Tumbling up a Mountain
One of the many lessons we have learned on this trip: no matter how crowded or intimate the locale, if you see empty seats available at an eatery or pub, don’t be afraid to ask if they are available. The worse case is the people next to the seats say, “no, they are not.” The more likely scenario is you meet amazing people when you hear, “absolutely, have a seat!” This has led to some of the best conversations on our journey.
Which leads us to a conversation with a local we met at Allagash Brewing Company in Portland, Maine. Interestingly, this particular local had done a very similar trip to ours a few years prior. Even more interesting: his favorite cities were Ouray and Telluride, Colorado, two of our favorite cities as well. He recommended we do a hike called “Tumble Down Mountain”, which we noted for later.
The hike recommendation was valuable, because it turns out that it was Labor Day weekend, something we had forgotten since every day is like Labor Day for us on the trip! Labor Day weekend in a state with heavy tourism means all campsites near attractions are completely full. Thus our planned destination of Acadia national park had to be put on hold. Instead, we found a free campsite about 2 hours Northwest of Portland, in the White Mountains on the border of New Hampshire and Maine.
The campsite itself was decent dispersed [free] camping. It was in a pretty area, full of woods and, given the holiday weekend, incredibly busy. We are still unsure of where the roughly-paved road near the campsite went, but it must have been somewhere significant, because during all hours of the day it sounded like a racetrack for touring motorcycles.
The TumbleDown hike was only about an hour’s drive away, so we headed out on a nice drive through the Maine country side. We really enjoy driving through New England since it’s littered with really cute, HUGE colonial and victorian style houses. It’s also notable to us West-Coasters that so many towns and villages say, “incorporated 1804”, or “incorporated 1798”, etc. It’s crazy to be driving through an area where people may have stood before the country was anything more than an English Colony!
We arrived at the trailhead ready for a moderate hike. The hike was supposed to be only about 3 miles round trip, but had 1600’ of elevation gain, so we knew it would be steep! What we didn’t know is that the trail started modestly steep, only to result in the last half mile being a very steep scramble through partial water run off over a series of very steep boulders. It was incredibly fun, but also very tiring! It was a nice 85* day, but high humidity also made for a very sweaty trek.
We all had a blast, especially the dogs, and we were rewarded with a beautiful lake at the top; the dogs got to cool off and play in the water, while we got to soak in the beauty. We were remiss in not wearing swimmable clothes, as many of the local hikers did, since it would have felt amazing to take a dip in the lake after a hike in the heat of the day. The hike was capped off with beautiful vistas from a short hike to lake overlooks.
