It’s Done!!!

[Berserker]

Well guys and gals, at about 10:30AM August 7^th I summitted Katahdin thus ending my 13 years of section hiking the AT with a good friend of mine.

I wanted to thank all of you on here that have helped me through the years with good advice and encouragement. Hopefully I have helped a few of you along the way, and I will still be hanging around to try and help others going forward.

So how about a few stats:

• Duration: 13 years
• Timeframe: 2007 – 2019
• Number of sections: 45
• Order of sections: random
• Direction of sections: all were done NOBO
• Final section: Monson to Katahdin
• Other criteria: made a point to pass all white blazes

So how about a summary of that last trip, which was Monson to Katahdin. This took 11 days. My bud and I used Phil at 100 Mile Wilderness Adventures for our shuttle and resupply, and I can highly recommend his services. Great guy and he has a really cool place we stayed at one night before starting and one night after finishing. The first 3 and a half days were rough. ME was in a hot spell, and this just beat us up. We were supposed to get to Logan Brook Lean-to for the 4^th night and we stopped short at Sydney Tappan campsite to recover…really cool spot to camp by the way. That night a front went through with some thunder storms that skirted us, so we didn’t get much rain. The Barren/Chairback range is tough, reminiscent of the stuff in Southern ME on a smaller scale, then in contrast the Gulf Hagas/White Cap ridge is pretty tame with rock steps and easy walking. When we got to White Cap there was still fog from the rain overnight, that suddenly lifted to reveal clear blue skies and a stunning view of Katahdin. I had my main emotional moment here as this is the first time I saw the end point of the journey.

The next few days go through the flat stuff that’s fairly easy…yeah, there’s actually easy stuff in ME. In here are some of the ponds/lakes with beaches that are awesome. The weather was dry and cooler but started warming up again. We decided to stay at Whitehouse Landing one night. I have read mixed reviews about this place for years, and my personal experience was very positive. Bill and Linda are good people and we really enjoyed our stay. As has been discussed many times over you will spend some money there, but if you know that going in then you can enjoy yourself. I mean it’s pretty much the only place in the HMW that I know of where you can get food, beer, a bed and a shower. While we were there another front came through that evening with T-storms, and it rained a little overnight.

After leaving Whitehouse Landing it took us 3 days to get to Katahdin Stream Campground. Yeah, we were able to get a spot in the campground, which I believe is much nicer than the Birches shelters. I was getting a little beat up feeling but was able to take it easy the last couple of days up to the campground thus conserving some energy for the summit day. The night before Katahdin Stream we stayed at Abol Campground and had a fantastic view of Katahdin from our campsite. We also had a couple of beers and some good food at the store plus a shower. These 3 days were clear and cool with it warming up again.

Summit day started off a little concerning from a weather standpoint. The day before was crystal clear, and we were originally planning to summit that day so I was kind of annoyed, but the heat earlier in the trip basically put us a day behind. Well, it ended up being a blessing in disguise. It was overcast, and even rained for a few minutes once we got up on the flat part about a mile from the summit, but everything stayed dry and it was calm with no wind. There was also an awesome view as the clouds were above the summit, and the surrounding mountains were poking up out of low laying fog (an inversion I think). My bud and I got up there to an empty sign as everyone up there were just sitting around, so we did the obligatory summit pics. After that we hung out a bit and then headed back down. Katahdin is the hardest climb/descent on the AT by the way in my opinion.

Two big takeaways from the trip are that we hiked the HMW while it was super dry as in like I think I walked through maybe 20 mud holes the whole way…amazing. The other thing is the mosquitos and deer flies were bad in some spots, especially the first 2 miles in Baxter where the mosquitos were on an all-out assault.

On an interesting side note we hiked and camped most of this trip with a fellow named Rover that we met out there. Great guy, and man can he go…and I say this because he is 72 years old but moves like a 30 year old. He was also finishing his section hike up of 5 years so that was really cool that we got to share that experience with each other.