NE 100 Highest #82 and #96
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
Continuing our glorious day, we drove down more dirt roads from Cupsuptic Snow to as far as we could make it for Whitecap and Kennebago Divide. Luckily this trailhead was not too far from Snow, and we would definitely recommend doing both of these hikes in the same trip to avoid having to do the long ride in on dirt roads twice.
AllTrails shows this hike being only 4.5 miles but you would have to both have an appropriate vehicle and be extremely comfortable driving on bad roads to make it that far. It ended up being closer to 12 miles for us because we worried about damaging Gus (our CRV). Route from Snow to Whitecap/KD (45.222620,-70.801520) below (although we didn’t make it in the car nearly that far, see AllTrails map above):
We brought our bikes; this shortened the time it would take to get to the start of the “trail.”
Surprise, surprise: there was more wet and overgrown foliage for us. I was going to wear my already soaked trail runners and socks from the previous hike (see Cupsuptic Snow), but John said “kick the can down the road; it’s going to be a long day.” I enjoyed my other pair of dry socks and shoes for about five minutes before they were completely wet, as well.
At some point during the hike it started precipitating on us.
It’s more of a bushwhack to Whitecap (though it’s way better than anything we encountered at the lower elevation), so we opted to get that out of the way first.
There’s more of a trail getting up to Kennebago Divide. Though there were canisters on both summits, we skipped signing in.
AllTrails showed a shortcut down from Kennebago Divide, but it was unclear where to access it. We continued the way we came for a bit before the trail split; this time we stuck to the trail on the right. We ended up coming out at a barely discernible junction. Looking at the cairn: going straight takes you to the junction with Whitecap and Kennebago Divide, while going left will bring you straight to Kennebago Divide.
While it was tough biking in, going back was a blast… and fast! We had thought about camping, but we were really uncomfortable and needed to try to dry out our shoes; we had three more days of hiking ahead of us. We decided to stay at a hotel in Rangeley to get ready for our next adventure: Boundary Peak.
Other posts you might like:
Adventuring with Mel and John 