Thoreau Country: Location Note

Ktaadn (Mt. Katahdin, Maine)

"Man is born to die. His works are short-lived. Buildings crumble, monuments decay, wealth vanishes. But Katahdin in all its glory forever shall remain the mountain of the people of Maine." Percival Baxter

Thoreau spent nine weeks over two decades in Maine on four trips. On the first, he looked for a schoolteacher's job. The other three were explorations: He climbed Katahdin's south side to its high tableland in 1846; glimpsed it from thirty miles west in 1853; and canoed around its west, north, and east sides in 1857.

Caption: "Katahdin over the West Branch of the Penobscot River," by Connie Baxter Marlow.

Above is a view of the south side of Katahdin, the side Thoreau ascended. Perhaps a dozen Europeans had climbed or attempted the climb before him. He had travelled up the West Branch of the Penobscot River by bateau and bushwhacked to the summit tableland. (His route was to the right of the conspicuous landslide.) Parker Huber writes of the view from the south, "Katahdin makes a vivid impression on the traveller of the West Branch [of the Penobscot]. It strikes its most sublime pose over the lakes, often doubling its solid image in their liquid surfaces. Ambajejus, Debsconeag, and Pockwockamus... Over their blue waters and green forests, the monolith dominates the horizon." (The Wildest Country: A Guide to Thoreau's Maine, 1981).

[Caption: Photo by Connie Baxter Marlow, from her fine book, Greatest Mountain: Katahdin's Wilderness (Gardiner ME: Tilbury House, 1999). Her photographs used with permission.]

"I climbed alone over huge rocks, loosely poised, a mile or more, still edging towards the clouds...The mountain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks, as if sometime it had rained rocks, and they lay as they fell on the mountain side, nowhere fairly at rest, but leaning on each other, all rocking-stones, with cavities between, but scarcely any soil or smoother shelf. They were the raw materals of a planet, dropped from an unseen quarry, which the vast chemistry of nature would anon work up, or work down, into the smiling and verdant plains and valleys of the earth" (Thoreau, The Maine Woods, Princeton UP (1983) p. 63).

[Caption: Photo is of the Knife Edge, which was first traversed the year after Thoreau climbed. Thoreau's route, short but steep, would have surmounted the slope to the right and behind the photographer. (Photographer and date unknown but ca. 1990.)

"The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent man, perchance, go there. Simple races, such as savages, do not climb mountains -- their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them. Pomola is always angry with those who climb to the summit of Ktaadn" (The Maine Woods p. 65)
 

[Caption: Tableland in fog with cairns. (Slide by S. Ells, 1953.)]

"At length I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away; and when, a quarter of a mile further, I reached the summit of the ridge, which those who have seen in clearer weather say is about five miles long , and contains a thousand acres of table-land, I was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them...It was, in fact, a cloud-factory" (The Maine Woods pp. 65-66).

He turned back to rejoin his group before finding the obscured and ambiguous summit of the mountain.

[Caption: The tableland.]

The year before, he had read about the two young men from Boston (and a lumberman guide) who had made a pioneering attempt from the north. On the same high tableland, en route to the summit, a downpour had turned to hail, and they had also prudently retreated. One wrote:

"If you can imagine three men, tightly wrapped in blanket cloaks, with caps bound closely down, strolling along over a bald mountain ridge with a wind like a mill stream knocking them backwards as it chose, and tumbling them and theirs among the rocks, I hope you will do it. There was something ghastly in the sight, for a very slight distance in the fog gave a hazy, indistinct outline to the gracefully flowing drapery,--though the horizontal lines of hail gave evidence enough of the nature of the enemy which we were pressing against so desperately" (Edward Everett Hale (with William Francis Channing), "An Early Ascent of Katahdin," Appalachia (Apr. 1901), pp. 277-89 and see narrative in Boston Daily Advertiser, Aug. 15, 1845.)

But Katahdin is not always so manacing. 50,000 people now climb it every year, but solitude is where you find it.

[Caption: Chimney Pond is in the basin to the left. Photo from Austin Meredith's "Stack of the Artist of Kouroo" Project.] 

[Prepared by S. Ells, 2/2002.
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