Katahdin, Fort, North Brother, South Brother, and Coe

Eric Gilbertson, Matthew Gilbertson, and Adam Rosenfield

On North Brother with Katahdin in the background

2/17/2012–2/20/2012

Katahdin, Baxter Peak
North Brother
Fort Mountain
South Brother
Mt. Coe

650 miles driving
~22 miles skiing
~21 miles hiking

Author: Adam

Eric and Matthew needed six more mountains to finish off their quest for the New England Hundred Highest, while I still have a long ways to go on that list. What better way to spend Presidents Day Weekend than by knocking off 4 of them in Baxter State Park?

Friday

We left Cambridge a little after 2pm on Friday afternoon and headed for Maine. Aside from a couple of freak sleet storms that lasted for no more than 5-10 minutes each, the drive up was mostly uneventful. I noticed that once you get past Bangor, ME, the speed limit on I-95 goes up to 75 mph.

We got to the Abol Bridge parking area around 8:30 pm or so (that includes a stop for gas and a stop for dinner in Millinocket) and started loading up our sleds for the ski into Baxter State Park. The roads into the campgrounds aren’t plowed in winter, so you have to ski or walk in (or snowmobile, if you’re lame).

At 9:30, we hit the park boundary and signed in, and by quarter to midnight, we finally made it to our campsite at the Katahdin Stream campground. There were plenty of people staying at the Chimeny Pond campground on the east side of Katahdin, but we were the only ones on the west side—we had the entire campground to ourselves.

Saturday

Our original plan had been to hike Katahdin on the day with better weather and the four other peaks on the other day. When we woke up Saturday morning, the weather seemed ok, so we set off for Katahdin via the Hunt Trail. The first part of the trail was broken in somewhat, but it appeared that whoever had broke that trail had turned around fairly early. Once we passed the Katahdin Stream Falls, we were breaking trail the rest of the way up.

When we started to get above treeline, it looked like there was a chance we might get some views, but it got cloudier as the day went on and as we got higher into the clouds. By the time we got to the nearly flat plateau-like section of the trail just before the junction with the Abol Trail, it was almost a complete whiteout.

Because the cairns up there which mark the trail are so small (probably due to BSP’s desire to keep the park as pure and wild as possible), and because the terrain is close to flat for large sections up there, we had some difficulty following the trail. Having a GPS made it much easier, but you shouldn’t rely on a GPS. I’m sure we would have been able to navigate our way to the top with our navigational skills and compasses, but having a GPS certainly made it easier.

Finally, out of the white, a familiarity emerged: the summit sign demarcating the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, meaning we were at the highest point in the state of Maine. We must have been the first summiters that day, since it was completely covered in rime ice. It’s possible we were the only summiters, since the park rangers often close the mountain in bad weather. I think this would have been one of those days, but since there were no rangers at the Katahdin Stream campground, there was nobody to tell us we couldn’t.

We took our requisite summit photos (including shirts off) and completed our summit rituals. Eric juggled, and I solved a Rubik’s Cube (in mittens, since it was pretty cold). I recently started a summit ritual of solving a Rubik’s Cube on top of all of the state high points—I’m pretty sure nobody’s every done that before—but I have a long ways to go.

With the summit bagged, we made our way back down. It was getting too late to think about trying to bag Hamlin Peak as well, which is about another 3.6 miles round-trip, since we had a long day coming up. When we were about a mile out, Matthew ran ahead to get dinner started. It’s very energizing and heart-lifting to know that there will be hot water waiting for you when you get back, especially since we were running low on water by that point.

We made it back to our campsite right around head lamp-o’-clock at 5:45 pm. Since the eponymous Katahdin Stream was still running due to the relatively mild winter the area had been experiencing, we could avoid melting snow to get potable water and just use iodine. That also helped save on fuel usage, but of course that just means more weight we have to drag around on our sleds.

After an awesome dinner of some kind of rice-based dish (I think it was a Knorr dinner?), we looked at our maps and weighed our options for Sunday. We had four mountains to climb (including one bushwhack of Fort Mountain), with two possible trailheads, both of which were up the road from where we were. We could stay where we were that night and have a super-long day the next with skiing at the start and end, or we could move camp to one of the other trailheads.

The prospect of an 18+ hour day did not excite us sufficiently, so we opted to move campsites. We packed up the tent, loaded up the sleds, and made our way back up the Park Tote Rd. Along the way, we passed by several empty snowmobiles parked at the Daicey Pond trailhead, to which Matthew quipped, “Well, I guess they’re not so wimpy if they’re camping out.”

Two hours later, we landed at the Slide Dam site at the head of the Marston Trail. According to the hiker register there, nobody had set foot there since the beginning of December—we would be undoubtedly be breaking trail the whole way up. We quickly set up a stealth campsite just beyond the trailhead which was invisible from the road.

Sunday

We woke up Sunday morning ready for another tough day. After another tasty breakfast, we hit the ground running (figuratively). Despite our snowshoes, the snow there was still really soft, so we were sinking in a lot, which made getting up some of the steep sections going up to North Brother slow and difficult.

