Tag Archives: Maine

Bagging the End of the AT

Just before the 4th, Rob, Sweeney and I were up with friends rafting near Baxter State Park. Though the camping weather was overly moist, the rafting was a blast. That night Rob and I set our sights on peak bagging Katahdin.

We were heading out around 8 when our friend Ben showed up and we all drove off into Baxter. The hike began under cloudy skies into dense fog up from Abol campground. We quickly rose above treeline where the trail followed a rock slide and led us up one of the steepest continual ascent we’ve encountered since Great Gulf.

Poor visibility at the summit

Ben and I get the age old shot…even through we didn’t thru-hike

We summitted the nearly 4000 vertical gain in two hours flat. On the way up we’d decided to loop the hike by descending via the AT to expedite our trip.

Rob above the Knife edge

Heading down the AT was definitely the right choice as we were awarded great views and stopped briefly to chat with an early season thru-hiker. I pulled my phone out to snap photos only a few times as we made our way down.

We made the 9 mile loop in 4.5 hours but were still 2.2 miles from our car, which put us back at the rafting lodge a little later than we’d anticipated. Rob jogged and we speed walked to the car, very satisfied to have finally hiked Katahdin.

Whirlwind Acadia Weekend

I wasn’t sure it would happen, but this past August I managed to continue the tradition of making it up to Acadia at least once. I had to drive by myself both ways, but it was totally worth it for an amazing weekend on the island.

I drove up Friday and made it onto the island in time to settle in before it got too late. Saturday morning we put in my sister’s Kayak and rented another to head out into Somes Sound. The weather was perfect, blue skies, and glassy ocean without much wind.

Out in Somes Sound. Calm morning, and still water.

The sea life must’ve agreed with us, since we saw a few seals and several porpoises. Not pictured, unfortunately.

My sister in her personal boat. That I have no chance of getting into.

After being on the water for a few hours, we went to pick up a park pass and then drove in search of the glorious Jordan Pond house popovers, something I’ve missed out on the past few years.

Glorious.

The day wasn’t over yet though. A quick jaunt along Jordan Pond brought us to the southern ascent of the South Bubble, a great steep, short hike. I went for a brief jog to scope out the climbing in the area, and after a bit of scrambling determined where it was, but further investigation was for another day. We made it up to Bubble rock just as the sun began to sink low.

Hangin' out on top.

The view from South Bubble.

Afterwards we executed a mission to quickly pick up some beer and burritos, then went on a night hike to our preferred hang out to enjoy our plunder.

Sunday morning we got up early for some delicious breakfast, after which I headed to Otter Cliffs to meet up with Sukes for some climbing. The cliffs were bustling with guides, their groups, and a few other pairs of climbers. It was definitely busier than I’d ever seen. Luckily now that I have some pro, Sukes and I were able to quickly pick out a route we figured we’d have no problem getting up, and start setting up.

Sukes and his Dad, enjoying the great view.

Cordelette in action for a 3 piece anchor. The puddle is all part of it.

Close-up of our top-belay system. Use a second rope for rappelling down if you have it. We were shown this setup by some climbers on our first Otter Cliff outing. Black 'biner is for lowering, silver is for belaying.

We set on a fun 5.7 with big blocks, ledges and a fun crux. It was slightly overhanging with a few hidden pockets. Unfortunately we were both short on time, so after we lowered each other and ascended twice, we called it a day.

Sukes getting fully extended on the block-y ledges.

Me, right at the crux.

Second time around. Resting briefly before the crux.

After climbing I laid low at camp and enjoyed some quality family time. The drive home had the usual traffic, but it was totally worth it, as always.

The Bigelow Adventure

This outstanding trip may have been my favorite hiking trip of the year to date. Sweeney has already posted his take of the excursion, though I have a few notes and photos to add myself.

The trip itself was thought up by Sweeney when he and a friend hiked part of the range last year, so he had more accurate expectations of what we’d encounter. The plan was to drive up Friday, stow the kayaks at the eastern end of Lake Flagstaff, then drive to the other end of the range, and camp out near the lake. We’d hike the range with all our gear Saturday, and then kayak back Sunday, leaving some extra time on Monday in case we didn’t make it all the way.

In end the, nothing went as planned, but everything worked out extremely well.

Friday

Sweeney’s account of Friday does a great job of describing our adventure, which began a little sooner than I was expecting. We gave my Pathfinder a good workout on the 4×4 roads near the lake, and it’s a good thing it was up to the challenge. After fair bit of driving and scouting for the campground in the car and on foot, I was glad to finally pitch our tents for the night and have a few beers.

