{"id":1539,"date":"2015-06-20T22:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-06-20T22:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/?p=1539"},"modified":"2018-09-08T01:41:36","modified_gmt":"2018-09-08T01:41:36","slug":"saturday-june-20th-robbinston-me-to-millinocket-me-216-miles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/06\/20\/saturday-june-20th-robbinston-me-to-millinocket-me-216-miles\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday June 20th (Robbinston, ME to Millinocket, ME–216 miles)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today was a half-and-half mix of driving and hiking. We drove on mostly
\nslow state roads from our inn by the seaside near Calais to Baxter State
\nPark- in the Mid-region of Maine–another travel tip from Richard. We only\u00a0stopped twice on the way, once for a huge garage sale and bake sale in a
\nteeny town not far from our starting point, where we could have picked up 78\u00a0records for cheap but just bought a couple of bar cookies instead, and the
\nsecond time because there was a marker for us crossing the 45th parallel,
\nand we are geeks.<\/p>\n

We got to Baxter State Park (BSP) around 1 pm. BSP is a large park (200,000
\nacres, and according to Wikipedia, with only 55,000+ visitors
\nannually–compared to the million that come to Acadia every year), and what\u00a0makes it interesting is that its motto is “forever wild”–it is a
\ngravel-road, no water, no electricity park with tent and cabin camping and
\nday visits only, and they are very good\/very strict bat their Leave No Trace
\nstuff. It is mostly famous as the location of the highest mountain in
\nMaine, Mount Katahdin, which has two peaks connected by a ridge that people\u00a0like to hike. But it is not a day hike–the ascent on any of the trails
\ntakes 8-10 hours total, and most people hike to the halfway camp and then
\nstart for the mountain in the morning. Mount Katahdin is partly famous
\nbecause it is the northern trailhead for the Appalachian trail, which has
\nalways fascinated us–and this day can go down in history as the day we
\nhiked 0.01% of the trail, about 2.2 miles of the 2,200-mile trail!<\/p>\n

But first we had a picnic lunch in the park entrance area, right by a lake
\n(our first picnic on this trip). We got a so-called “moose ticket “to go
\ninto the park–all the day-hike parking spots were already taken, given how\u00a0late we got there in the day, but this allowed us to go into a particular
\narea for just three hours to look for moose. We drive to the designated
\narea and got on the Sandy Stream Pond trail. We didn’t see any moose,
\nsadly, although we did find lots of moose tracks in the mud by the trails. But we did get to take a 2.5 mile hike around a lake with a beautiful view of
\nthe mountain and some very nice woods around it. Presumably, Every hiker goes up to Mount Katahdin, so we only ran into 7 or 8 hikers total on this trail. Then we\u00a0returned to the entrance station, returned our moose pass, and were allowed\u00a0to go in again and hike, since it was now 3:30 or so and more parking had\u00a0been cleared. We drove to another area of the park and went for that hike\u00a0on the Appalachian Trail–from near our parking lot to two falls in the\u00a0river named little and big Niagara. They were absolutely beautiful, and\u00a0because the rocks around them are all granite and stay dry, we could climb\u00a0really close. We even saw traces I’d an old mill works upstream from the\u00a0falls. We walked the AT back after we had seen enough of the falls, and\u00a0failed miserably taking another AT proof-that-we-were-there selfie on the\u00a0trail, with the tell-tale white trail mark on a tree (we hate selfies, but at least it made us laugh). The\u00a0mosquitoes were getting pretty bad, even with the bug spray we had with us,\u00a0so it was time to leave, even though for wildlife, we only got to see a\u00a0beautiful dragonfly-type bug, a jackrabbit and a small red squirrel.<\/p>\n

By the time we had driven back out of the park after our hiking half-day,
\nand into Millinocket, it was 7 pm. We found a doable motel which had what
\nwe really wanted–a roadside Chinese restaurant at the end of the building!
\nWe had a decent, cheap meal in the almost deserted restaurant, where we were\u00a0the only guests, with only two calls coming in for takeout while we were\u00a0there. The whole town is a little sad; it is trying to survive on tourism
\nsince its key industry, a major paper mill (Great northern, which had been
\nthere since 1899), went under a few years ago–and there are just not enough\u00a0tourists around, even with all the pretty lakes and the state park right\u00a0there. After dinner, we just turned in and did our daily journal logistics.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was a half-and-half mix of driving and hiking. We drove on mostly slow state roads from our inn by the seaside near Calais to Baxter State Park- in the Mid-region of Maine–another travel tip from Richard. We only\u00a0stopped twice on the way, once for a huge garage sale and bake sale in a teeny … Continue reading “Saturday June 20th (Robbinston, ME to Millinocket, ME–216 miles)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roadtrip2015"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1546,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions\/1546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}