The Candid Cyclist: Baxter State Park

I haven't been to Baxter State Park since I was a kid. And that is a long time ago. This little thing called COVID-19 came through, maybe you have heard about it, and canceled the IronMan my wife was going to compete in. No problem we would go and stay in the hotel we already booked in Canada for a vacation. Nope, they closed their borders to us dirty Americans. can't really blame them. Our third choice turned out to be a lot of fun. We got an opportunity to rent a camp in Millinocket Maine instead. OK, so Millinocket turns out to be the latest hyped COVID hot spot which made national news a few days before we got there. You can't escape this shit. No big deal, we weren't planning on going anyplace more public than a 209,644 acre national park. We're going to take our chances. Enough on COVID.

The rock shows what the mountain would look like without fog.

We packed the car and embarked on the 3 hour drive to the camp. Once we got there we took a quick ride on the Golden Road. This road is a private dirt road where logging trucks travel 70MPH. Luckly we didn't see one and decided that we would avoid it in the future.

Packed to the gills.

Our first trip brought us to the ice caves. The trail was almost as interesting as the caves themselves. It was strewn with glacial erratic boulders.

Walking through 2 erratics.

There was still some ice at the bottom in late August.

A short side trail brings you to a view over several lakes.

The next big outing was a trip from the Baxter south gate to the South Branch Campground at the north end of the park on the Park Tote Road. If you are into groading I would highly recommend it. I planned a loop trip that would have been close to 130 miles but an out and back seemed more manageable.

I'm just going to post a bunch of random (kinda boring) road pictures

so that anybody considering this ride

can see what the surface looks like.

I like my Di2 bike. I don't think it is a game changing technology like some but it generally works well. Some people complain that they don't' need another thing to charge but I'm hear to tell you that you don't need to charge it that often. So infrequent in fact that I didn't remember the last time I charged it. I know it was before camping. I first thought of it after I had traveled 3-1/2 hours away from my charger with no known bike shop for 100 miles. Hmmm. How long does it take to go from flashing green to solid red? Don't know. Why do the red and green indicators come on simultaneously? Don't know. So I was pretty conservative with my shifts, yeah, I tried not to shift at all in case I really needed to.

The reward at the halfway point.

So far we are up to about 10 hours in the north Maine woods and do we see any Moose? No. We saw a lot of great scenery but I was really hoping for a moose.

Ledge Falls was a nice place to stop for a snack but it was too cool to want to swim.

In all it was a great ride. We were on cross bikes which were a great choice. No need to go full mountain. Of course a gravel bike (cross bike with tires that are 4mm wider) would be great.

It turns out that I probably could have shifted for another few hundred miles. The green and red indicators together indicate that it is in "Manual Mode" Maybe it has been doing that since I updated the software a year ago.

4.4 miles to the peak, IDK, maybe it will take an hour. :)

Our next adventure brought us to the big rock pile itself. We chose Abol trail because it was the only parking reservation we could get. GET YOUR PARKING RESERVATIONS EARLY. After reading a lot of trail reports about how "serious" this trail was I packed way too much stuff.

The views are pretty good.

My wife has a pretty good case of acrophobia and we knew this hike might push her limits in places. We also knew we weren't going over the Knife Edge on this trip. But after the first wave of panic and thinking she would turn back, she did it! I'm proud of you honey!