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4.17.07
The Still Untamed Maine Woods
Following in the footsteps of Thoreau, the author set out to
explore Mount Katahdin. What he found was a wild mountain that can at
once inspire and challenge visitors.
by
Ryan Krogh
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Baxter Peak on Maine's Mount Katahdin.
(Ryan Krogh)
In August of
1846 Henry David Thoreau set out to summit Mount Katahdin,
Maine’s highest point. After days of grueling backcountry
travel, days in which the mountain was obscured nearly
constantly by the forest canopy, Thoreau finally reached its
cloud-covered tablelands. In “Ktaadn,” his essay about the trip,
he writes that at this point he “most fully realized that this
was primeval, untamed, and forever untameable Nature, or
whatever else men call it…Nature here was something savage and
awful, though beautiful.”
Much of the same can be said of the Maine woods today. While
roads and trails have opened the region to travelers, the
forests themselves are often just as impenetrable. Nature, here,
is just as untamed. I discovered this myself in summer of 2006,
nearly 150 years to the day after Thoreau, when I left on my own
journey to the state of Maine. I harbored my own aspirations of
climbing Mount Katahdin. I wanted to see the Maine woods
firsthand, following in the footsteps of Thoreau. So, along with
a hiking buddy, Jimmy, I set off to conquer the mountain myself.
Today Mount Katahdin is the centerpiece of 200,000-acre Baxter
State Park, and even from a distance it’s easy to appreciate the
mountain’s allure. The granite massif looms over the land like a
distant, stone sentinel. At more than 5,200 feet, the mountain
dwarfs the surrounding peaks and rises incongruously from the
earth below. The same foreboding forests that deterred 19th
century explorers have now become the exact attraction that draw
twenty-first century tourists; more than 50,000 people visit
Baxter State Park each year.
Our journey began, like Thoreau, in southern New England. We
traveled the three-hundred odd miles from Boston to Baxter State
Park in a little less than half a day. Unlike Thoreau, however,
who was forced to endure day after day of exhausting overland
travel, we were simply able to drive our vehicle right up to the
lower slopes of Katahdin. As we discovered the next morning,
though, this doesn’t make the climb any easier.
Today hikers can climb the mountain from nearly any direction.
There are more than half a dozen trails that wind their way up
to the top of Katahdin. After talking with a park ranger, we
decided to follow the Hamlin Ridge Trail, a path that followed
one of the mountain’s eastern ridgelines to the tablelands. The
trail approached the mountain from an entirely different
direction than Thoreau—a minor disappointment—but we chose the
route in assurance from the ranger that it would give us the
most dramatic views of Katahdin’s southern summits. We couldn’t
resist.
After a peaceful night’s sleep at Roaring Brook Campground, one
of nearly a dozen camping facilities in the park, we left at
first light and began hiking in a cool morning mist. The forest
was quiet and we walked in silence for the first hour. We left
early in the morning to allow ourselves plenty of daylight to
get up the mountain and then back down again. As we later
discovered, we would need all the daylight we could get.
At first the trail was an easy hike, only gradually ascending
into the damp spruce forest. By mid-morning, though, we were
pulling ourselves up by the roots of exposed trees. After three
hours of hiking without a single view of the peak I began to
question our choice of trails and wondered if we would ever see
a glimpse of the illusive mountain. Eventually, though, we began
scrambling up the backside of a ridge, weaving our way through a
vertical field of granite boulders. The trees slowly gave way
and suddenly, almost without warning, we reached the top of the
ridgeline and found ourselves face to face with the sheer
granite façade of Baxter Peak, the mountain’s highest point.
Looking at the peak, it is easy to appreciate the geologic
forces that created this rock massif. The sheer wall of Baxter
Peak falls precipitously away from the tablelands and car-size
splinters of granite are strewn about on the rubble slopes
below. Mount Katahdin is a testament against the ravages of
time; it is essentially the only earth remaining after eons of
erosion washed the surrounding land away. Even advancing
glaciers hardly scarred the behemoth.
In “Ktaadn,” Thoreau described the mountain as a “vast
aggregation of loose rocks, as if sometime it had rained rocks,
and they lay as they fell on the mountain sides…They were the
raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry.”
Standing atop Katahdin’s tableland it is easy to imagine just
such a scene. After reaching the ridgeline and seeing the
mountain close up for the first time, we slowly made our way up
to Hamlin Peak and the tablelands that surround it. The
tableland of Katahdin is nearly 4 miles long and falls abruptly
away on all sides for at least 1,000 feet. It is also littered
with house-sized boulders: remnants from slowly receding
glaciers. In order to reach the summit, we had to scramble over
and around the boulders for more than two miles. No matter how
close we got, Baxter Peak never seemed close enough. Among the
jagged boulders, sucking in the thin air, it did indeed seem as
if we were climbing on another planet.
The first recorded ascent of Mount Katahdin took place in 1804,
more than forty years before Thoreau. Thoreau was still right,
however, in assuming that his party was one of the first to
climb the mountain. Only a handful of other written accounts
predate his journey. He also assumed that it would be “a long
time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way.” Well
that time is now here.
In addition to the highest point in Maine, Katahdin is also the
northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. As such, it has
become one of the most popular mountains in New England. But in
spite of the number of people that grace its summit each year,
the mountain still retains an air of solitude. In the heat of
summer, during one of the busier months of the year, we did not
come across a single person until reaching the final climb up
Baxter Peak. And then it was only a handful of climbers
congregating on the summit to admire the view. The atmosphere
was convivial and everyone was still giddy from their respective
accomplishments. We talked about trails and gestured to each
other about the land below. At one point we sat in silence for
what seemed like an hour, watching a hawk below us sail silently
on the wind. No one seemed in a hurry to go. No one wanted their
hike to end.
But our hike was just beginning. We had talked for days about
climbing across the Knife Edge, the mountain’s most infamous
trail, and now it was decision time. Should we go back the way
we came, insuring we would have enough daylight to descend
safely, or should we push on with our plan and traverse the
ridge, knowing full well that we might be descending the
mountain in darkness?
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