Goose Eye Mountain

Mahoosuc Traverse

On Goose Eye Mountain

Aug 16, 2009

Eric Gilbertson, Matthew Gilbertson, Aaron Yahr

32 miles

10,500 ft elevation gain

Author: Eric

In the past four years I’ve tried at least six times to complete this trip and always been thwarted by rain, snow, or my companions bailing out. I guess that’s understandable, because the Mahoosuc range is about a 4-hour one-way drive from Boston not including preparation time of planting a car on each end. But I say the trip is totally worth the effort to get to hike over some of the most rugged, remote terrain in New England including the toughest mile of the Appalachian Trail – Mahoosuc Notch – which can hold snow and ice in its boulder field year-round.

For this seventh attempt we had one car and three bikes and enough determination to somehow make that work. We left Boston around noon on Saturday and were immediately stuck in traffic from all the beachgoers getting out of town. I’m used to leaving town around 4am and missing the traffic so this was quite a surprise, but I expected at least a few setbacks. However, none of us could have expected what was in store for us up in Gorham. Our plan was to drop off some tents and sleeping bags at the AT trailhead just east of Gorham, drive over to Bethel and up to Grafton Notch to drop off the car on the north end of the traverse, then cruise back down the way we came on our bikes and hopefully sleep at the trailhead before dark. When we got to Gorham I was just about to comment on how we’d finally made it and nothing could stop this hike from happening now, when we got stuck in a huge traffic backup in the middle of town. As we got to the route 16 turnoff a policeman told us a train carrying hazardous waste had derailed near the AT trailhead and nobody was allowed to continue on the road. Great. It felt like an act of god at that point telling us not to do this trip.

We weren’t prepared to give up though. Luckily another trail started across the river just northwest of Gorham and linked up to our traverse. There was no apparent way to drive to the trailhead, until we reach the location (using our gps) and found a parking lot with a pedestrian bridge. We took out our tents and sleeping bags and stashed them on the other side at the beginning of the trail and then returned to the car. Good thing we did that during the daylight because the trail actually turned off some gravel roads on the other side and the only sign for the trail was actually about 10 square inches in size and dark blue! (see the picture).

Instead of driving through Bethel we had to loop way up north to Errol and back into Grafton Notch where we dropped off the car. That road took us over an hour in the car, which meant many hours on bikes and it was already nearly dark. However, there was the 30-mile, fairly direct Success Pond road paralleling the mountains back to Gorham (we hadn’t driven this road because the car was fairly low clearance). The only problem was it was all gravel and Matthew and I had brought our road bikes. But we figured those bikes had made it 500 miles on gravel roads last summer in northern Alaska so this couldn’t be that bad. So we set off with lights and our handy gps to navigate our way through the maze of logging roads ahead of us. Within the first hour Matthew managed to pop his tires twice – two times more than the entire 500-mile Dalton highway last summer. Luckily the road changed from chunky rocks to sand downhill in the second half and we made it to the trailhead and into our tents by around midnight. The dilemma now was when to start the actual hike. I had originally wanted to start hiking around midnight to get back to Boston at a reasonable hour, but it was unreasonable to do the whole traverse after pulling an all-nighter and biking for four hours. So we agreed on a 4am start compromise.
None of us wanted to crawl out of our tents at 4am – it felt like we had just crawled in the tents – but we did anyway and were off and hiking by 4:30am. I felt terrible for the first few hours when it was still dark and Matthew said he was considering turning around and going back to sleep. But as soon as it got light out I think we all started feeling better.

We met up with the AT on Mt Hayes and the trail just kept getting more and more rugged. We passed the remains of a moose carcass mid-morning and moved the bones closer to the trail so everyone could see. Later when we took a break I noticed this enormous cliff on the side of North Bald Cap Mountain. That’s so far in there I bet it’s almost never been climbed and you could probably put up a first ascent or two a few pitches long.

We crossed the Maine border around 1pm and then the trail started getting really rough, required 3rd class scrambling moves once in a while. This is prime thru-hiker season so we passed quite a few on the trail (I could tell because they all had crocs and looked really hungry and the guys had long beards).

About 5pm with 9 miles left to go Aaron made the call that he was too tired to finish at any reasonable hour and we should just bail out and hitch back to Gorham on a side road. Matthew and I noted that there was a good chance it would take a long time to find a ride on Success Pond Road on a Sunday night and that based on Aaron’s pace, it would take him about as long to hike out to the road as it would us to finish the traverse and drive back to pick him up. Our hiking out was the safest option because we wouldn’t have to rely on some other car to get back. And, Matthew had an advisor meeting at 8am the next morning to keep in mind.

So we split up. Now the limiting factor on when we got back to Boston was how fast Matthew and I could do these last 9 miles. We jogged down the trail until we hit the infamous Mahoosuc Notch. It’s only a mile long but guidebooks say it can take 1.5 hours to scramble through it. The trail goes through a massive boulder field require all sorts of scrambling, even going underneath boulders six times. The notch is also impressive because the walls are so steep, the notch so narrow, and the boulders so large and numerous, that ice and snow stay in there year round. In some cracks the snow only sees daylight for maybe an hour a day. All this means the notch was at least 15 degrees cooler than the sweltering 90-degree air outside.
Despite being called the “toughest mile on the AT”, Matthew and got through in about 30 minutes, including 10 minutes of fooling around eating ice and taking pictures of snow. The temperature swing was enormous, and we regretted having to leave the notch to be hit by a wall of unbearable heat.
Directly after the notch we had to climb Mahoosuc Arm, which is probably the steepest mile on the AT, climbing about 1200ft in a mile. My fuel tank ran empty once and I had to force down a power bar, but we made it up in good time. We had planned to swim in Speck Pond at the top but unfortunately only had time for a quick head-dunking. No time for the little side trail to Old Speck Mountain either.

We made it back to the car at 8:30, barely needing the headlamps and averaging about 3mph over some pretty rough terrain. That made the whole traverse almost exactly 16 hours. But we weren’t done yet.

Matthew took the driver’s seat in Aaron’s car and we headed off down Success Pond road. Luckily we were driving very slowly because out of nowhere a big moose and calf jumped out right in front of us. Had we been two seconds earlier they might have jumped right into the car!

We found Aaron around 9pm and he said not even one car had driven by since he got there. Aaron took over driving and we made it back on the dirt road with only one more moose encounter. Picking up the stashed bikes and tents was no problem and we left Gorham around 10:30pm, arriving back in Boston just before 3am with a few driver rotations for sleep breaks. Boston to Boston in 40 hours with 4 hours of sleep – sounds like a pretty epic trip to me.

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