Words: Vincent Lebrun and Jean-Sébastien Chartier-Plante 2018-01-18 14:52:33
According to Penobscot tribal lore, Maine’s Mount Katahdin is inhabited by a winged, moose-headed spirit named “Pamola” who commands the weather and protects the peak from intruders. Any offender trying to climb Katahdin—meaning “Greatest Mountain”—will be quickly devoured, and bring down a fury of treacherous weather on the tribe.
As my two companions and I sipped tea in our frigid lean-to at the base of Katahdin, we decided someone had made Pamola very angry.
Rising 5,267 feet above sea level, Mount Katahdin is the tallest peak in Maine, part of a huge, horseshoe-shaped bulk of granite containing five other peaks and numerous bowls and couloirs. Beyond its spiritual protector, the alpine setting is unique among the forested mountains of New England, both for its size and remoteness. To reach the foot of Katahdin in the winter, one must skin through 17 miles of protected wilderness.
Our group—photographer Jean-Sébastien Chartier-Plante, Emmanuel Demers and myself—first discovered Katahdin four years ago, on a road trip through the Northeast. The week before we arrived, the area received more than 30 inches of snow with stable avalanche conditions. We skied nonstop for days and only explored a small part of the area. We had to return.
Which brought us to the lean-to next to Chimney Pond, looking up at the huge faces around us. Considering the area’s endless options, we’d expected to find plenty of lines, whatever the conditions.
Pamola, however, was also known to be a temperamental spirit, and he had other ideas.
The wildest skiing in the Northeast is also protected by a set of strict regulations, enacted during the mid-1900s by former Maine governor, multimillionaire and avid outdoorsman Percival Baxter. Katahdin was one of his favorite haunts, so when a huge logging boom swept through Maine in the early 1900s, Baxter became determined to protect the area. His efforts to do so through legislation stalled, so in 1930—five years after leaving office—a frustrated Baxter began buying the land himself. He created Baxter State Park, and over the next 32 years it grew to 200,000 acres. Before he died, Baxter set up a trust to fund its management, insulating the sanctity of Katahdin against taxpayers and logging-minded lawmakers.
Fifty-five years later, Baxter’s legacy still stands. Visitors must apply for a permit via the U.S. Postal Service, provide an itinerary and describe their outdoor experience. The access road closes for winter, and the park itself closes completely from April until mid-May, a key transition time for fragile park fauna.
This makes skiing Katahdin an complex endeavor, with most groups taking nearly two days to reach Chimney Pond. During our first visit, we were spurred on by waist-deep powder. This year, our trudge toward our first night at the Roaring Brook bunkhouse was unusually miserable. Heavy rain in March had been followed by a harsh cold front, creating classic East Coast dust-on-crust.
We reached Roaring Brook bunkhouse at sunset. Built in 1949, the bare-bones cabin is a launch point for numerous hikes, including the Appalachian Trail, and in the summer, it’s the busiest place in the park. In the winter, it’s usually empty, as it was when we arrived with Jean-Sébastien’s bottle of bourbon significantly lighter after the day’s brutal approach.
The next morning was sunny and clear, and after a few miles Katahdin came into view, a serrated ridgeline and glacial cirque rising 2,353 feet above the forests. It more than made up for the simplicity of our shelter, a wooden lean-to with no door, no stove, no insulation and barely enough space for all three of us to lay out our sleeping bags.
Four years ago, we discovered the best skiing on Mount Katahdin lies in the south- and north-facing gullies of the Great Basin, a gallery of chutes dropping 800 to 1,200 vertical feet with sustained steeps between 30 and 40 degrees and beyond. The best is off the north face of Pamola Peak: the Chimney, a puckering couloir that starts at 50 degrees before narrowing to a 20-foot-wide pinch. It’s an East Coast test piece, and probably the most aesthetically pleasing line I have ever skied.
This time was a different story, which is why we were drinking tea with bewilderment. That morning we’d been forced to use crampons and ice axes on our first boot pack, and temps were continuing to drop. It was time for a new plan, and with typical East Coast resignation, we decided to enjoy what we had.
We skied every day that week, making good use of our crampons and axes and skittering between patches of ice and rock. We bashed through compacted snow sculptures, climbed through freezing rain and fog that softened the snow but eliminated visibility. One day, we hiked to one of the craggier ridges in a snowstorm, just to escape our freezing lean-to.
But on our last day, we awoke to endless blue skies. Katahdin was naked and glorious, and we decided to go for the summit via a technical route that had been otherwise untouchable during the past week.
We reached the summit to find a 360-degree view, encompassing the entirety of Baxter State Park. The clear weather hadn’t brought warmer temps, so after a few minutes we dropped in on a south-facing line that hadn’t softened a bit under the sun.
The descent was a brutal lesson in Type II fun. The harder the chopped-up snow got, the humbler we became, until we finally reached the lean-to half an hour later. Jean-Sébastien poured the last of the bourbon, and we spent the rest of the evening nursing our glasses, marveling at a mountain guarded by a moose-headed god, a frustrated governor and some of the wildest terrain on the East Coast.
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