Next door in New Jersey, almost 40 percent of the land is forested — surprising, since the state is the most densely populated in the country. But neither it nor Pennsylvania can approach the leafy marvel of Maine, at the top of the most-wooded list with 83 percent cover. Even there, though, the number of private owners is only 250,000 and the parcels are much bigger; in 2011, a billionaire from Colorado purchased a million acres.

Most Heavily Forested States Pennsylvania is one of the most heavily forested states in the nation, and the proportion of New Jersey that is forested is close to the national average of 35 percent. Note: Data does not include Alaksa or Hawaii SOURCE: U.S. Forest Service

In Pennsylvania, the 20,000-acre Blooming Grove Hunting and Fishing Club in Hawley, Wayne County, is the largest privately owned forest, but right now in Elk County alone, properties of 7,150 acres and 9,894 acres are for sale. The latter, on the market for $31.5 million, is larger than Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The smaller one, known as the North Fork Lodge, is owned by Kip Fulks, CEO of the Under Armour clothing line, and includes a historic hunting lodge. It's priced at $13.5 million.

In Luzerne County, an organization founded by former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Tim Tebow purchased a 3,000-acre property in Bear Creek Township. Tim Tebow Foundation representatives said he was unavailable to discuss the property.

Pennsylvania's Bureau of Forestry was once interested in purchasing the North Fork Lodge, Finley said, but the cost was prohibitive. Both it and the larger Elk County property have valuable timber, according to the listings, and any potential owners could draw money from them for a lifetime by logging out trees and planting new ones, one of the tenets of being a steward.

“We can’t preserve it, but we can conserve it.” – Jim Finley, retired Penn State forestry professor

The Center for Private Forests will likely reach out to the new owners, to offer a path for forest stewardship if they want it.

"We know that when land changes hands, quite often that's when things happened to it," Muth said. "Land can be subdivided and sold individually. There's a lot of transition that can happen."

The properties come with a bundle of rights — layers of ownership that can be sold off to make money but also, increasingly, to conserve the forest without losing access to it. For instance, an owner could sell the rights to the natural gas beneath him to a company in Oklahoma, and sell development rights to a land trust that would bar future owners from building on it or breaking it up.

"We can't preserve it," Finley said, "but we can conserve it."

If forest stewards are Pennsylvania's master gardeners, one would expect Finley's 270 acres in Elk County to be pristine. He scoffs at the word, noting that the state's woodlands have been razed, replanted, and managed since William Penn drew up his charter requiring that one acre of forest be left standing for every five cleared. Still, by 1907, the state's forest cover had gone from 90 percent to its nadir, 32 percent; it rebounded to more-or-less current levels by the mid-1960s.

Finley happens to have a bad neighbor — a PennDOT property where invasive plants run riot.

During a soggy tour of Finley's property last month, rain pooled between the trees and flowed down through the dark hemlocks toward his favorite place, the confluence of two creeks. The normally clear, babbling trout stream raged like a torrent of chocolate milk, fed by surface water from nearby roads and a PennDOT culvert. "I've never seen it with that much water in it," he said, nearly yelling.