Greenville sits at the southern end of Moosehead Lake, and everything here points north. The lake is the largest in Maine, about forty miles long, a huge, island-dotted sheet of water ringed by forest, and the town is the jumping-off point for the whole North Woods. Seaplanes line the harbor, floatplane pilots ferry fishermen and hunters into remote ponds, and the main street has outfitters, diners and a tidy waterfront. It feels like a frontier town that has learned to be hospitable.
History is close to the surface. Henry David Thoreau came this way in the 1850s, traveling by steamer and canoe, and wrote about it in The Maine Woods, and a handsome old steamer, the Katahdin, built in 1914, still sits at the dock as a museum and occasional cruise boat. Mount Kineo, a huge cliff of flinty rock rising straight from the lake, was a source of stone for Native toolmakers for thousands of years, and later a grand resort stood on the peninsula below. The logging industry once ran the whole region, and the old booms and drives are the stuff of local legend.
The ride from here is one of the great quiet roads of the Northeast. Route 6 and Route 15 run northwest along the lake's west shore, through forest, past isolated ponds and hamlets, to Rockwood and then on to Jackman, a long, lonely road with gentle bends and wide views. The surface is generally good, but the road is narrow and shared with logging trucks, which are huge and travel fast. Moose are everywhere, and collisions are serious, so take it very easy at dawn and dusk. Beyond Rockwood there are no services for a long way.
Greenville has fuel, a supermarket, a handful of restaurants and several motels. The next sizable town, Sangerville, is a long ride south, so fill up here, and carry water and a snack. The best months are June, when the lake is cold and clear, and late September, when the foliage is at its peak, but July and August have the warmest water and the longest days. Black flies and mosquitoes are bad in late spring, and winter is long and snow-bound, with the lake frozen thick enough for ice fishing shacks.