| Summary | Sunrise on Katahdin |
| Owner | John Romanishin |
| Creation Date | 2012-08-08 20:26:46 UTC-0400 |
| Description | We drove all night, and then hiked all night, to get to the sunrise on Baxter peak.
____________________________________ Becca Greene, Nicolo Decarli, John Romanishin, Elliott Fray, Marcel Williams, Song, Kelly Walters, Nadine Müller-Dittmann Tuesday night - I had just uploaded my very first hiking announcement for an almost fullmoon hike on Franconia ridge and was very satisfied with that. It would be a relaxed weekend and I was pretty much looking forward to the hiking at night and seeing the sunrise from up there. When one day later John e-mailed me asking to reconsider the fullmoon hike and going for a sunrise hike on Mt. Katahdin in Maine instead, things got changed a little bit. I felt the temptation, but I couldn’t change the entire trip! That would be quite unsocial for people who signed-up looking forward to hike on Franconia. The situation got even worse when John also posted these awesome sunrise pictures he took the last time he was up there. How can anyone resist??? Mh, I felt the physical pain wouldn’t be as bad as the mental pain of regretting not to be there and I probably had to do both trips. That would have been 27 miles to hike (or even more? I don’t know), which I hadn’t done (and not at night) since I’m in the US. I wasn’t quite sure to manage all the distance, and when I expressed some concerns John wisely recommended to consume some illegal drugs “and you should be fine” – damned, I knew I lack some connections in Boston ;). So I gave myself some rest in advance, pre-slept a lot and since I felt well on Friday, I decided I could give it a try for both hikes. We figured out all logistics and it turned out that Elliott was interested in joining for both hikes as well. Friday night we drove up to Maine, leaving at 5:30 PM from MIT campus. The night was clear and the fullmoon was just amazing. It’s been so bright, that I permanently had the impression there must be a car right behind us having turned on the high beam! For me it’s been the first time in Maine and it’s just so cool, if you come to this beautiful place in the dark not having an idea what the landscape is like. And once you are on the mountain you start seeing these beautiful surroundings! On our way up we also got pulled over by the police (yep, police involvement seems to be an obligatory part of a real “John Trip”). But fortunately the officer just “wanted to make sure, we would reach our destination safely” (very kind of him). We arrived 10 min before midnight at the parking lot, where the other car had arrived a couple of minutes before. We were quite surprised how that timing had been working out (since it’s a 6,5hrs ride) and could getting started hiking at midnight. John added a Moonwalk at the very beginning. There was this huge sandheap where we all ran down feeling like Neil Armstrong. We hiked the blueberry ledge trail (that actually had blueberries, as we discovered on our way back) and passed a campground silently. The hiking was so great and John hadn’t exaggerated when advertising how nice it would be. We passed a bridge with a waterfall and shortly after we started climbing up we were quite exposed and had this clear sky above us, almost saw some shadows of the mountains surrounding us which were revealed behind the hazy deep blue. The night was silent and peaceful what made me feel like an alien in another world. At the steep part the teams split into the racing team (raced to the top and made it up there before sunrise) and the enjoying team (reaching the top shortly after sunrise) – to which I belonged. On the way up Becca had hit her leg and it looked pretty bad, but she didn’t care too much about it und just pretended to be in pain for the foto. We all met at the top for some foto sessions, food (Nico revealed his secret italian weapon: Nutella) and hanging out there for a while. The light shortly after sunrise was great for fotos and I totally understood why John could fall so much in love with this mountain ;). I guess nobody really wanted to leave, but it was getting pretty cold, so we started making our way back (interestingly I have no idea what time that was and how long we spent – time just didn’t matter too much …). We thought we would be much faster on the way down, but that was not the case! In our excitement we hiked up very quickly, but took some longer breaks on the way down. I think nighthikes just generally take longer than you would expect. We stopped at the beautiful waterfall for pictures, some swimming (Elliott took a nap while lying in the stream) and blueberries. Song even told me the blueberries were the best part of the entire hike for her ;). At the entrance of the trail we met a communicative ranger telling us all sorts of smoking moose stories. His job was to inform people about the hike on the “third busiest entrance” (which he proudly emphasized) – he later added that they would only have 3-4 entrances at all. After arriving near the parking lot at about 1:30 PM, all happy hikers got some ice-cream and we took a picture with “our” mountain. The first group left for Boston and Kelly even planned to go on a party that night, while Elliott, John and me took a 30 min, bug-full nap in the woods. At 3:30 PM we started making our way to New Hampshire, with a short stop at the Appalachian Trail café in Millinocket for massive amounts of carbohydrates. Elliott definitely was our hero on the road. I guess he probably slept less than 2hrs the entire weekend with no signs of getting tired and even drove all way (that had been 14,5hrs)! I still would like to know how he did all that! I was quite looking forward to the Franconia hike, somehow it seemed like this cool sunrise part had just been too short and I was very happy to being able to experience that again. -Nadine |