Cold and gray with a few flakes of snow. Decided on yet another attempt to find the abandoned McFarland Hill/Mountain Trail. The top map is our approximte route today. The other is the Pathmakers map of the old trail starting near the Breakneck Ponds. We know two other ways up McFarland and decided we would go up and look for the trail from the top.
We started from a trail a short ways up the service road that leads to the air quality monitoring station. An easy trail to follow as people have added more cairns along the way.
After a short time in the woods you come to a nice ridge with good views
Please click this one and then again for a large view
A very old stump
We think this large cairn marks the summit
From here we searched several possible routes, none of them leading antwhere that we could tell. There are some small cairns which we had found before- shown next to Kelley
but hey appear to only lead to a ledge offering a view to the east
We walked a ways along the slope but never found anythin promising and went down via the other trail that starts/ ends at the air quality monitoring station
We walked back down the road to the car and, since Kelley had found little water ( only ice) we drove the short distance to the Breakneck. I thought the large ponds might not be frozen yet. I was wrong
We made a brief attemp to follow what we think might be the trail we want but as before we lost it at the same spot as previousely.We gave up and walked back to the car. Not a bad hike in spot of poor weather and another failure to find the trail. 2 1/2 hours
Never heard of this trail. How do you discover all these great trails?
ReplyDeleteThere is a book called "Pathmakers" that is a history of the trails at Acadia - my library has it. It lists all of the trails inclunig abandoned trails and we have searched for several of them. If you use the search function at the top of the page and type in 'Old Brown Mountain', 'Potholes', 'Boyd Path' you will find three of them. This is the book
ReplyDeletehttp://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005234095
I notice that many people who comment on your blog do so anonymously...understandable since Google makes it difficult to do otherwise (unless you have a Google account). It would be nice if people would identify their comments with a signature.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment John. I wish Google made it easier. It would be nice to identify posts by the same person.
ReplyDelete