When we came to a little frozen pond along the trail at the source of one of the branches of the Roaring Brook, we took a short break to grab some food and water and enjoy the scenery. We spotted some ice off in a gulley towards North Brother which I bet you has never been climbed before, considering how few people hike these mountains and how much climbable ice there is around the Chimney Pond area.

We made it up to the summit of North Brother, which pokes above treeline for a little bit, and it was incredibly clear but windy up there. We took some quick pictures and did some quick rituals but forewent a shirtless photo.

After North Brother came the start of the bushwhack—Fort Mountain is officially trailless. There’s supposedly a herd path of some sort, but we didn’t really find it. We were wading around in deep snow, forging our own twisted little passage through a maze of trees, all alike. Even though there were three of us, we were all having trouble with the deep snow—at the back of the pack, I still sometimes sank in deep enough where I had to dig myself out in order to extract my snowshoes.

But again we emerged above treeline, making the last sprint to the summit a breeze. There are actually two separate points on Fort which look like the could be the summit; the western one on my map is marked as 11 feet higher, but we tagged both just to make sure. There’s a cinder block sitting on the eastern point, but no obvious sign or object was on the western point. We took some more photos and did more rituals, with my solving my Rubik’s Cube again.

Coming down off Fort was much easier, now that we’d broken out our own trail, and it of course also made bushwhacking back trivial. We continued south along the North Brother Trail towards the other Brother.

The sun was getting close to the horizon by now, and it had just set by the time we reached the end of the spur trail leading to the summit of South Brother. Many people wake up early to see the sun rise on top of mountains, but few see the sun set from the top. It’s about the same, in my opinion, though of course depending on a mountain’s particular geography, it might look better if the sun is in the east than in the west, or vice-versa.

With three peaks under our belt, we were determined to make that four. Fortunately, it was almost all downhill from there, with only one short section going up to the summit of Mt. Coe. We donned our head lamps around the col between South Brother and Coe, and we poked our heads above treeline for the fourth and final time that day.

Once again we took our obligatory summit photos and quickly moved off of that rock. It was still cold and windy, and with the sun gone it was only getting colder.

There was a wide slide coming down off of Coe which made following the trail a little difficult. We switched from snowshoes to crampons to make our way carefully down that slide, and once that mellowed out we switched back to snowshoes. For the third time that day, we questioned whether we were where we thought we were and checked the GPS, and not 100 feet later we stumbled into a sign or blaze confirming our location on the trail.

From there it was smooth sailing down the Marston Trail back towards our campsite. When we hit the junction with the North Brother Trail, Matthew again ran ahead to get dinner started, and since we’d broken out that section of the trail at the start of the day, we cruised back down into camp and made it back around 9:45 pm.

Incredibly, there was another group camping at the picnic area by the trailhead! They looked like they had already gone to sleep, so we tried not to disturb them. We scarfed down a delicious mac & cheese dinner and then hit the hay ourselves after an exhausting day.

Monday

We slept in late Monday morning (by which I mean until 7:30-8 or so, which is late for hikers) since we were not on a tight schedule. We had a quick chat with the other group as they passed by our camp at the start of their hike—they were only doing North Brother, and you can bet how pleasantly surprised they were to find that we had completely broken out the trail for them. They said that they had called the rangers, who’d told them that nobody had been up there all winter, which was true until we got there. We did tell the rangers we intended to hike these mountains in our original camper registration form, but it’s entirely possible that the ranger that group talked to wasn’t aware of our plans.

After our last breakfast, we packed up camp and loaded up our sleds for the final time. We skied out in daylight for the first time. The skiing was again mostly uneventful, but I did almost get taken out by some snowmobiles at one point—it was at the bottom of a hill coming off of a blind turn, so there was little time to react. Fortunately, I managed to get out of the way enough, and the snowmobilers were able to slow down enough to weave their way around us. I normally get annoyed at the noise that snowmobiles make, but that day I was happy to have been able to hear them coming from at least a little ways away.

Towards the end of the ski, we ran into a couple who were finishing up the Northeast “115” 4000-footers. They seemed to be very proud of their peakbagging accomplishments, with AMC 4000-footer patches sewn prominently onto their fleece jackets. Eric and Matthew sportingly decided not to one-up them with all of their accomplishments.

Coming up past the Abol Beach area, we finally got our first really good look at Katahdin—it had been dark on our way in, and the trees partially obscure the view from everywhere else we had been. It’s an incredible-looking mountain, very majestic in its own. We were hoping to get a nice group shot out on a little clear area out in front of it, but Eric discovered that there was thin ice and had one ski fall into the water (he had extra socks back in the car, so he didn’t suffer for very long). So we settled for a slightly less well-framed picture there.

At long last, to our great relief, we made it out of the woods back to the parking are around 1:45 pm. We snapped a couple more photos, loaded up the car, and headed back to Millinocket, where we had a nice big lunch at a local restaurant. Lots of places were closed, given that it was Presidents Day, but not everything, fortunately for us. A little over 300 miles later, we were safe and sound back in Cambridge.