Tumbledown Mountain via AMC Route (5.6)

Climbing up the second pitch

Eric and Matthew Gilbertson
9.22.2012

Tumbledown mountain falls under the radar of a lot of hikers and climbers since it’s not on any major peakbagging lists, is only ~3000ft tall, and is farther away than the Presidentials from Boston. But it’s definitely a worthwhile mountain: it’s above treeline with great views, has a cool pond near the top, and most importantly has routes to the top that require technical rock climbing. Matthew needed to get experience multi-pitch climbing in preparations for some bigger mountaineering trips coming up, but just climbing a cliff wouldn’t do – we had to climb to the top of some mountain. The AMC route on Tumbledown fit the bill.

The route

A second objective of the trip was to learn how to drive a manual-transmission car to prepare for renting cars in other countries that don’t have automatics. We found probably the only rental company in Boston that rents manuals and took off Friday afternoon from a sketchy back-alley auto-body shop in Sommerville.

I kind of knew how to drive a manual so took the first shift. Rush-hour traffic was a bit tricky, and I got honked at several times, but made it out of Boston with no new scratches on the car. We alternated driving on the 4-hr trip to Maine, and got some especially good practice starting on hills on the road to the Tumbledown trailhead. The turn signal and speedometer didn’t always work on the car, but at least the clutch, brake, and accelerator all worked.

We camped at the Tumbledown trailhead and started hiking up the loop trail Saturday morning. The forecast had been sunny all day, but it was cloudy and drizzling for some reason. About 2 miles in we came to a clearing that would normally have a good view up at the mountain, and here turned off left on the old abandoned chimney trail. We hiked up for maybe another mile, crossing a talus field, and came to the base of the climb directly on the side of the trail. It’s a mostly smooth cliff face with a big rounded prow above.

Rapping down the chimney

It was still drizzling and the cliff was wet, so I scouted around and found an arête on the right side that looked doable even when wet. I led to a tree and belayed Matthew up, then led up a second pitch which had a fun little finger crack ending at a huge belay ledge with a rappel anchor. I think this was officially the AMC Route Variation. From here we traverse right and then continued up the cliff for two more pitches, passing the remains of a moose carcass on one ledge, before reaching the top of the cliff. Finally the rain stopped and we could admire the view.

We spread our gear out to dry, and bushwacked up to tag the true summit. On the return we were hoping to rappel down, but it wasn’t really possible with my single rope without leaving gear. We instead hiked down the old chimney trail and rappelled the chimney section, so still got some rappelling practice in for Matthew.

I definitely recommend Tumbledown for a fun mountaineering experience of roped-travel leading to the top of a mountain.