Elephant Mountain

Elephant Mountain and West Quoddy Head (Easternmost point in USA)

Matthew and Eric Gilbertson
June 1-3, 2012

Originally, the primary objective of this little weekend trip was to climb Elephant Mountain, a small, trail-less, view-less hill in western Maine. But what the mountain lacked in elevation it made up for in importance for us. It would make mountain #99 on our New England Hundred Highest list. We had missed the opportunity to summit Elephant Mountain back in the fall when we had climbed Snow Mountain and East Kennebago (#91st and #94th highest in New England) in the same day but dwindling daylight had forced us to save Elephant for another day.

We had heard from fellow New England Hundred Highest’ers that Elephant Mtn was not to be taken lightly. They said they had “swam through a sea of pine trees” for hours before they reached the summit. To me (Matthew) it sounded a lot like Scar Ridge, which in the end had really lived up to its name, based on the number of scars the dense brush gave me. Scar Ridge had been a fortress and I had somehow found the most difficult way up it. Hearing the other people’s report about Elephant gave me the shivers to think it could be anything like Scar Ridge. If the bushwhacking were really that bad, we thought, it would be super-difficult in the wintertime with deep snow. So, we had decided to focus on other mountains over the winter, and to leave Elephant for a sunny, warm weekend when we could devote an entire day to it.

This particular weekend certainly wasn’t sunny and warm, but we had finished off 98 of the other mountains on the list so the time had arrived to check off Elephant. Even though it only looked to be a 2-mile roundtrip hike with 1500ft of elevation gain, we figured we’d give Elephant the benefit of the doubt and plan on a hard bushwhack that took all day.

We rented a car from Budget Friday afternoon and made it up the windy little logging road to the Elephant Mountain “trailhead” in western Maine by 10:30pm. The forecast for the weekend was a cold, pouring rain so we had brought the rain jackets, ponchos, and drybags. We had a peaceful sleep in the tent next to the car, with the lights of Andover, Maine sparkling below us.

A hard rain around 7am woke us up. “Great time for the rain to start, huh?” Eric said. “It could have rained all night

and that would have been OK, but now, just when we’re getting ready to start the hike, it decides to start pouring.”

We quickly packed up our stuff and ate breakfast in the car. I ate my traditional power breakfast of cereal and powdered milk, which we had first experimented with on the Appalachian Trail. Somehow that food just never gets old. Next, we suited up in our rain gear, donned the drybag, put on our gamefaces, and stepped out into the downpour.

Luckily I had found online someone else’s GPX track of the route and I had it loaded on the GPS so we were sure to stay on route. There’s not actually a trail up Elephant Peak, just a “herd path,” but we knew that even staying on a faint herd path could save us a huge amount of hassle, scars, and time over bushwhacking. We started out in some old logging areas but eventually the herd path turned up into some older growth woods and it was time to put the sunglasses on. We’ve learned the importance of eye protection on our numerous forays into the bush.

Carefully we followed the faint herd path up through the trees. Soon it faded out and we found ourselves swimming through the soaking wet bush. “Well, I guess this is the part they were talking about,” I said.

But lo and behold, the dense brush soon ended and we were once again on the herd path. “Um, I don’t think this hike is going to take all day,” I said to Eric. Pretty soon we passed by the “Elephant Tree” and spotted the familiar PVC-canister summit register with “Elephant” written on it! The summit! It was almost surprising to see any sign of other people up here on this remote little hill. Sure it was actually pretty easy to get to, but it was surprising to think that anyone else would venture up here. It certainly wasn’t for the view, it was for the glory of the Hundred Highest List.

Forty-five minutes! That’s all the time it had taken to reach the summit. It was only 9:30am and we didn’t have any higher to go. We were starting to realize that we’d have time for more than just Elephant Mountain this weekend in Maine. With our cold, wet, shivering hands we struggled to open the cap to the summit register capsule. To our dismay the little tablet inside was soaked and the pen wouldn’t write on it, so we abandoned hope of leaving our mark on the mountain. It appeared that someone else had been there a few weeks ago.

We took the requisite photos (well, without the jumping and juggling photos) and paused for a moment to take in the view. There wasn’t much to see and we were both shivering in the cold wet wind so we headed back down, a total of 6 minutes at the top.

Up until now we were mostly dry, having been careful to avoid the wettest of the wet spruce trees. But somehow on the way down we had gotten complacent and I hadn’t checked the GPS carefully so we ended up in a really dense spruce thicket and proceeded to get drenched. Well, I guess there has to be a little bit of difficultly involved in this hike, we thought.

We emerged from the bush with sopping wet clothes and tagged the car. Only 10:02am! The hike had taken just an hour and a half. We wrung the muddy water out of our clothes and exchanged them for a dry outfit. Then we hopped in the car.

“Um, ok, it’s 10:15am on a Saturday morning, we’re up in Maine, and we’ve accomplished all of our goals this weekend. What do we do next?” Eric asked.

