Trail: Little East Pond Tr and Bushwack

Date Hiked: 08JUN08

Conditions: Little East Pond Trail is in good shape all the way to the pond. Log bridges are getting old but are still sturdy. Stream crossing low.  The Bushwhack from Little East Pond up to Scar Ridge is brutal. The spruce and the blowdowns makes it nearly impassible. No heard path to speak of except at summit and even then very difficult to follow.

Special Required Equipment: Lots of water. A second hiker. Solo hiking this bushwhack not recommended. Real easy to break a leg or something.

Comments: Every now and then you get a big ego and think your an expert hiker and then a mountain like this comes along and cuts you down a few pegs. The black flies had a huge summer barbeque, I think they invited their cousins down from Maine and Canada to join in. Impervious to DEET or Picaridan.

1 compact Digital camera  $300
1 Compass                         $50
1 Watch                            $40
1 pair of good hiking pants torn to shreds   $50

Spending a day in the woods and being able to check off the Scar Ridge West Peak…   Priceless.

  I hadn’t been in the woods since last October and that was a repeat of Mousilake. I was jonesing for a good solid hike. Most of what I have left is far far away (Bigelows, Khatadin, etc…) and will take several days per trip. I wanted something close by that I hadn’t done before and hopefully a member of NEHH.

  After checking the list and the map Sandwich Dome looked like a good bet. But it was an awfully short hike even as a loop, with a round trip book time of 5:25. So I thought there must be something else nearby that would be worth hiking as well? And sure enough a little ways to the West up Tripoli Road was the West Peak of Scar Ridge, and look the trail goes almost all the way to the top! Goodie! Shouldn’t be a problem to do both peaks. (HA!)

 This was kind of a last minute decision for me so I didn’t do my normal research. I did a cursory search for other trip reports a little bit of research but I didn’t print out extra maps like I usually do. The trip reports I did find all seemed to be approaching from Loon. That seemed like the long way to go. The short way was to bushwhack up from the East. All the trip reports for that direction seemed rather old but they all talked about heard paths especially on top of the ridge. I figured it can’t be that bad of a bushwhack especially if there are heard paths.

  So the alarm goes off at 5am, I grab the pack and am on the road by 5:20 and at the trailhead of East Pond Tr by 7:20. The hike up to Little East Pond was quick and uneventful. It felt damn good to be back in the woods again. I hit the pond sometime after 8 and took a look at the Dragon’s Back that is Scar Ridge. I pulled out the map and tried to line up the high points on the ridge with the tiny circles on the map. I took a bearing on what I thought was the Middle and West peaks. The plan being to split them and hit the saddle in the middle and then turn left to the West Peak. So I followed the heard path around the left side of the pond as the lone Mallard Duck swam around in the middle of the pond in the morning sunlight.

  About the time the heard path peatered out I noticed just how many black flies there were. I stopped and put on more bug juice but it didn’t seem to do any good. So I pressed on into the spruce. It got real thick real quick. It was all new growth though so it was fairly soft and easy to push the young six or seven foot trees aside.

Then came the blowdowns. Lots of them. Blowdowns on top of blowdowns. Criss crossing each other. You couldn’t walk under them or through them so you had to balance on top with no idea how far below the actual ground was. I grabbed at the tops of the young spruce for balance and slowly made some forward progress.

I was just about ready to say the hell with this when I stumbled into a small clearing that was actually part of a dried up swamp. This lead me to a small dried up stream that fed it. I started climbing up the stream and saw signs that someone had recently gone before me. I thought yeah this must be the heard path.

Well, that didn’t last long maybe four or five hundred feet of elevation and the stream bed went away. Didn’t mater even though it was a stream bed the shear number of blowdowns made it barley passable. 

At the to of the stream the same thing as at the bottom. Blowdowns and spruce. Only here the spruce wasn’t nice soft young growth but old, dried up, pointy sticks. Just as thick.  By now the heat of the day was starting to hit. I looked down to check the time and realized my watch was gone! When did that happen?! I mean my watch has a pretty secure buckle, I should have noticed if it was ripped off my wrist.

  I couldn’t stop to look for it because there was no room to maneuver in the spruce thickets not to mention the black flies, realizing that they had a captive meal, had started to call in the relatives from the Pemi and the Dry River to.  So I just kept pushing upward. 

 There was no view of anything. No view of the Ridge and no view of pond. No way to tell what direction you were going, other than up. Of course every few minutes I would stop and try to take a bearing to make sure I was going in the right direction when one time I went to reach for my compass and I found nothing but the end of the empty string it was once tied to. Great.  At this point a sane person would have probably turned around. No compass in the thick spruce was not a good thing. But hey, the summit must only be a few more feet right? Push on. 

