The Champion LandsThe former Champion Lands of Vermont consist of 132,000 acres in the Northeastern Kingdom of Vermont. The Northeast Kingdom of Vermont includes some of the largest areas in Vermont, consisting of relatively remote and wild lands. A substantial portion of the Championlands lies in the Nulhegan Basin, a vast area of ​​northern lowland forests and wetlands surrounded by hills and mountains of moderate elevation and drained by the Nulhegan River. The Champion Lands of Vermont are part of a larger system known as the Northern Forest. Stretching 400 miles from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean, the Northern Forest covers more than 25 million acres across New York's Tug Hill Plateau and the Adirondack Mountains and includes nearly all of northern Vermont, New Hampshire and the Maine. The forest extends north and east into Quebec and the Maritime provinces of Canada. This vast regional forest contains a range of forest age classes, from early successional to, in some isolated locations, mature forests, but overall these are young forests, less than 100 years old. It provides important habitat for large mammals native to the extensive deciduous, coniferous, and mixed forests of the Northeast. These include black bear, bobcat, deer, and moose. The lands are divided into three different property parcels, each area has its own unique characteristics and area of ​​interest. The West Mountain WMA lands are dominated by three major features: At the center of the parcel, West Mountain rises to an elevation of 2,733 feet above sea level; to the north and east the land drains into a series of small ponds into the Wheeler Stream drainage, while to the west and south Paul Stream drains an area dominated by Ferdinand Bog. These two streams, which are tributaries of the Connecticut River, contain what is believed to be the largest concentration of ice-contacting glacial deposits in Vermont. The result is a highly varied terrain containing kames, moraine kames, eskers and kettles surrounding the resistant West Mountain granite. Notch Pond Mountain, part of the mountainous edge of the Nulhagan Basin north of West Mountain, separates the Wheeler Stream and Paul Stream drainages from the Nulhegan River. The mountains and high hills of the West Mountain WMA are heavily dominated by northern hardwood forests, while the streams are dominated by spruce-fir and hardwood forests or lowland spruce-fir forests and a variety of wetlands and ponds. Wetlands are predominantly northern white cedar swamps, spruce-tamarack swamps, and alder-beaver meadow complexes.