This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in News & Citizen on July 17.

With the pending purchase of an adjacent tract of land, the Peter A. Krusch Nature Preserve is set to greatly expand the publicly accessible forestland in Cambridge.

The Krusch Preserve Committee, which in 2021 established the preserve on land acquired by the town from resident Sally Laughlin, opened a 51-acre tract of dynamic woodland to the public, and created an accessible route to the Cambridge Pines State Forest.

A neighboring piece of land known as the Bormann property was considered for the preserve at the time, but an initial grant application was denied. Now, four years after the preserve first opened, the town is planning to acquire nearly 30 acres of additional land with assistance from the Vermont Land Trust.

The purchase will also connect the central section of the preserve with another piece of land owned by Cambridge village. Part of that land is off-limits to the public due to the existence of a wellhead on the tract, but trails that will be built through the area will more than double the area of publicly accessible forest, Laughlin said.

The expansion will add more diversity to the preserve, she said, and expand the preserve to over 200 acres.

“I was delighted when we walked up into the Bormann land, which is more hardwood forest, more maples and so forth,” Laughlin said. “There are wood thrush there, and there’ll be some different species of birds and plants and so forth.”

The Cambridge Pines State Forest contains some of the oldest trees in the town — it is a second-growth forest that has been mostly left intact since it was logged about 200 years ago. The current preserve contains meadow, forest, wetlands, Dragon Brook and a sand blow, land that has been rendered sandy and unvegetated by stiff winds.

The new portions opened up by this purchase will add higher elevation habitats to the range, and even features what Laughlin says is “probably the oldest yellow birch in Vermont,” just over the line into the village’s property.

The preserve has become regionally popular in its four years of public use, with a tracker borrowed from the Lamoille County Planning Commission indicating the preserve saw thousands of visitors within a 10-month span.

The Bormann family has entered an agreement to sell its property to the land trust, which will then transfer it to the town for the appraised value of $235,000. With additional costs, the land trust has estimated that the overall cost of the project to be at around $300,000, most of which will be covered by a grant they’re seeking from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust, along with $20,000 from the Cambridge Conservation Commission and additional funding raised by the nonprofit Friends of the Krusch Nature Preserve.

Bob Heiser and Friends of the Krusch Nature Preserve president Mary Fiedler, in a letter to the selectboard from land trust project director, noted that expanding the preserve has important environmental benefits.

“The forestland is part of a larger forest block identified by the State of Vermont as a Priority ‘Connectivity Block’ and Priority ‘Interior Forest Block,’ providing critical ecological connectivity on a statewide level,” the letter said.

The Cambridge Selectboard voted at its July 1 meeting to sign a letter of support to the housing and conservation board in support of the grant.

A public informational meeting about the project will be held Monday, Sept. 8 at 6 p.m. at the Cambridge Historical Society.