Chocorua Lake Conservancy (CLC) is a nonprofit land trust founded in 1968. CLC owns and manages 800 acres of conservation land across 17 properties, and protects 2,500 additional acres through perpetual conservation covenants and easements on over 100 properties.
Our main areas of focus include:
Public Access: We are committed to providing local residents and occasional visitors with convenient, attractive public access to Chocorua Lake and trails on nearby conservation lands.
Land Conservation: We protect the scenic and natural resources of the Chocorua Lake Basin and surrounding area.
Lake Protection: Through monitoring and other activities, we protect the pristine water quality of Chocorua Lake, the Chocorua River, and other tributaries.
Forest Protection: Conducting and modeling sustainable forestry operations.
Education & Outreach: We offer events throughout the year to encourage people of all ages to enjoy Chocorua Lake and the trails that surround it, to learn more about the natural world we’re part of, to engage in active stewardship with us, and to have fun with friends and neighbors while doing all these things.
To understand where we’re going, we must understand how and why we got into our current predicament.
Fresh air, good company, and a chance to pitch in, all with a view of a beautiful mountain! Chocorua Lake Conservancy is hosting a spring cleaning at the Grove & Island public access areas along Chocorua Lake.
Good company and free exercise in the fresh air while helping protect a place we all share, with a view of a beautiful mountain to boot! Chocorua Lake Conservancy is hosting a stewardship morning at the Island and Grove public access areas along Chocorua Lake.
Help us clean up plastics and other trash before they degrade and leach pollution into the lake.
Lend a hand creating wood and brush piles for wildlife with recently-cut early successional habitat saplings, and learn about the benefits of brush piles, which provide habitat, cover, and food for many types of wildlife and insects. We will also be clipping small stumps of saplings the mower leaves behind.
We’ll be spreading wood chips, as we do regularly, to help stabilize the shore during busy seasons with lots of foot traffic. Many hands make light work!
If you love to hike Chocorua, come help keep the trails clear and safe, and meet others who also love this place.
The greatest danger for raptors are anticoagulant rodenticides, or poisons used to kill rodents.
In 2023, Chocorua Mountain Club merged into Chocorua Lake Conservancy, and a new coalition of trail stewards is coming together to care for the well-used trails on Mount Chocorua. You’re invited, too!
Early in 2022, Chocorua Lake Conservancy (CLC) and Cook Memorial Library (CML) met with a group of interested community members to discuss climate program possibilities. Since then, with inspiration from that group and continuing conversations with folks around the community, we have been convening an ongoing program series called Climate & Community (C&C).
This past September, the Friends of the Cook Memorial Library asked us to speak at their Annual Meeting and share the history and current activity of CLC with their group. Many thanks to the Friends for this invitation, which provided the impetus to write a short history of the Lake Basin and the CLC.
My guess is that by the time you read this, It will be more or less Christmas time. So let’s talk about Santa Claus…
A big thank you to Green Mountain Conservation Group for hosting CLC Stewardship Director Deb Marnich and Haley Andreozzi from UNHCE for Wednesday’s Wildlife Corridors Workshop. If you missed it, here is the replay and the resource list from GMCG—thanks to them for this, as well, and for all the work they do protecting the water in this region.
Now that the Chocorua Mountain Club has been merged into CLC, and as the CLC expands its own trail stewardship, we are seeking volunteers to help in different ways to care for the many trails up Mount Chocorua and on nearby conservation land.
Read about the work of a small land trust, Land Trust Alliance standards, upcoming projects to restore and stabilize the eastern shoreline of Chocorua Lake and repair the dam at the southern end of Little Lake, and the recent merger of the Chocorua Mountain Club into CLC. Also: a Q&A with the CLC Board of Directors, water snakes, fungi and forests, our Legacy Circle Challenge, and more!
It was a hot, hazy July summer day on one of the most glorious lakes in New Hampshire. My husband and I and the doggo were out for a canoe paddle and a leisurely swim to chill the summer heat…
Long before Chocorua Lake Conservancy was a twinkle in its founders’ eyes, and a whole decade before the founding of the White Mountain National Forest, the Chocorua Mountain Club (CMC) has been maintaining trails on Mount Chocorua…
Banner: Kristina Folcik. Other photos: Juno Lamb