Saturday

I’ve been pairing down my back packing gear for a trip just like this, so I was pysched to have reason to bring it on the trail. I was not as interested in bringing my 70L internal frame pack when I only had ~35L of gear to put in it, so I borrowed Sweeney’s extra REI pack, which was much smaller, and fit everything perfectly. Since this was my first overnight of the year where we’d be on the trail, I really had a chance to test out some new purchases. My Big Agnes 2-man packed well, and I enjoyed the smaller, lighter sleeping bag and half-length pad I’d brought. We only shared our food and cooking system, otherwise we were pretty much soloing in terms of gear carried, which made for a good test, and allowed us some extra comfort.

I swear the leaves were colorful. Just not as colorful as bright orange.

The hike started slow but about three miles in we peaked Cranberry Mt. and got some great views of the lake and the rest of the range, the first of many. The foliage was in full color, but it’s a little hard to tell with Sweeney’s shirt out shining the color of the leaves.

Around Cranberry we ran into two guys doing the same trip as us, but in the opposite direction. They’d camped at the Horns, about half way, the night before. It was cool to hear that some others thought it’d be a sweet idea to do the traverse and then return by boat, but we didn’t run into them on the lake the next day.

On top of Cranberry, looking at Cranberry pond below, and the Horns ahead.

Sweeney, looking satisfied with the views.

Next was North Horn, one of a pair of steeply pointed peaks. We heard from a few sources that Horn’s pond, a glacial pond on the eastern side, has some great Trout fishing. Based on the number of fish rising while we were there, I’d love go to back and catch a few, but it’s a small pond, so it’s hard to say how many fish there are in it.

West Peak, with Avery not too far away.

We trekked on to West peak, the first over 4000, and made sure to pick up the pace to Avery, the last peak before we descended and took a fork to leave the AT and head for the Round Barn campground, where our kayaks were. We caught the sun setting on the windy rock on top Avery, and by the time we reached the trial junction 2 miles down, it was dark in the dense woods, despite the bright light of the moon.

Caught in the shadow of Avery, looking at Little Bigelow. The AT continues to follow the smaller mountains.

The campground was a maze of pine needles and more crowded than we expected, but we got settled in and had some time to unwind and enjoy the evening.

Sunday

This was the part of the trip that was a bit questionable. It’s been awhile since I’ve kayaked, never with gear, and never in Sweeney’s boats. The weather, and wind would also factor into whether we’d make the trip in one trip. We got a late start after repacking our gear and getting everything situated in the kayaks.

Even with a strong head wind that followed us the whole day. and some patches of rough water with white caps, it was a beautiful day to be on the water. It was clear, sunny, with just a bit of haze.

Sweeney had his GoPro snap a ton of photos. but I managed to get a few of the range.

As we rounded the last corner for the last 1/3 of the trip, we got a great view of the entire ridge we’d hiked the day before. From left to right is Avery, West, the Horns, and then Cranberry.

We made good time and finished the kayak ahead of schedule, even with a few stops. That meant we still had time to head to the bar Sunday night and then find a place to camp.

Monday

We’d headed partway back along the ridge to camp near another ‘road’ that lead to Stratton Pond, which was a great scene to wake to up. After packing up we, a bit unwillingly, headed back to MA to drop off the gear.

The Pathfinder, just before we unloaded the kayaks.

15 Miles

Last weekend Ziehl and I pulled off our multi-day Bigelow Range / Flagstaff Lake excursion, as per our plan discussed earlier. Our party unfortunately unraveled towards the last minute, with the final roster consisting of just the two of us. We made some quick logistics adjustments (less cars, less boats) and went for it. As it turned out, our shortened roster would actually be the least of our troubles before the end of the trip! The full trip report follows. Friday We decided it might be prudent to get started as early as possible on Friday. The original plan called for a Friday afternoon/evening departure with a goal of accommodating most people’s schedules, but now that our team was down to just two, we amended the plan and hit the road around 10 AM. Ziehl swung by my place with the Pathfinder, I threw all my gear in the trunk, and we were off and running.

