On the last Sunday morning in August, a small group gathered on the Castle in the Clouds Conservation Area to watch a plaque change hands. Joan Maloof, who founded the national Old-Growth Forest Network in 2012, presented it to Lindsay Rosa, executive director of the Lakes Region Conservation Trust. Afterward, everyone walked into the woods behind a guide named Rick Van de Poll, an environmental scientist from Center Sandwich, to see the thing the plaque was actually about.
Most people who make the drive up to the mansion have never heard of that ceremony, and most never will, because it happened quietly and it wasn't about the mansion at all. It was about the forest around it, and specifically about a fact that took until this past summer to become official: parts of that forest are old growth. Never logged, never cleared, standing since long before Thomas Plant broke ground on Lucknow in 1913.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live in Moultonborough. The 5,246-acre Castle in the Clouds Conservation Area now belongs to a list of forests the country has decided are worth protecting specifically because of their age, and the forest earned that status while the mansion up the hill was busy collecting a different kind of recognition. Lucknow made the National Register of Historic Places in 2018 and became a National Historic Landmark in December 2024, both honors for a building that is, as historic buildings go, still fairly young. The trees around it are not.
What the Network Actually Requires
The Old-Growth Forest Network isn't a marketing label. It's a nonprofit that Maloof started with one specific, almost bureaucratic goal: at least one protected, mature, publicly accessible native forest in every county in the country capable of sustaining one, out of roughly 3,140 counties nationwide, with a target of 2,370. As of this induction, the network includes more than 345 forests across 41 states. Getting on that list means a forest has to actually be old growth, not just old-looking or long-untouched. It means the trees have never been commercially cut.
Castle in the Clouds is the fourth New Hampshire forest to make that list. The other three are Snyder Brook Scenic Area, Norton Pool in Coos County, and Big Pines Natural Area inside Hemenway State Forest, which happens to sit in the same county as Moultonborough. Carroll County now has two entries on a national registry that most of the country will never see in person, and the second one is the forest a lot of Moultonborough residents have already walked past without knowing what they were looking at.
Not One Forest, Twenty-One Patches
Here's the detail that changes how you should picture this land. The old growth at Castle in the Clouds isn't a single unbroken stretch you can circle on a map. It's 21 separate delimited areas scattered across the property, and they are wildly uneven in size, ranging from about 1 acre up to 238 acres. Add them together and they cover a little more than 800 acres out of the property's 5,246, meaning the majority of the Conservation Area is still younger, previously managed forest. The old growth is embedded in it, not spread across all of it.
That matters for anyone who assumes a 5,000-plus acre conservation property is uniformly ancient. It isn't. It's a mosaic, with pockets of centuries-old trees sitting inside forest that has been cut, replanted, or otherwise shaped by people at some point in its history. Van de Poll, who serves as the network's volunteer for Carroll County and was the one who helped identify and document these patches, was also the one who led attendees through them after the ceremony. Knowing which 21 pockets those are, and how a 1-acre patch differs from a 238-acre one on the ground, is the kind of detail that separates a casual hike from an informed one.
Two Clocks Running on the Same Hillside
The estate has always told two stories at once, and this summer made the gap between them more visible. One story is architectural: Plant built Lucknow between 1913 and 1914 as a 16-room mansion with what was, for its time, remarkably advanced home technology, and the Castle Preservation Society has spent the twenty years since 2006 restoring and interpreting that building. That's the story most visitors come for, and it's the one the mansion tours, the Carriage House Restaurant, and the new exhibit on Lucknow's post-Plant owners are built around.
The other story runs on a much longer clock, and until August 30 it didn't have an official marker. Trees that predate the mansion by an unknown but clearly substantial margin have been standing on this hillside the entire time the Plant family, and every owner after them, walked past. The Lakes Region Conservation Trust has managed the surrounding woodland for years as the Castle in the Clouds Conservation Area, but old growth status is a different, more specific claim than general conservation, and it's one the property only just earned.
A Few Weeks Left to See It This Year
The 2026 season at Castle in the Clouds opened May 23 and runs through October 25. Onsite tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. daily, the gift shop, Carriage House, and exhibit gallery open at the same time, and the trolley up to the mansion starts running at 10:15. None of that changes because of the new designation. What changes is what you now know to look for once you're past the historic entrance and into the 28 miles of trails the Lakes Region Conservation Trust maintains across the property.
If you've been meaning to walk those trails again before the gates close for the season, the old-growth induction gives this particular fall a reason that has nothing to do with foliage color and everything to do with what's actually growing along the path. A hemlock that was already mature when Plant's crews were pouring the mansion's foundation is a different thing to walk past than an anonymous stand of trees, and for the first time, the property itself has an official answer for which ones those are.
Here is the short version of what's now on the national record for this stretch of Moultonborough:
- 5,246 total acres in the Castle in the Clouds Conservation Area
- Over 800 acres classified as old growth
- 21 separate old-growth patches, ranging from 1 to 238 acres
- The fourth New Hampshire forest, and second in Carroll County, in the national Old-Growth Forest Network
None of this required a single new trail to be cut or a single acre to change hands. The forest was already there, doing what old-growth forest does, which is mostly just persisting. What changed on August 30 was that somebody with the authority to say so finally said it.
If you spend enough time in these woods, you start to notice details like this on your own, long before anyone puts a plaque on them. That's most of what we do at Lake Mountain Property Group, walking this region closely enough to catch the small, specific things that make a place what it actually is, not just what it looks like from the road.
