CHESUNCOOK - We are relieved to be here, walking around this tiny, wooded settlement where Henry David Thoreau traveled in 1853 "to see how a pioneer lived.''

From the porch of the Chesuncook House, a magnificent view of Chesuncook Lake, Mount Katahdin and its neighboring mountains in the distance. Staff photo by John Ewing.

We have found the shade and some of the solitude we missed along the West Branch of the Penobscot River and on Moosehead Lake, our initial stops on this three-week journey into the Maine woods.

Photographer John Ewing and I had expected we might find here a few of the motels and restaurants that crowd Greenville, well-positioned as this village is for tourists who want to see more of the Maine woods.

Thankfully, we do not. While the log shanty for itinerate lumberers - described by Thoreau as ''a slight departure from a hollow tree'' - is gone, there still are no roads into Chesuncook, and no electricity or telephones. Just four people live here year-round.

''We get folks passing through all the time who are chasing Thoreau,'' says Jack Murphy, a gunsmith who operates Chesuncook's only store out of his home. ''And they're usually surprised to find not a lot has changed.''

Count John and I among them. With a two-person team from WGME-TV (NewsChannel 13) - anchor/reporter Felicia Knight and photographer Scott Episcopo - we are spending three weeks in the woods and on the water looking for Thoreau, looking for the frontier he wrote about in ''The Maine Woods.''

We are retracing the author's route, from Greenville to the Allagash to the East Branch of the Penobscot River, traveling clockwise around Mount Katahdin before we finally climb the state's highest mountain, as Thoreau did in 1846 - only the eighth or ninth white person to do so.

The Maine woods in the 1850s was among the few places in the East still unspoiled or undeveloped by European settlers intent on turning the shaggy forest into productive farmland. It was this darker and denser wilderness that Thoreau came to see and experience, and which we have come to find.

Thoreau's trips here in 1853 and 1857 began in Greenville, which was then barely a clearing on the shore of New England's largest lake. ''You see but three or four houses for the whole length of the lake,'' he wrote, ''and the shore is an unbroken wilderness.''

This ''suitably wild-looking sheet of water sprinkled with small, low islands'' is today a vacation destination for more than 25,000 people each year. From the vantage of a historic steamboat that still makes sightseeing trips up the lake, it is impossible to count every year-round residence and summer camp that has been built along the shore and on the smallest of the islands.

In the summer the sprawling lake, 40 miles long and 20 miles wide, can be a hive of noisy motorboats, water scooters and low-flying floatplanes. Climbing Mount Kineo, as Thoreau did in 1857, we find the buzz of boats on the lake to be only slightly less annoying than a roomful of blenders.

''This is not really a wilderness experience anymore,'' says Toni Blake, executive director of the Moosehead Lake Region Chamber of Commerce. ''We're providing something for people who don't necessarily want the experience Thoreau had. I'm not even sure that experience exists anymore.''

We are beginning to wonder ourselves.

A logging landscape

Owen is a Thoreau fan who knows this stretch of the West Branch - between Seboomook and Chesuncook lakes - as well as anyone. Each year for the past 30, he has paddled and salmon-fished the river, and seemingly is familiar with its every turn and rapid.

Moosehorn Stream, a tributary of the West Branch of the Penobscot River, was described by Thoreau as ''comparatively deep (and) fitly enough named, whether from its windings or its inhabitants.'' Staff photo by John Ewing.

''There have been huge changes in the landscape since Thoreau was here,'' Owen says, sounding at once wistful and bitter. ''But the river, in essence, has not changed at all. It persists.''

In Thoreau's time, the West Branch ran swiftly, canopied by a thick forest. ''You paddle along in a narrow canal through an endless forest,'' Thoreau wrote. ''The vision I have in my mind's eye is of the small, dark and sharp tops of fir and spruce trees, and pagoda-like (cedars), crowded together on each side.''

Today, a trip down the river conjures a different image - that of log drives and massive clearcuts. Indeed, nowhere is the state's long and prosperous lumbering history more on display than here.

Beginning in the 1860s, less than a decade after Thoreau's final visit, lumbering became big business in Maine. Millions of feet of logs were hauled out of the woods every spring and floated down the river to mills, often jamming the West Branch for miles.

A still-visible residue of those days is a lattice of 4-foot logs that lies undisturbed on the bottom of the river in places.

On the shore, the two-tiered forest - spruce and firs in front and towering 100-foot white pines behind - is gone. The river's banks are now thin with a young, regenerating forest.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, to combat the devastating spruce budworm epidemic that threatened to kill millions of healthy trees, Great Northern Paper Co. aggressively harvested here. The blue sky we see through the trees on the northern shore is the result of one of the largest clearcuts in the state, a swath of denuded forest that extends for thousands of acres.

''These clearcuts would drive Thoreau right up the wall,'' Owen says as we paddle. ''They drive me up the wall.''

In ''The Maine Woods,'' Thoreau anticipates - and laments - such large-scale lumbering, writing, ''We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.''

''But the pine is no more lumber than man is,'' he writes, ''and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure. . . . A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.''

Living a pioneer's life

One of the dams, Ripogenus, is the largest privately owned hydroelectric dam in the Unites States - a concrete behemoth that measures 795 feet long and 83 feet high - impounding 20 miles of water, a surface area of about 29,200 acres.

But the small working farm where Thoreau enjoyed a meal of moose meat and apple sauce is not so different today.

Thoreau stopped in Chesuncook in 1853 to observe pioneers - people who had gone into the woods and not returned - and he quickly found himself charmed by the hard and simple lives they led far from ''steam and staging and all the busy world.''

Thoreau stayed one night here, in the primitive, 80-foot-long log shanty built by Ansel Smith. John and I also spend one night, at the Chesuncook Lake House, which Smith built in 1864 and later converted to an inn.

Carrying on the sporting camp tradition today is Maggie McBurnie, owner of the Chesuncook Lake House, who prepares raspberry pancakes for guests. Staff photo by John Ewing.

For the past 40 years, the Chesuncook Lake House, whose front porch offers incomparable views across the wind-swept lake to Mount Katahdin, has been owned by Maggie McBurnie and her husband, Bert, who died last April.

Maggie was born in Paris, France, and moved here after meeting and marrying Bert, who had grown up in Chesuncook. At 65, Maggie still lives a pioneer's life - waking every day at 4 a.m. to bake bread, prepare menus, cook meals, cut wood, do laundry, mow the lawn and tend her garden.

''Everything you do here is the hard way,'' she says, her Parisian accent intact. ''But the pleasure I get from it is a pleasure I never got in the city. If you are an earth person like me, there is something very appealing about this kind of living.''

At night, the sky is white with stars and we are treated to the distant echoes of unseen loons on the darkened lake. We suddenly feel part of a wilder nature, closer to the Maine woods Thoreau experienced 150 years ago.

''Oh, yes,'' Maggie says the next morning. ''Thoreau is very much alive here. Very much.''