East Kennebago and Snow Mountain Chain of Ponds

East Kennebago and Snow Mountain Chain of Ponds, Maine

Biking up East Kennabago

Eric and Matthew Gilbertson

Snow Chain of Ponds – 70th highest peak in New England
East Kennebago Mountain – 91st highest peak in New England

November 12, 2011

10 miles mountain biking
3 miles hiking
2 miles bushwacking

Our day started five miles down a logging road at the base of Snow Chain of Ponds Mountain in northwestern Maine. We had successfully bagged our 92nd and 93rd mountains of the New England Hundred Highest list the previous day (Redington and Abraham), and headed north for one final peakbagging day of the 3-day weekend. We had mountain-biked most of the Redington-Abraham route, and we expected the bikes to spend one more day earning their ride back to Boston.

We strategically chose to climb Snow Chain of Ponds, East Kennebago, and possibly Elephant Mountain this day. They all required miles of logging-road driving to reach the base of the mountains, and this appeared to be one of the last snow-free, unplowed-logging-road-drivable weekends of the year. Each of these mountains alone should constitute a full day’s trip based on all the trip reports we’d read, but our secret weapons – mountain bikes – meant the rules didn’t exactly apply to us.

The sun was just starting to rise shortly after 6am, and with 11 hours of sleep under our belts and our trusty bikes under our feet we headed up the mountain. The first two miles of the standard route up Snow COP mountain are on 4-wheeler trails and make for excellent mountain biking. We hit the end of the bikeable part by 7am, at about the same elevation where the snow started. There was a small sign on a tree that said “Snow Mountain”, and we followed a muddy trail from this point. Someone had generously flagged the trail with yellow surveyor’s tape, so there was no worry about getting lost.

We soon hit snow pond and were tempted to borrow a pair of canoes that were in the woods there to paddle around, but instead kept focused on the summit. Though there’s no “official” trail to the summit, but there are the remains of an old lookout-tower trail that’s apparently maintained by the locals. After another mile or so of hiking we came across the remains of an old cabin and then saw the summit lookout tower. Snow mountain is just barely below treeline (~3800 ft or so), but a 20ft metal structure on top puts you above all the trees. I guess it was originally a lookout tower for forest fires, but it makes a great lookout for hikers now. We had been skeptical about its state of stability based on trip reports, but are here to report now that the tower is very climbable as of November 2011.

Rime ice caked most of the structure and the wind was howling at the top but the view was totally worth it. We were far enough into Maine that the only sign of civilization in my ~50-mile radius of view was a smokestack way in the distance in Quebec. It’s comforting to know places like Snow Mountain still exist within a day’s drive from Boston.

I couldn’t last too long holding onto the cold metal ladder, and got down before my hands got too numb. From the top we could see our next objective to the south – East Kennebago Mountain. We knew that was an honest bushwack and bound to take longer than Snow Mountain, so we quickly snapped some pictures and headed back down.

This time we encountered some unexpected visitors back at snow pond. As we approached the pond we heard some loud splashing and the sound of ice breaking, and then silence. There was obviously something big crashing through the pond that we had scared. We paused for a minute, but without hearing anything else continued down the trail. After walking for about three more minutes we heard the splashing again and then branches breaking. Looking back on the trail we saw a big bull moose with a huge rack of antlers charge across the trail and into the woods, followed by a big female moose. They were rightfully scared of us (it was hunting season), and had apparently waited for us to walk right by them before dashing away. It makes me wonder how many times moose are watching me from the trail but we don’t see them. This time we just got lucky.

Shortly after the pond we reached our reward for pushing an extra 20 pounds of metal up the steep hill that morning. The bikes were still intact, with not a single flat tire. We jumped on and cruised the whole way back to the car, hardly even needing to pedal.

By now it was 9:30am and we quickly dismantled the bikes, threw them in the back of the Subaru, and took off down the road. After driving through Eustis and Stratton we headed west on 16, and then turned off on an inconspicuous-looking logging road to the north. We would have undoubtedly missed the turn the first time if not for the GPS, and we patted ourselves on the back for doing our homework on this mountain.

As of a 2009 trip report the road was supposedly drivable by standard cars to within a 2-mile bushwack from the summit, but a lot had changed in the past two years. After driving a few miles up the logging road we started encountering big lateral drainage ditches that were just deep enough to cause the front of the car to scrape if we tried to drive over (this isn’t meant to imply that we ever tried to drive over and scraped the rental car, of course). However, if we lined up two rows of rocks in the ditch a car-width apart it created a bridge that the trusty Subaru could cross. This worked, but became pretty annoying once we realized the ditches were put about every 100 ft in the road. The bikes wouldn’t flinch at those little ditches, so at the next turnout we switched the car out for the bikes and continued on our way.

