Boundary Peak, White Cap, Snow Cupsuptic, Kennebago Divide

Bushwack-Biking up Four Trail-less Peaks in Maine

Biking up Kennebago

Eric and Matthew Gilbertson
10.29.2011
16 miles mountain biking
8 miles bushwacking

Boundary Peak, 3855ft, 83rd highest peak in New England
White Cap, 3856 ft, 82nd highest peak in New England
Snow (Cupsuptic), 3784 ft, 94th highest peak in New England
Kennebago Divide, 3775ft, 96th highest peak in New England

“Why didn’t those cars honk at you, Eric? I thought we were still in Boston?”
“They think I’m an undercover cop,” I replied. I was driving a huge Ford Crown Victoria – the only car Budget had left to rent – which was conveniently the exact same model as every police car in town, just without the stripes and sirens.

Our goal this weekend was to finish off as many of our 18 remaining mountains on the New England Hundred Highest list as possible, and we had come prepared with mountain bikes that just barely fit in the trunk of the car. We were aiming for the Rangeley six pack – a group of trailless peaks near the Quebec border north of Rangeley, Maine accessible only by 20 miles of logging roads and several miles of bushwacking. In the winter these peaks would be basically inaccessible without a serious 4WD vehicle, and with the first winter storm of the season forecast to hit Saturday night, our summit window was rapidly closing.

This was a risky trip, because if the storm came earlier in the day Saturday than expected we might get stranded 20 miles from the nearest plowed road with no cell service and no chance of seeing any other cars for weeks. But we were willing to take that risk.

With Matthew navigating on the GPS, we reached the start of the logging roads near Oquassoc Maine by 11pm, and the start of the Boundary Peak bushwacking route by 11:30pm. The “standard” way these mountains are done is to bushwack to Kennebago Divide, then White Cap, then over to the US-Canda border (which is cleared) and hike along to Boundary Peak. The full trip is 14 miles and is considered a pretty long day by the few reports I’ve read. We’d done our satellite imagery homework on these mountains, however, and found a quicker route that might allow us to do these three mountains plus one or two more that day.

Based on the satellite images the road continued north past the standard start, and a side road actually led to some logging clear-cuts within 0.5 miles from the summit of Boundary peak. We kept driving, but after a couple miles were stopped by a big yellow gate across the road.

“Hmm, that didn’t show up on the satellite image,” Matthew observed. We had a hunch it was probably unlocked, and sure enough, the combination lock was through the gate but not completely closed. I had no reservations about driving through a gate we weren’t allowed to drive through, but was a bit worried about driving back out.

“What if, while we’re in there, somebody else drives through the gate and actually locks it? Then we’d be trapped,” I said
“Well, we’re actually only 7 miles from the start of the bushwack, so we could just mountain bike in,” Matthew observed.

We weighed our options: the “standard” 14-mile hike for all three mountains would take at least 7 hours (since it was almost completely bushwacking), whereas our new route (14 miles of mountain biking + 1 mile bushwacking for Boundary Peak) should take about 3 hours, and the remaining two bushwacks would probably take about 3 hours also plus an hour driving in between. Involving the bikes would be way more fun though, so the choice was obvious.

We pulled over next to the gate, took out the tent, and camped right there, getting to sleep by midnight. The next morning we were woken up at 8am by the sound of another car driving by. A Subaru Outback pulled up to the gate, and a guy walked out and started fumbling around with the lock. We started talking to him and he said there was actually a private hunting club on the other side of the gate that owned 90,000 acres of land.

He was interested in why we had driven all the way back in the woods here from Boston just on a weekend, and we told him our plan to bike in and climb boundary peak.

“You’re probably not supposed to be on that road, since it’s private property, but if it were me I’d still do it,” he replied.

He then drove through the gate, came back, fumbled with the lock again, and continued up the road. Just out of curiosity I went to inspect the lock and he had actually left it unlocked. He obviously didn’t want us to know that, though, and that must have been why he acted like he was locking and unlocking it each time.

It was 8:30am now and the clock was already ticking until the big storm came, so we quickly took down the tent, put the bikes together, and raced down the road. It was chilly biking in sub-freezing weather, but much more fun than walking. We actually passed a second gate about 2 miles in that was locked for real, and we knew we had made the right decision to bike in instead of drive.

After 3.5 miles we turned off on a tertiary dirt road and started winding up the mountain toward boundary peak. The satellite images we had were from 2007, and the road had apparently been abandoned sometime in the last 4 years. It deteriorated until, about 6 miles in, we gave up and started walking. Eventually we reached the clear-cut we had planned on, and easily crossed to the other side. From here it was only 0.5 miles line-of-sight to the summit, but that could either be a pleasant open forest or an impenetrable spruce wall. It was impossible to tell from the satellite images, but we lucked out and the forest was pleasant and open almost the entire way up. Only the last 500 ft or so were impenetrable spruce, but we barreled through and made it to the top by 10:30am.

