This was a day I set aside exclusively for hiking. Granted, my idea of hiking is not with full regalia of boots, poles, ropes and pitons. It’s more of a stroll over some obstacles like rocks and tree limbs, with an occasional bog to work around.
Baxter State Park in Maine is a hiking mecca. For one thing, it is the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. It is so popular that to minimize environmental impact, the number of day hikers is strictly limited, and is handled on a first-come, first-serve basis. People start arriving at 5 AM to get in when the park opens at 7 AM. To get around this you do what I did, which is to camp overnight. That’s limited too, and I had to make a reservation (and pay) two months ago to be sure of a tent site. Its not bad, no potable water, no electricity, no showers, but there are vault toilets.
The hike I took was about three miles long around two ponds---that’s apparently what they call a small lake. There are supposed to be moose to be seen in the area I covered, but I was too noisy and too impatient to wait them out, so no moose was sighted by me. Others on the trail claimed to have seen them, and even described them in anatomical detail. Could they have merely memorized the exhibit at the Museum of Natural History?
Baxter State Park has an interesting history. Percival Baxter first saw the area in 1903 and he formed a life-long attachment to it. When he was governor of Maine in the 1920s he tried to get the legislature to buy the land. When the legislature refused, he bought the land himself. He later donated it to the state with strict limitations on its use. Those limitations still govern the park today.
The main feature of the park is a series of peaks that are part of the Appalachian Range, which were formed initially by volcanic activity 450 million years ago, and then were uplifted and reformed by the collision of the Acadian plate 350 to 400 million years ago. Subsequent erosion, particularly from Ice Age glaciers, has worn down the peaks to their present elevation of 4,000 to 5,500 feet. Most of the rock in this area is granite, which is the result of the volcanic activity. Granite is igneous (volcanic) rock that relatively speaking didn’t get very hot. It is also the most resilient to erosion of the igneous rocks. But where there is granite, as here in Baxter State Park, there is usually a lot of it.
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| Moose Country, Baxter State Park |
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| Mountain Silhouette, Baxter State Park |
Mileage: 0