Of course the ditches seemed to end after that point for the next mile, but luckily they returned again (to vindicate our choice of abandoning the car). When we finally reached the point where the bushwacking was supposed to start, we were astounded to see three other vehicles parked! One was a high-clearance truck, but the other two had the same amount of clearance as our car! They must have scraped, we justified to ourselves.

Two people were walking back to the truck and it turned out they had just finished their New England hundred highest list that day on East Kennebago. And the other two cars were from people hiking up East Kennebago as well. That was quite the surprise, to have 4 different, independent groups hiking up this little, viewless, trailless mountain on the exact same day. Of course we didn’t all just come to East Kennebago by chance – we were all trying to climb the one hundred highest mountains in New England and East Kennebago was on that list.

I asked what was the next project the couple planned to do, now that they were finished with this list (indeed, this is a question I expect to be asking myself pretty soon). I expected an answer like the Adirondack 46ers, or New Hampshire hundred highest, but they surprisingly said they’re trying to climb the US state highpoints now.

“Wow, which ones have you done?” I asked innocently enough, fighting the urge to blurt out the fact that Matthew and I had in fact already climbed 49 of the 50 state highpoints. It’s easy to get into a one-upmanship contest when talking to fellow highpointers, and I wanted to avoid that if possible. But I still hoped an opportunity would present itself to casually mention our exploits.

“All the new England ones, and now we’re working on the mountains out west,” they replied. We started talking about some of the fun mountains out west (rainier, gannett, granite), and it soon became apparent that Matthew and happened to know a lot about the mountains this couple was trying to climb.

“Have you guys climbed many state highpoints?” the man asked. Yes! The opportunity had presented itself.

“Yeah, we’ve done them all but Texas,” I answered casually. Suddenly our credibility had jumped by an order of magnitude. The couple were astounded.

“You’ve done 49, even Denali?!” the man asked in disbelief. The New England Hundred Highest now seemed like a cake walk. We started talking about more big mountains out west, but soon figured we’d better actually do East Kennebago before darkness precluded us from our next mountain on the wishlist for the day.

At this point the main logging road turned left, but we kept biking up an abandoned logging road to the right. We had to carry the bikes over some huge culverts, and then started biking through denser and denser trees. Eventually we saw a cairn on the side and knew we had reached the start of the bushwacking. We left the bikes next to the cairn and started hiking up with Matthew in the lead. Now, a New England bushwack can be either hours of wading through impenetrable spruce walls, or easy walking through open forest. This was mercifully the latter, and even easier – there was a well-defined herd path to follow. There were actually markings on trees every once in a while because this route followed a property boundary of some sorts.

We passed a pair of Quebecois hikers coming down, and talked to them for a few minutes. They were definitely pleased hear we had done Snow mountain that morning, because they were also hoping to hit Snow mountain that day.

We soon reached the summit and met the final pair of hikers – a couple from New Hampshire with their dogs. We asked how in the world they made it up that logging road with the car they had, and they admitted they had definitely scraped the bottom of the car on most of the ditches. That was a relief for us and even further vindication of using the bikes.

There was no tower or view here like on snow mountain, so we simply signed the register and headed back down – 95 mountains down and only five to go. We reached the bikes by 1:15 and easily biked straight through most of the culverts that we had had to carry our bikes over before. Lower down on the main logging road we could actually use the drainage ditches to get some serious air on the bikes. That by itself would have made biking up the road preferable to driving up it.

By 2pm we were back at the car and driving out. With our rock bridges still in place we had no problem with the annoying ditches. We were a bit unsure what to do about Elephant Mountain, though. We still had a 1.5-hour drive to the base of the mountain, and the route was an honest 4 miles bushwack round trip with no apparent herd path. Sunset was at 4:15pm, so we would have to do almost the whole trip in the dark. On top of that it was supposed to rain that evening and we had a 5 hour drive back to boston.

It didn’t take too much reasoning to decide Elephant Mountain might have to wait for another day. We still, however, wanted to drive to the base of the mountain and check it out, since we were already up in Maine. We remembered an AT road crossing of the approach road being gravel back in 2006, and wanted to know what we’d be up against if we came back in the winter.

We drove down through Rangely, through Andover, and up the road almost to South Arm. It turns out the road is actually paved now up to and past the AT crossing (good thing we checked). We then turned off on Elephant Mountain road (which is dirt), and carefully noted the odometer reading on the car. By 3.5 miles we hit the end of the road and saw where the bushwack began. It was almost dark, so we weren’t tempted to climb the mountain. There was one particularly muddy part driving back down the logging road where the car actually slid for about 20 ft while the brakes were fully engaged! We’ll have to come back some time in the winter and cross-country ski up that mountain to make it an adventure.

We called the weekend a success with seven new mountains climbed, and only five left to go to finish all hundred highest in New England.