For a moment we thought about going for the gold and knocking off mountain #100, Vermont’s Pico Peak. It would be an easy hike and we could surely drive over there and finish it before the sun even set. But we were planning to save Pico for a weekend when Jake and Garrett could join us and we could have a proper celebration on the summit. So we resisted the temptation and contemplated our other options.

Eric pulled out a big highway map of Maine and spread it out over the dashboard. “The orange lines are where we’ve driven before,” he said, “there’s got to be something interesting in Maine that we haven’t seen yet.” Nearly all the major highways in Maine were highlighted.

I scanned the map for an orange-free area. “What about here?,” I pointed. I looked a little closer at my finger and the location I was pointing to was West Quoddy Head, the easternmost point in Maine and the United States.

“Sure, that looks cool,” Eric said, “I’ve had that on my list for a while, let’s go there.” And with that, we pointed our little Mitsubishi down the gravel road and set off.

Now just because Quoddy Head was also in Maine didn’t exactly mean it was close to us. The GPS predicted that it

would be another 5 and a half hours before we arrived. But it was still early in the day and it sounded like a cool destination so we figured it wouldn’t be a problem. I remember years ago seeing an L.L. Bean commercial on TV where people drive to Quoddy Head on New Year’s morning to watch the “first” sunrise in the USA. I put “first” in quotations, however, because according to PeakBagger, Quoddy Head actually sees the first US sunrise on a handful of days, from March 7-24 and Sep 19-Oct 6. Cadillac Mountain and Mars Hill (both in Maine) share the other days. But even if we couldn’t see the first sunrise we could still say we were the easternmost people in the USA (well, excluding Guam).

We headed east for a few hours until we couldn’t head east anymore and turned at the entrance to West Quoddy Head State Park. (I’m still not sure why they call it “West” Quoddy Head, because as far as the USA is concerned, there’s absolutely nothing “west” about it.) We pulled into the parking lot and noticed an awesome little lighthouse down the hill. “Ready for a swim?,” I asked Eric. From my point of view, you haven’t genuinely experienced a body of water until you’ve swam in it. We’d swam in Peru’s Lake Titicaca (highest lake of its size in the world), the Arctic Ocean off of Norway’s Knivskjellodden, the Hudson Bay off off Waskaganish (Quebec), Alaska’s Yukon River, and the USA’s southernmost point at Ka Lae (Hawaii). Now it was time to add America’s easternmost point to that hallowed list.

I told Eric that we had to do the swim for my labmate Bill’s sake. I knew he would truly appreciate the feat. We grabbed our stuff and headed down to the water. As we walked down the hill and the shoreline came into view, it wasn’t the picturesque little lighthouse that grabbed my attention, it was the rocky peninsula jutting east in front of us. It was a few hundred yards-long spit of land sticking out into the water, covered in wet seaweed. After consulting the GPS we soon realized that we had come just minutes after the lowest of the low tide, and it was clear that at high tide this little peninsula must be completely submerged. According to the GPS, the tide was over 20 feet in this area! I thought about it for a moment and remembered that we were on the edge of the Bay of Fundy, which experiences the largest tides in the world.

“Well if that water’s gotta rise 20 feet in just six hours,” I said to Eric, “then it must rise pretty quickly. We better get this swim over with quickly.”

We dilly-dallied near the lighthouse for a few minutes and then found a route down the steep rocks to the shoreline.

“It’s good nobody’s watching us right now,” I thought to myself, “because what we’re about to do probably looks pretty foolish.”

We stood there at the root of the wet, rocky, grassy, slimy little peninsula and planned our attack. The highest point of rock on the peninsula was a good fifteen feet higher than us at this point, but even so the seaweed suggested that it gets covered at high tide. We painfully changed into our cold, soaking wet hiking clothes and prepared for the swim. With a surge of adrenaline from both the frigid, wet clothes and the need to beat the tide we raced off along the slippery rocks toward the end of the peninsula.

As we hobbled over the seaweed I noticed the water already beginning to rise. “Man, we’re really gonna have to be quick here,” I shouted, “this low point’s gonna be covered pretty soon.” I had this mental image of the two of us turning around and finding our route submerged in water. As the tide rapidly rises we retreat to higher ground until our little island gets submerged and we have to swim for shore. I hastened my pace, trying the push the image out of my mind.

After slip-sliding over seaweed-covered boulders and wading through tide pools for about seven minutes we were finally at the end of the peninsula. The easternmost point in the USA! I declared that I would be first to take the icy plunge. Nobody was there to watch us. No tourists to be impressed at our bravery. No club membership to be earned. No treasure chest to be found in those frigid waters. Nobody told us we had to do it, or that they themselves had done it. It wasn’t even any kind of tradition. We hadn’t been planning this for weeks. And we knew the quick dip was going to be painful. The reason I had to swim in that water was difficult to articulate. As I stood there, barefoot, on the shore, trying to think of why I was going for this swim, I came to realize that the reason was simple: if I didn’t jump in that water I knew I would regret it.