The summit, as you could guess by the name, is actually directly on the Canada-US border. The border corridor was cleared of trees in a 20-ft-wide swath extending as far north and south as we could see. Notably, we couldn’t see a single sign of civilization despite being the tallest mountain around. We did notice a large hump of mountains way to the south that was the only object covered in clouds, and we figured that must be the presidentials.

After eating a little bit of snow from the summit and snapping a few pictures we hurried back down, already planning our next mountain. We easily reached the bikes and cruised back to the car, finishing that leg in almost exactly 3 hours (just like we had planned!).

We threw the bikes back in the trunk of the Crown Victoria, and headed back down the logging road. After 5 miles we turned off on Bear Brook road, and started driving up towards White Cap Mountain. We passed by one active logging operation with some amazing all-terrain vehicles, and passed by one group of hunters driving down the mountain in a big pickup truck. They probably wondered what in the world a car would be doing back there on such rough roads.

By 1pm, at about 2700ft elevation, we had reached the unequivocal end of the drivable section of road, and swapped the car out for our trusty bikes. Soon the road deteriorated in to a four-wheeler trail, and then even that got too steep for the bikes. We knew the bikes would be infinitely faster to descend with than walking down, so we continued to push the bikes up the mountain.

From previous trip reports we expected the four-wheeler trail to end at the col between White Cap and Kennebago Divide, but amazingly it kept going west. With no complaints we continued pushing the bikes up the mountain, and even through a half inch of snow. The trail certainly wasn’t maintained by the one or two highpointers that go there every year, so it must have been used by hunters.

Eventually the trail disappeared completely and we changed into bushwacking mode. We plunged into the forest, and luckily the trees were extremely sparse. We even stumbled upon a herd path as we got higher up the mountain, and successfully reached the summit of White Cap Mountain by 2pm. We saw some flagging tape heading west from the summit, and this must have been for the route that continues on to Boundary Peak.

Looking at the summit register the last party had been there about a month earlier, so it was, as expected, not a particularly popular mountain. We quickly scarfed down some snacks and turned around, off to the next mountain. Soon we reached the mountain bikes, and the real fun began.

“This is why we ride at the fells,” Matthew yelled over the crunching of snow as we barreled down the mountain, “to train for real mountain biking.”

We soon reached the col and entered the woods again by foot. The trees were much more dense here and the going pretty slow. As usual with these bushwacks we reached a faint herd path close to the summit and that sped up our progress. Bushwacking peaks are somewhat counterintuitive: usually mountaineering routes get harder as you get closer to the summit. You might drive on a road, then the road gets bad and you have hike on a trail, and then the trail disappears and you rock climb or cross a glacier or something. Not so with bushwacks in New England. There’s usually a herd path that starts part way into the bushwack and leads to the summit. The reason is that each party takes a slightly different route to the summit, but the probability of those random routes intersecting gets higher as the routes get closer to the summit, until most routes converge on a common path that becomes a herd trail.

We soon reached the summit, and were amused by the spaghetti-sauce-jar summit register next to the official looking sign for Kennebago Divide Mountain. We only stayed long enough to sign in, since we still wanted to get in at least one more mountain that day before sunset.

We reached the bikes by 2:45 and were back to the car by 3pm. There was a slight problem, though. A stick had gotten lodged in my rear derailleur and bent it so badly I couldn’t pedal. Luckily I hadn’t needed to pedal going downhill, but we planned to use the bikes on Sunday and my bike had to work.

But that didn’t matter today, so we put the bikes in the trunk and started driving to Snow mountain. Sunset was officially at 5:30pm, and we didn’t want to be caught bushwacking after dark. We hadn’t done our homework quite as well on this mountain, so basically just parked on the side of the road as close as the road got to the mountain and started walking up.

It was 4pm when we started, and at 4 miles this mountain looked like it might push us past the brink of sunset. Matthew took the lead, and we passed through a pleasant open fern-wack, followed by a series of dense spruce thickets, before the trees finally opened up in the final half mile. Surprisingly we didn’t see the usual herd path until we actually reached the summit proper. It turns out the standard route climbs up from the north, whereas we came up from the east.

We signed in and quickly retraced our steps down to the car. Amazingly we popped out at the road at 5:30pm on the dot! We didn’t even need the headlamps! We had one final mountain on our wish list for the day, but didn’t feel like bushwacking in the dark, so decided to skip it. Too bad it wasn’t summer when we’d have an extra four hours of daylight.

Our grand plan was to hit Redington, Abraham, and Sugarloaf on Sunday, and we started down the road to Carrabasset Valley, Maine. We breathed a sigh of relief that there was no snow on the road and none in the air, yet. However, we soon got an updated weather forecast from a phone call to civilization – up to 8” of snow starting at 9pm, then an additional several inches Sunday, changing to rain in the afternoon. The hike Sunday would definitely turn out to be an adventure…