On a sloppy November day on Vermont’s highest mountain, two inches of wet snow whiten the footprinted trail and the sky churns with dark gray clouds. You want to keep your eyes down to see where you’re stepping.

But the real sights on the short path to Bingham Falls rise overhead. Soaring hemlock trees, some of them 400 years old, stand sentry on both sides of the narrow whitewater gorge. Their bare trunks reach 30 feet or more before the lowest branches appear.

The opportunity to visit an ancient forest surviving in the northeastern United States is not as rare as you might think. A new Sierra Club guidebook http://www.sierraclub.org/books/catalog/1578050669.asp helps travelers find 134 old-growth stands of trees in eight states. Many are more accessible than you would think – one is next to the New Jersey Turnpike, another is actually in Manhattan. The book gives detailed driving and walking directions, accurate for the four forests I checked out.

“Most experts believed that ancient forests in the eastern part of the country had all but been destroyed by centuries of exploitation,” write Bruce Kershner and Robert T. Leverett in The Sierra Club Guide to the Ancient Forests of the Northeast. “But beginning in the 1980s, a group of modern-day explorers teamed up to look for these presettlement woods. What they found astounded everybody: hundreds of thousands of acres of ancient forest that no one knew existed.”

What you begin noticing around Bingham Falls, a popular swimming hole http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0306/swimming.html#vermont near Stowe Mountain Resort on Mount Mansfield, is more than just the stately height and impressive girth of the Eastern hemlocks. Gnarled roots buttress the trees on their rocky perches. Deeply furrowed bark reveals the effects of centuries of weather.

The authors say these and other features of ancient trees reflect “character,” even “charisma.” Once you spot the traits in a grove certified as old (“a canopy dominated by trees 150 years or older”), you’ll notice them in freestanding specimen trees in many places you travel — along canals, in the side yards of farmhouses, on the edges of cemeteries.

It’s easy to guess why singular examples survived. Less obvious are the reasons larger parcels were spared during the clearing and logging mania that cleared 99 percent of the original forest from the 1600s to the early 1900s.

Some groves were dedicated as public lands early on. Others were protected on private estates of the very rich. Land disputes saved a few places because timber companies shied away from properties where title wasn’t perfectly clear. And some sites lucked out because they were too remote or, like the gorge alongside Bingham Falls, too steep and difficult to log.

Apparently no one knows why Bulls Island in New Jersey was spared. A flood plain of the Delaware River, separated from the mainland by a branch of the Delaware and Raritan Canal, it boasts sycamores with thick columns, giant silver maples and grape vines a foot thick. You can camp on the island or bicycle through on a 58-mile path that follows an abandoned railbed and the canal towpath. http://www.dandrcanal.com/

Elsewhere in New Jersey, Helyar Woods sits in an improbable location between busily traveled Route 1 and the New Jersey Turnpike. You can hear the roar of traffic whenever the footpath brings you near the perimeter of this otherwise peaceful 30-acre retreat of 250-year-old trees. The park also features a pond, a waterfall and a garden of hundreds of symmetrically spaced pines that form wondrous tunnels in front of you, behind you and at every diagonal. Rutgers University maintains the preserve. http://aesop.rutgers.edu/~rugardens/

Surely the most surprising ancient forest in the Northeast is the one found in Inwood Hill Park on the northern tip of Manhattan. Like many of New York City’s 27,000 acres of parkland, Inwood Hill offers ballfields and jogging paths. But it also includes Manhattan’s largest and most diverse natural area.

When you arrive through the pleasant neighborhood surrounding Columbia University’s football stadium, the first thing you see is a tidal salt marsh at the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson rivers. Just below the park’s ridge, the highest land in Manhattan, stand majestic oaks, American beech and tulip trees that germinated in the 1700s.

Before that, the area had been logged for building materials and ships’ masts. So this is secondary growth. It made it through the 19th century in private hands (the Lord family of Lord & Taylor department stores), and then was acquired by John D. Rockefeller. He donated it to the city in 1920.

More than just a stunning retreat, the park serves actively as an urban ecology center. After-school students hack away on steep terrain to build an erosion-control project. A falconer keeps a close eye on young bald eagles that are audaciously being restored to New York City. http://www.washington-heights.us/links/frame.php?url=http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_signs.html

While most of the areas in the Sierra Club guide have felt noticeable effects of human disturbance, they remain relatively pristine as laboratories, genetic banks and preferred habitats for rare species.

But the ancient forests’ greatest value may be intangible, and the authors put it well: “They are examples of nature’s majesty, and their hushed green cathedrals are places of inspiration.”

Happy Traveling!

Photos:

1. Entwined roots at Bingham Falls, VT

2. Bike path at Bulls Island, NJ

3. Giant oak in Helyar Woods

4. Black squirrel in Inwood Hill Park

5. Jogging path in Inwood Hill Park