 So I pushed, through huge swaths of blowdowns from some long ago microburst, through thickets of spruce young and old alike, through clouds of black flies so thick they were blotting out what little sunlight was making it through the thick woods.

And then boom, it was over. The forest thinned out (relatively speaking) light shone through the trees from the right. I had no idea really were I was but I just kept heading up. Then a small clearing with a huge rock to one side and no more up. This must be it. I climbed on top of the rock so as to tag the summit and then sat and rested. The black flies had phoned the relatives from Maine but I didn’t care, I was exhausted. I sat, drank water and looked around. There was no view but there, screwed into a tree was a small white PVC tube. On which someone had written “Mid Scar”.  It took a few seconds for that to sink in. Damn it.

I again gave serious thought to just heading back down. No compass, no watch, and as I soon realized, no camera. But it was still early I doubt it was much later than 10am plenty of time. Besides there must be a heard path from Middle to West peaks. So I quickly ate my peanut butter and jelly before I bled to death from the black flies. I wanted to read the entries in the register but I could barely stand still long enough because of the flies to add my own entry. I did notice that the first entry was from ’91! Having been energized by the peanut butter I set off to West Peak which I could faintly see through the trees.

  Heading down Middle peak was pretty straightforward. Relatively open woods considering what I had come up through. I hit the saddle and could still see the first PUD of the summit of West Peak. Somewhere in the saddle I found a heard path that was good for a few hundred feet up the side of West Peak. It ran smack dab into the middle of a massive blowdown. I looked left and right but it was huge, the only way was to go through, or more accurately over it. So once again balancing on log laid across log, holding onto the tops of trees for balance I made my way up.  Things cleared out a bit at the top of the false summit, enough that normal walking on actual ground was possible.

 Again I found the heard path but it was crossed by a major blowdown every ten or twenty feet or so.  I worked around the blowdowns and tried to re-find the path each time. And then, I rounded a corner and Boom, Canister in my face!  YEAH!

By now the Maine relatives had arrived and the black fly party was in full swing. The Canadains were on their way and everyone was having a grand ole time. So needless to say I quickly signed the register, ate another sandwich and headed back down.

I quickly made a plan for the decent. I was not going to go back the way I came. I had to try to avoid the big swaths of blowdowns. The idea was to just head down and left off the ridge. That should drop me right onto the Pond, I hoped. I had nothing to go by except my map. I couldn’t get a visual through the trees and my compass was somewhere at the bottom of a spruce forest.

The decent was just as brutal as the ascent. I was able to avoid most of the blowdown areas but the blackflies just would not stop. Which meant I couldn’t stop, which meant I was going waaay to fast for the conditions. Several times I came close to stepping off a ledge with a good ten or twenty foot drop. The edges would just sneak up on you since you couldn’t see more than five feet into the forest. I kept pushing through, hoping and praying that I didn’t fall and break something.  I just kept going down and left and down and down and left.

Then I ran out of down. There was no more down and no pond. Were the hell was I? I pulled out the map, either I had gone to far left and missed the pond or not left enough and was headed for Mack Brook, neither prospect looked appealing. I started to panic a little. I tried to remember what emergency stuff I had in my pack. How much food, how much water? How long would it take me to bushwhack out to Tripoli Rd? Or out to East Pond Trail? I knew the problem was lack of nourishment. I had been busting trail in hot weather for hours with almost no stops and no food, damn black flies.  Once I realized that I was in fact panicking due to lack of nutrients I felt a little better. It couldn’t be more than 1PM, I still had plenty of time before dark, I had my water filter, stove, plenty of food, no biggie. Just keep pushing on.

So I took a look around trying to figure out where I was in relation to the peaks, well, I couldn’t see the peaks. Then I saw a bunch of tall Maple and Birch trees a few hundred yards to the right. I figured I would go over to those trees and see what’s what over there. At least they weren’t freaking spruce trees.  And Boom, Pond! Yeah Pond! Looks like I hadn’t gone far enough to the right when coming down the Ridge. I figured I did pretty damn good considering I had no compass and couldn’t see the terrain to be only off by a few hundred yards, not bad.

The walk around the pond and back down to the trailhead was uneventful other than the flies now had more room to maneuver around and find the prime feasting spots since they were no longer hindered by the spruce.  Needless to say I did not go and hike Sandwich Dome.

As I sit hear typing this I can’t count the number of black fly bites, I look like I have the chicken pox. Add in the scratches to my face and arms from the spruce and the bruises on my shins from the blow downs and I’m in pretty bad shape.  But all in all I think it was worth it. Not only the sense of accomplishment of checking off another peak but it was good to get out into the woods. I definitely needed that.