111. Mount Katahdin

            Another mountain in New England that has captured my imagination is Mount Katahdin in Maine. I had never even heard of it before I went to Maine with my wife in the early 1990’s. We went to Maine just to go see it and then this mountain seemed to loom over us in several parts of the state. It was like Mount Rainier in Washington. You can even see Katahdin on the coast at Acadia National Park. As someone from the Rocky Mountains and the west I always thought that to see mountains from so far away the peaks must surely rise over 10,000 feet, yet from spending time in the Appalachian east, I know that Mount Washington in New Hampshire was the highest peak in New England and that it barely rose above 6,000 feet. Yet there was Katahdin in Maine lording itself over all of that state and it doesn’t quite reach the 5,300 feet mark in elevation.

            It’s a really beautiful mountain at the center of Baxter State Park and we did go to the base of the mountain to see it. There were tons of cars there and people hiking onto the mountain. Like the highest peak in any state, it attracts plenty of climbers. If I had known about it in advance I probably would have set aside enough time to climb it as well but I didn’t know about it and was in no way prepared to climb a mountain that week that we were there. (We were, at the time, more interested in the coast.)

            I do, however, want people out west to know that our fellow countrymen in the east have imposing mountains just like we do out here. Katahdin is every bit as rugged as a peak in the Rockies and even though it may not be able to boast such grandiose elevation as a mountain in the Cascades, it still commands a presence over a large swath of country that is at sea level or slightly above. The immigrants who came to the New World in the 1600’s were not the little wimps who knew nothing about roughing it. New England is a rugged beautiful place that took its toll on early settlers every bit as much as did the vast expanses and rugged mountains of our western frontier. Katahdin is the prime example of that for me. Any smug superiority that I might have had before going to Maine was swept away by Katahdin.