Three months, 95 days, 5 zero days, 1,170 miles, 13 miles per day, one pair of Crocs, and I’m done.
Between the town of Monson (where I sent my last report) and Baxter State Park (where be Katahdin) is that stretch of trail called The 100-Mile Wilderness. It is a nice hike, with a tough first 30 miles of climbs and roots and rocks and slick mud. But gradually the climbs become shorter and the really nice flat smooth sections between climbs and bogs become longer. It gets going so fast that I had to intentionally do a couple short days at the end so I wouldn’t arrive at Mt. Katahdin too early to meet my dad.
One of the short days was a six miler from Antlers Tentsite to a place called White House Landing. Antlers Tentsite is one of several places in Maine where I was able to camp next to a picturesque lake — if I didn’t know better I might have thought Bob Ross himself had placed the happy trees on the shoreline, and, with an impossibly simple scrape of his putty knife, their reflections in the glassy water. I don’t know how to explain the loons; I don’t think Bob Ross paints loons.
White House Landing is what is called a traditional hunting/fishing camp where you can (and I did) pay $40 for a bunk (with a mattress and pillow case, but no sheets or blankets), a hot 5-minute shower, and an all-you-can-eat blueberry pancake breakfast. To get there you walk a mile off the trail along the shore of a lake until you get to a little boat dock across the lake from the camp. Hanging from a tree near the dock is an air horn with instructions to blow one short blast on the horn. A few minutes after blowing the horn a guy in a motor boat arrives to take hiker and pack across the lake. The next morning he takes you further up the lake so you don’t have to walk the entire mile back to the trail.
I’m not really sure what makes the 100-Mile WIlderness a wilderness. It didn’t feel any more remote than many other parts of the trail, when I made it to the summit of White Cap Mountain there were already several groups of day hikers up there, and I never saw a moose. I feel like I was promised to see a moose in Vermont, New Hampshire, or, at the very least, in Maine, and the trail let me down. Though now that I reflect on it, I’m not sure who I think would have promised me such a thing. And I did meet a section-hiking goat named Moose, so in ways the trail exceeded its obligations.
Getting to Katahdin, and especially seeing many thru hikers who had hiked up from Georgia finish, was exciting. The weather was rainy and cloudy most days in the Wilderness, but it cleared up and stayed clear as soon as I got within view of Katahdin. I slept at The Birches campsite/shelters in Baxter State Park, which is reserved for long-distance hikers. The next morning, August 19, I met Louis down at the trailhead! He had driven all night from Boston and was pretty tired, but we started right up Katahdin anyway. The first mile was nice and flat, but then it was 3.5 miles of, as Louis put it, 90-degree climbing. I didn’t estimate the angles quite so steep, but I would say it is probably the most difficult 4 miles of the entire trail because of all climbing over boulders (would be even worse in the rain).
When we got to the top, Lou’s body was trying to kill him, like it sometimes does when he hikes, so I went up the last bit to the sign to get my picture taken while he started back down. After I got my photograph taken, I went as fast as I could down, which was fun, and a little painful, and it still took me almost two miles to catch up to my dad.
When we got back to the trailhead we were both quite tired and decided not to camp in the park as we had planned but instead drove to Millinocket and stayed in a motel there. The next day we drove to the town of Bath, ME, which is along the Kennebec river (the same river the trail crosses at the canoe ferry) and stayed there a couple nights. We went running, and visited the Bath Maritime Museum where we learned about the Kennebec’s historic shipyards, and we ate some good continental breakfasts.
We then drove back to Boston where I decided my hike was long enough without hiking the southern half. I took an Amtrak train home. I had never taken a train before, but now I have 53 hours of train experience (we were delayed for 10 hours in Iowa waiting for freight trains to pass). I switched trains at Chicago’s Union Station, and while I was there I was a little disappointed to find out that I had missed an earthquake as well as the impending hurricane. I realized there were many adventures I was skipping by not hiking into Virginia.
But now that I’m home and caught up on my last trail report, I’m excited about the time I’ll have at home to continue my old projects without feeling compelled to walk 8 hours a day.
Diode