I swear, we’re only going to be gone for a few days…

We had two scheduled pit stops on the way to Maine: once at Ziehl’s family’s house to retrieve some extra dry bags and a carbon fiber paddle, and once at my family’s house to pick up the boats and life jackets. Stop number one went just fine, stop number two on the other hand marked the first official mishap of our adventure. We pulled the kayaks out of the basement, and got ready to throw them on the roof with the Thule J-bars when we realized that I had left half of the hardware in the back of my car in Boston. Instead of going all the way back to Boston, we went back to Ziehl’s house and took the hardware from his mounts. Even with this major blunder on my part we still managed to hit the road around 1 PM. With Ziehl doing the driving this time, I took charge of the co-piloting for the weekend. When Tripp and I did this trip last fall, we had a Hell of a time finding the campground in the dark with no cell service. With cell service we could easily have used the GPS in my phone to figure out exactly where we were, but without cell service the navigation software can’t download the map tiles for the given region. This time around, I made sure to pre-cache map tiles in advance. Just because I love redundant systems, I used Google Maps Labs to cache tiles in the Android Google Maps app, and I pre-cached the same region in Backcountry Navigator Pro. All of this may seem slightly excessive, but we felt a lot better about travelling on roads of dubious condition in the dark in unfamiliar territory with the ability to scheme up a Plan-B in a pinch. The next order of business, was getting the GoPro squared away for use with the Kayaks. This was pretty much the maiden voyage of the GoPro, so I wanted to make sure that I had all of the settings dialed in before we got out in the woods, where I’d likely be too busy or tired to take my time and do it right. This was actually a non-trivial activity. The GoPro is pretty incredible from an industrial design standpoint, but the UI leaves a bi to be desired. Given the circumstances (only two hardware buttons to work with), they actually do a pretty good job. Anyhow, I set it to take one hi-res photo every 60 seconds for the duration of the trip. It seemed to me that video of 7 hours of paddling might be a bit tedious, but tons of still photos might yield a few cool shots. After a few stops for gas and sandwhiches we rolled onto the access road to the Round Barn Campground where we would drop our kayaks. By now it was about 7 PM and not yet totally dark. We found the waterfront day use area of the camp ground and prepared to unload the kayaks in the fading light. Right then, we ran into a crazy old Irish guy watching the sunset from his VW Eurovan. We end up telling him our plans for the weekend and were excited hear that he had just run into two other people doing the same loop as us, but in the opposite direction. Until then, we were worried that we might be planning an overly ambitious trip. The next thing he said was cause for concern; we told him how we intended to get from Round Barn to Trout Brook and he informed us that last time he was down that road a bridge was missing and that the only option was to ford the stream with steep embankments on either side. We decided to take a shot at it anyway – if it was really in bad shape we’d have to find another way around. The series of setbacks ensued, summarized best in this map:

View Flagstaff Adventure in a larger map

Here’s what happened. We headed west from Round Barn down East Flagstaff Road, which according to the map connects with West Flagstaff Road and eventually goes straight past Trout Brook Campsite, where we intended to camp. This was supposed to be about 15 miles long and we expected it to take an hour or so. East Flagstaff Road was in pretty rough shape, but Ziehl’s Pathfinder was up to the challenge. After about an hour of plodding through the woods in 4-wheel drive we came to a huge red steel gate. We’d only come about 3 miles. After swearing a whole bunch we looked at the map and realized that we must have taken a wrong turn about a mile back. We turned around, found the turn we missed and instantly recognized why we’d missed it in the first place. The road was totally grown in with 10 year trees. We ended up backtracking the the entire three miles and finding a road to the south of the range called Carriage Road. Carriage Road was another route of dubious quality. We passed it on the way to Round Barn and it was just a dirt path through the woods. We had no idea if we might encounter similar troubles. The only other alternatives would have taken us significantly out of our way. The Carriage Road turned out to be smooth sailing and we quickly popped out of the woods at Rte. 27/16, which apparently had been destroyed in several places by Hurricane Irene. In many places it was still down to one lane. We arrive in Stratton around 9 or 10 PM in search of Trout Brook Campground which should have been a convenient spot to spend the night. All we could find was a large, swampy, clearing full of dead trees and brush. Maybe more evidence of Irene? In any event, we decided to just drive to the trailhead and camp there. According to the map, the trailhead was at the end of Reservoir Road in Stratton. We found Reservoir Rd. easily and quickly found that it was gated off by a sparkling new, chain link fence. Starting to run out of patience, we jumped out of the car, GPS in hand and followed a snowmobile path around the back of the fenced off property to the trailhead. From the trailhead parking area, we were able to backtrack out to the road and back to the car via some dirt road, not on any of the maps we’d looked at. It was at least 11 PM and we were anxious to try out the Gritty’s Halloween Ale we’d picked up, so we grabbed our headlamps and threw together a hasty campsite in the parking lot. Turns out the view from the parking lot wasn’t too shabby…

Nearly a full moon.

