On an early fall day, with just a hint of red tinting the maples, the view from the summit of Deasey Mountain is spectacular.

To the west stand the rugged, treeless basins and knife-edge spine of Mount Katahdin. Off to the south, you see Wassataquoik Valley in the near distance, the peaks of the 100 Mile Wilderness beyond. To the east and north, more wild Maine woods and hills rolling for miles, to the Canadian border.

It's a fascinating view, partly because until recently, this mountain and most of the foreground were owned by one person. In August, entrepreneur Roxanne Quimby donated it to the federal government, and President Barack Obama designated the area the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument.

Now the 87,500-acre monument - adjacent to Baxter State Park - is Maine's largest parcel of federal land, nearly twice the size of Acadia National Park, and I've come to explore.

I started the trip to Deasey by following a rough road to a trailhead inside the monument, then mountain biking along an old logging road that parallels Wassataquoik Stream. A beaver clambered along the bank of a small stream. A bit farther along, hoofs clattered on river cobbles, and a cow moose trotted off into the birches.

Eventually, I found a sign for the International Appalachian Trial, or IAT, that extends the concept of the Appalachian Trail (which itself ends at Katahdin) to Canada and beyond. (One indication of the size of the new monument is that it includes 31 miles of the trail, about the distance between New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut.)

The trail crossed the Wassataquoik at a knee-deep ford, meandered through mixed woods and skirted a massive glacial erratic before turning steeply uphill for a mile toward the summit of Deasey.

Hiking out, it seemed I had the place to myself. On 10 miles of trail, I had flushed several grouse and stepped over moose, coyote and bear scat, but I had not encountered another soul.

In fact, the only person I talked to that day was a man at the trailhead who said he had grown up fishing and hiking in the area. He hated the idea of a park and said, "I'm just coming to say goodbye to it for the very last time." It's not surprising, really: The park and Quimby have been controversial for years.

Quimby's story is by now familiar. A single mom and a back-to-the-lander, she teamed up with grizzled backwoods beekeeper Burt Shavitz to cook up a line of personal-care products on her wood stove. By the time Clorox bought Burt's Bees in 2007, Quimby had made hundreds of millions of dollars.

She used some of that money to buy strategic conservation lands, much of it heavily logged, and sat on the board of an organization that aspired to create a 3-million-acre Maine Woods National Park, encircling Baxter State Park.

The park proposal was opposed by the timber industry and locals accustomed to virtually unrestricted access to private timberlands for hunting, fishing, snowmobiling and riding ATVs.

Even though the National Park Service designated the region a national monument, which is less restrictive than a national park, tensions remain. Driving to the monument from Route 11, on a gravel logging road, one passes a sign bolted to a pine tree next to the one-lane wooden bridge over the East Branch of the Penobscot River: "This bridge owner says NATIONAL PARK, NO!"

The monument aims to commemorate the area's cultural history, including the logging that has transformed Maine's woods. Over several centuries, timber interests felled trees, dammed rivers and built thousands of miles of roads.

Some elements of the new monument feel perfunctory, like the sketched-in outlines of a park. There is a loop road, for example, leading to a couple of spots with fine views of Kathadin.

There's also just one car-accessible campsite in the park, and it is really a glorified gravel pit. But it is comfortable, with picnic benches, fire pits, a few sandy tent sites, a new outhouse, and a marshy pond.

If there's plenty of room for improvements, the National Park Service has the cash to pay for them. In addition to the land, Quimby donated $20 million for an endowment and pledged another $20 million in future support.

I also wanted to see the northern end of the monument. There are two ways to get there. You can hike the IAT and continue 20 miles past the Deasey summit, or drive a 40-mile loop through Patten (where the Patten Lumbermen's Museum doubles as another visitors' center for the monument) and past Shin Pond. Just before the northern entrance of Baxter State Park, a dirt road heading south features a small sign marking the International Appalachian Trail, but no sign for the monument. A half-mile down the road, there is an information kiosk with a map.

That evening, I biked down toward the East Branch seeking a campsite. A mile and a half in, I found something better. Haskell Hut is a bright, spacious log cabin with six bunks, perched on a bluff over a wide, slow reach of the river.

I perused the large topo map on the wall to plan the next day's adventure. It looked as though it would be fun to bike downriver, then hike to a pond for some trout.

So I set off early, fully caffeinated with a fly rod in my backpack. By early afternoon, I had found a path to a small, scenic pond.

Someone had left a canoe neatly stowed among the moss and wintergreen near shore. Sliding the boat, I could see a trail through the aquatic plants left by a moose.

Another angler had left a fly in the canoe, a well-proportioned brown woolly bugger. Taking it as a sign, I tied it on and began casting but found no evidence of trout.

Still, it was as fine a place as you could be while not catching fish. The rugged mountains of Baxter stood off to the west. Pickerel frogs patrolled the damp fringes, and dragonflies and damselflies darted among the lily pads. A kingfisher flew over the shallows.

In the solitude, I wondered how this may change under National Park Service management. Acadia National Park hosts 2 million tourists each year. Baxter State Park sees 75,000 visitors annually and is struggling to meet its "forever wild" management mandate, exemplified by recent criticism over celebrations at the summit of Katahdin. The monument is less dramatic than either of the two, but it will likely attract thousands of visitors. But with just a few parking areas and one car-accessible campsite, it is not yet ready for them.