The Cathedral, a zone in the Katahdin massif, gets its name from a prominent rock band that gives the place a Gothic look. It also has amazing skiing, as Vincent Lebrun discovers on the Cathedral’s lower face. 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 gla-cial 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 Ka-tahdin 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 prob-ably the most aesthetically pleasing line I have ever skied. This time was a different story, which is why we were drink-ing 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 crag-gier ridges in a snowstorm, just to escape our freezing lean-to. But on our last day, we awoke to endless blue skies. Katah-din was naked and glorious, and we decided to go for the sum-mit via a technical route that had been otherwise untouchable during the past week. We reached the summit to find a 360-degree view, encom-passing 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. 102 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume Eleven, Issue Four: Page 102
