own Austin Corbin’s old mansion; and there’s even one of the descendents of the Von Trapp Family Singers, from the Sound of Music.
central station, corbin park. image via google maps.
These 30 members and their guests shoot somewhere between 200 and 600 wild boar every year, and between 40 and 120 deer and elk.
From the tax forms you can see that the park makes money off of meat-cutting (members can pay to have their meat butchered for them) but most of their income comes from membership dues, which cost something in the neighborhood of $25,000 dollars a year.
To become a member, you also have to buy the shares of a former member. No one told me how much it cost them to buy into the club initially, but I was told that calling it a millionaire’s hunt club is not an exaggeration.
So why all the secrecy? These are wealthy people who don’t want to attract the attention — and perhaps the resentment — of those who don’t approve of their habits. And believe me, there’s plenty of resentment.
“You can’t get into it. It’s the biggest secret. It’s the millionaires hunt club. The most exclusive game preserve in the United States,” said Rene Cushing in an interview, a New Hampshire state legislator who says that on the political spectrum he leans toward the socialism, “Millionaires only, and New Hampshire peasants need not apply.”
Cushing tried to get a bill passed to require the people who hunt boar inside Corbin Park to buy a New Hampshire hunting license, which is not currently required. I asked him why he felt their exclusivity was a reason to go after the club members.
“I don’t think it’s fair that the people who go surf-casting, pay their $8, pay the Fish and Game Department, should end up subsidizing the Fish and Game Department when they have to go to Corbin Park to respond to a hunter being shot, or when they have to go up to 89 and pick up a wild boar that’s escaped from this fenced in property, and the rest of us are picking up the tab,” said Cushing, “It’s just about fairness.”
I think this is why it’s so hard to talk to members of Corbin Park. The probably feel like just laying out the facts of this place — the cost, the invasive species escaping into the state, the overwhelmingly male membership and guests — will prompt a negative reaction from the Rene Cushing’s of the world.
Reporters sniffing around the fences of the park inevitably puts them into a bind, though. If they talk to reporters, it could encourage more reporters to do more stories, which means more people talking (some negatively) about this gigantic exclusive park. If they don’t talk, then the eventual stories that do come out sound like this one, where the members seem somehow shady, for exercising their right to not comment.
The members probably feel like outside the fence, they can’t win.
corbin park central station, photo by sam evans-brown
It’s 26,000 acres of rocky New Hampshire land, fenced off, stocked with elk, eurasian wild boar and white-tailed deer. It’s private, but you can get in if invited by a member, or if you ask on the right day. It was built over 100 years ago, by a super-wealthy banker. Every year, hunters inside shoot somewhere between 200 and 600 wild boar, and between 40 and 120 elk and deer. The animals are fed through the winter to help keep the populations up, but you’re not allowed to hunt around the feeding sites.
Members can get the meat butchered and smoked on site. They can stay in cabins and old farmhouses - the ones that are still standing - that are sprinkled throughout the park. They can hike up Croydon and Grantham peaks, the two tallest mountains in Sullivan County, which are inside the fence.
It’s expensive to be a member, and only 30 people are allowed to be members. When someone wants to sell their shares, you’ve got to know a guy who knows a guy if you want to buy them; there’s no announcement in the papers.
And we also know that most of the people who live near this park, folks like Brian Meyette, have no problem with the place and tend to say it’s a good neighbor. The park is quiet, pays its taxes.
However you feel about all that… it’s up to you.
In the end, I don’t think Corbin Park is actually a mystery. At one point, I spoke to Heidi Murphy a lieutenant with Fish and Game, who has been inside to help the park staff with occasional issues with bears.
“It’s just you know a big huge patch of woods with some hunters that are camping out in some cabin,” she said, laughing at my insistence that it must be more interesting than that.
“It’s, you know, it’s New Hampshire woods,” she shrugged.
Sam Evans-Brown, with help from Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Logan Shannon.
Special thanks to David Allaben and Tony Musante from the USDA. By the way, if you see an escaped boar in New Hampshire, you should report it to those guys.
Thanks also to Ken Hoff, who volunteered his time and his skills to give us an airplane ride over Corbin’s Park
This week’s episode featured tracks from [tk tk tk]. Check out the Free Music Archive for more tracks.
Theme music by Breakmaster Cylinder
We reported this story back in 2015. There have been a couple of changes which we mention in the version you see below: Episode 39: Champagne on the Rocks. Both versions of this episode are included in this post for the sake of keeping our archival ducks in a row. Enjoy!
In the summer of 2015, Scott Jurek set a new record for running the 2,181 miles of the Appalachian Trail. But on his triumphant day atop the last mountain in Northern Maine, his 21st century campaign for the trail's record ran afoul of a park founded on ideas about wilderness from a decidedly earlier time.
