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6.13.11
Tall Fail
Mount
Katahdin stands 5,267 feet high. It’s the highest
point in Maine, but it’s no K2. So why does it break
hikers’ hearts and keep rangers busy saving people
on the mountain? A group of hikers found out the
hard way . . . twice.
text and photos by
DAN MATHERS
Maine's Mount Katahdin, shrouded in
cloud cover.
This can’t be
happening, I
thought. Sitting beside Chimney Pond, at the base of Maine’s
Mount Katahdin, a driving rain was ending, thick clouds were
lifting, unveiling parts of the ridgeline, and I thought “Oh
no.” Normally, the improving weather conditions would be
great for a hiker to see. But not for us. My three friends
and I had already tried hiking up Katahdin. But, in a
pouring rain and with the weather forecast calling for
conditions to worsen with thunderstorms, we turned back.
Now we sat at
Chimney Pond watching as conditions seemed to defy the
forecast. In fact, the strong storms that were predicted as
a virtual certainty never came, and we were left
second-guessing our decision. It may not have left us
feeling so sick if it hadn’t been the second-straight year
we’d been turned back by Katahdin. Now we’d made two 6-hour
drives to Baxter State Park, sacrificed two 3-day weekends,
only to find ourselves 0-for-2 with lots of disappointment,
and searching for how to explain to people that we failed
not once, but twice.
Mostly, I was
searching for a way to explain that to myself. I’d never not
climbed a mountain I’d set out for. After all, this wasn’t
K2. This was New England. I just kept thinking “How did I
get here?”
Fail One
June 28, 2009
“This is stupid!”
My friend Bob
had cracked. We were halfway up Cathedral Trail – a steep,
rocky trail up Katahdin – and we were soaked and
demoralized. After spending the day smashing our shins on
slippery boulders and exhausting ourselves using our hands
as well as our feet to climb Cathedral, we were now pinned
down behind rocks as the rain grew the hardest it had been
all day. We were able to hide behind rocks because it was
raining sideways.
Soon, not
knowing when the rain would stop, we decided to continue on.
There was no going down. Even before the hike, the guides
we’d read and people we’d talked to said you didn’t want to
go down the Cathedral Trail even when it was dry; too steep
and rocky. Now that those rocks were wet and slippery, there
was no way we could go down. We continued up, and soon Bob
had his epiphany. He turned to each of us individually – me,
my friends Mike and Smitty – and asked each of us “This is
stupid, right?” We, of course, gave the obvious answer:
“Yeah, this is stupid.” Bob had reached a breaking point,
but instead of losing his mind he appeared to make more
sense than any of us had all day.
Smitty had
climbed Katahdin years ago. But for Bob, Mike and I, this
was our first trip to the mountain. And we’d picked a bad
time to do it. It was June 2009, and the northeast was in
the midst of the wettest summer in 100 years. It rained
almost every day. And as the date for our trip grew closer,
we watched the wet weather report with dismay, holding on to
any glimmer of hope – there’s ONLY a 60 percent chance of
rain; it’s not supposed to rain ALL day.
The day we
arrived (in the rain) at Roaring Brook Campground in Baxter
State Park, the weather report at the ranger station said
there was a 70 percent chance of rain the next day. To us,
that meant a 30 percent chance the weather would be great.
We set up camp, then took a wet, 2-hour hike where we saw
two moose. The rocks were slippery, but the wet roots along
the trail were slippery as ice, and we slipped and fell
along the way, smashing our shins. When we got back to camp,
we enjoyed a hearty spaghetti and meatball dinner, and
talked to a ranger who told us how the night before they had
to rescue a guy on top of the mountain who got stuck in a
thunderstorm. On Katahdin, he said, the thunder sounds like
cannon fire. It’s not a place you want to be when there’s a
storm. It left us something to think about.
The morning of
the climb, the weather report put the chance of rain at 90
percent. But it wasn’t raining yet. Being optimists, we
started out on the Chimney Pond trail thinking that the rain
might hold off or that we could beat it. That lasted about
20 minutes, and then the sky opened up. As we continued on,
the trail turned into a stream. The creeks that we passed,
we swollen from a month of heavy rain. Parts of the trail
detoured where flooding was bad. By the time we reached the
ranger station at Chimney Pond, the rain had eased, but we
were soaked.
At the
station, we got talking to the ranger and a couple of
marines who’d been hiking in front of us. The ranger told us
up on the peak it was hard to say what the weather would be
like. It may or may not rain. But, he said, we looked
prepared (much to my surprise). The marines wished us luck,
but said they were heading back.
We hiked
around the pond and reached the base of Cathedral Trail,
where my heart sank. What we saw was a fiercely steep trail
of huge boulders climbing into the clouds. We’d be climbing
with hands and feet over the boulders through whatever
weather we encountered. But it couldn’t continue the whole
way like that, I reasoned. I paused for a moment thinking
about a news article I’d read about two guys dying in a rock
slide on Cathedral in 2004. But then we started up.
The climbing
was exhilarating. There’s something about climbing over
rocks with your hands and feet that makes you feel like a
kid. But it was also exhausting . . . and slippery. We all
took turns slipping, smashing our knees and cutting our
shins. Mike had one close call where he almost fell
backwards. Falling backwards on Cathedral would end badly.
There are few places that can make you feel as disgustingly
mortal as a mountain in bad weather. And Cathedral was doing
a great job of that.
(Continued next page.)
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