With the satisfaction of that realization, I jumped off the rock and became the easternmost swimmer in the USA. Well, OK, a few things to clarify here. By “jumped” I really mean that I slowly slid off the rock and into the water. And by “swim” I did a breast stroke or two before being magnetically repelled back onto land by the lung-crushing chill. Sure, it was early June, but the water was still in the 40’s F. With a few photos Eric forever immortalized my fifteen-second feat.

As Eric took his dip I noticed that the current had gotten stronger and already some nearby rocks were getting

swallowed up. “I got the photos, now let’s get outta here!,” I yelled. We quickly slipped on our soggy footwear and raced across the slippery boulders. If anyone had been there to observe us they probably would have wondered what the heck was going on. Couple of guys run across this slimy little peninsula, jump in that cold water, don’t even admire the scenery, then race back… what kind of a bizarre ritual is this?

We crested the rocky hill and immediately gained a new sense of urgency. The little peninsula we were on wasn’t no peninsula no more, it was an island. The low point on the peninsula had already flooded and we could see the water surging over it. We raced down the hill and, with relief, discovered that the water was only a foot deep. We waded through the rising waters and with a big sigh of relief stepped back onto the mainland. “Wow, that was crazy!” I said to Eric. (Based later analysis of the photo timestamps, it had taken us eight minutes to walk out there and just five minutes to run back.)

As we gazed back at the island we could actually watch the water rise. We were deep in mental calculations. “If the water rises twenty feet in six hours,” Eric finally said, “that’s an average of one inch every ninety seconds!” Wow, we thought, an inch in just ninety seconds. No wonder we were wading through a foot of water after our little fifteen minute excursion!

With that checked off the list, we searched for more fun in Quoddy Head State Park. We discovered with delight that there are a few miles of hiking trails in the park, so we hopped into the car and drove over to the trailhead. As we hiked along the seashore we looked back on the little “peninsula” which was now an ever-shrinking island. The spot where we had swum had already been engulfed by the rising Bay of Fundy. We realized that our timing had been absolutely impeccable.

After hiking all four miles of trail in the park we sat down for dinner at a nice little picnic table overlooking the bay. We fired up the trusty ol’ XGK and dumped some Liptons into the old beat up aluminum pot. “I wonder how many meals have been cooked in this pot?,” I asked Eric. The pot had been bent and unbent countless times over countless trips. By now the paint was basically invisible. Tonight it served us yet another gourmet meal with an unbeatable view. We spotted the rocky cliffs of New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island a few miles offshore, which supposedly has good ice climbing in the winter.

We had originally hoped to camp in Quoddy Head State park, but alas camping was specifically forbidden, so after dinner we packed up and headed south. The general goal was to camp in the Schoodic Peninsula section of Acadia National Park. We had never been there before and figured there’d be good (stealth) camping opportunities because it’s detached from the main section of the Park. We drove around in search of a spot but surprisingly there weren’t any campgrounds. Now let’s be clear here, you don’t actually need a campground in order to camp, and there were plenty of nice little pull-offs where we could stealth camp. But we figured that a drive-thru National Park like Acadia is one place where you probably don’t want to stealth camp. It’s just too easy to get caught.

So, with dismay, we continued driving in search of greener pastures outside of the park. It’s a little trickier to stealth-camp with a car than a bike, but we were confident we’d find something. We drove slowly and engaged our campsite-lookout mode. “Wait, there’s a pull-off, what about there?” Eric said. He pointed the headlights into the darkness but there was a mailbox. No dice here. Drive a little farther. “What about there?” Mailbox once again. Shoot.

But on the sixth try we thought we had found our spot. We pointed the headlights down a dark gravel road but to our disappointment it was blocked by a thick steel cable. “Dang it, let’s keep going,” Eric said.

“Wait, I’ll go take a look,” I said. Our experiences working on trail crew for the Forest Service, our trip to Maine’s Boundary Peak, and the drive to Ontario’s Ishpatina Ridge had all trained us to treat locked gates with a little skepticism. I hopped out and ran my hand along the steel cable. Uff-da, two big padlocks and a rusty chain around that boulder, ain’t no way this one’s unlocked… wait a minute, what’s this? Bingo. One of the links had been cut into a C-shape so that you could disconnect the loop. I triumphantly unthreaded the chain and pulled back the cable. With a flourish I gestured for Eric to enter. He drove in and I rapidly reclosed the cable.

We quickly drove up the rough road until it petered out into dense bushes. “No way anyone’s driving up here tonight, or probably this year,” Eric said. We had a peaceful sleep and hit the road first thing in the morning. We made it back to Boston in time to haul some wood over to Eric’s apartment and returned the car with plenty of time to spare.

Elephant Mountain, swimming off the easternmost point in the USA, hiking in Quoddy Head State Park, and running some errands – we got a little more accomplished this weekend that we had expected.

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