Saturday We rolled out of bed at 9 the next day, had some oatmeal, loaded our packs and were on the trail by 10. The day called for roughly 15 miles of hiking over 4 peaks.

View Flagstaff Adventure in a larger map There would be a lot of elevation change and we had overnight gear, extra layers, food, water treatment equipment, the cameras and other gadgets, and shell pants and jackets. We had no idea what the weather would be like this time of year. As it turns out the weather was basically perfect: 60-70 degrees, mostly sunny, light breeze. We could have skipped the extra layers and shell pants, and probably should have, because there were a lot of steep climbs. The hike turned out to be long and fairly difficult, but well worth it.

From this panorama you can actually see most of the hike and the paddle!

Looking north west – the ridge we just came over is to the left.

You can see how steep the ridge is – it falls away sharply to both sides.

We refilled our water at this MATC camp site.

Scoping out Sunday’s activities…

One of the last big climbs of the day.

The view immediately after the final summit of the day. The moon was out and the sun was just about to dip below the mountains behind us. It would be totally dark in about an hour!

Photo Credit: Ziehl

We reached the final summit about an hour before sunset. We still had about 3 miles of steep downhill before we were back at Round Barn, and we ended up completing the last hour or so of it by headlamp. It was nearly a full moon but the foliage prevented much useful light from reaching the forest floor. When we got back to Round Barn, we spent about an hour locating the kayaks in the dark and finding an unoccupied camp site. We wasted no time in consuming the first PBR (strategically stowed in the Kayaks on Friday night). With that out of the way, we put up our tents, started a fire and sat around eating for about 2.5 hours before going to bed. Sunday Day two turned out to be another exceptional day. We pulled our food down, threw together a quick breakfast and started taking down the camp.

Whitecaps on the lake!

Rigging the kayaks. The GoPro is right behind my hand. We stowed the trekking poles with the deck rigging. Most of the overnight gear was stowed in the main hatch. We were able to keep extra layers in the rear external stowage using bungee cords. My two solar chargers are clipped to the bow deck rigging along with the trekking poles.

Under way!

The wind was gusty and the water, choppy at 10 AM, when we departed.

The portage: the road was nearly completely submerged, which worked great for us! We only had to pull the kayaks out of the water for a few feet. The western bank of the isthmus was difficult to deal with. It was mostly flooded and full of weeds and bog-like vegetation which mostly too thick to paddle through and mostly not firm enough to stand on. The windward bank was a tangled mess of driftwood and dead trees.

View Larger Map

The first portage: a thin isthmus where a road (of red steel gate infamy) crosses the lake. The road is mostly submerged here.

Reconnoitering…

Finding our way through the second portage.

This may be our best option…

After a lengthy search, we decided to just haul the boats over this mangled pile of driftwood and dead vegetation.

Portage number two.

Hauling the kayaks – they’re way easier to handle when they aren’t full of hiking gear.

Portage two: not so bad after all…

Considering our options…

Checking on the solar panels.

A pit stop…

Now, right around here I must have whacked the shutter button on the GoPro. So here concludes the GoPro footage. Fortunately Ziehl, has plenty of still photos from his point and shoot, which I imagine will surface on his page shortly… Anyhow, be sure to double check that your camera is still recording from time to time! After the portage fiasco was resolved, we encountered pretty smooth sailing for the rest of the day. We followed the Lake as it wrapped around the Bigelows back toward Stratton. Eventually we spotted the Boat Ramp across the street from Stratton Elementary School. We landed the boats and hid them in the bushes while we walked back to the car, about a mile and half away off of Main Street. Reunited with the Pathfinder, we collected the boats, unloaded them, put them back on the roof and went straight for the White Wolf: the only bar in town. Neither of us had ever been to a bar which was ‘the only bar in town’ and we wanted to see what such a place might be like. We were pleasantly surprised by the limited yet carefully selected draft list (Long Trail, Carrabassett, Shipyard, Gritty’s) complemented by a none-too-shabby list of bottles. We had a quick feast, a couple of beers and then set off in search of a camp site for the final night. We settled on Stratton Brook Pond. Monday We skulked out of our tents, ahead of schedule for the first time of the trip. After a quick look around, to see what we’d missed in the dark, we tossed our gear in the trunk, rigged the kayaks for the highway and hit the road in search of breakfast. The Looney Moose in Stratton turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.

Our camp, with the Bigelows in the background.

Sunrise at Stratton Brook Pond.

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