Day 85, June 27, Up and Down Katahdin with Kim

Today I hiked 5.2 miles of AT, but over 10 miles in total

Today I’m hiking with Kim. We set out at 7:20 after a quick ranger briefing and signing up as hikers. We slept at the Appalachian Trail shelter yesterday and hiked there ourselves this morning.

Last night we had dinner at Scootic In. While we were there we chatted with another Trek blogger, Charles Gutierrez. My wife has followed his blog since the beginning and we had a great conversation with this war veteran. In my opinion he is a true hero. You can read his blog on this site.

I took two photos at Katahdin Falls – one of the lower falls and the other of the upper falls, which total about 100 feet in height.

Today is not a perfect day to hike Mt Katahdin, the cloud bottom is about halfway up the mountain. We plan to take the Hunt Trail up and the Abol Trail down the mountain.

Although we spent most of the hike in the clouds, we managed to see one short view along the way.

The climb was much harder than we remembered when we did it 12 years ago! It took us 6 hours to reach the top, at 1:30. I was worried I wouldn’t make it down before dark!

Shortly after we reached the top, it began to rain heavily. Kim started talking about trying an easier route to the other side of the mountain and called for a shuttle. I wasn’t sure if that was even possible. We ended up hiking down Abol, which we found much easier than the Hunt trail. When we came out of the clouds, we had a beautiful view of the bottom of the mountain.

We were down and had hiked the two miles from Abol Campground to Katahdin Stream in a little over 4 hours. Considering how tired we were, that was really quick. We got a ride the last mile from a very nice couple who were going to camp on Katahdin Stream and got back to the hostel a little after 7.

After another dinner at Scootic we went to bed exhausted.

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