What Goes Up: Abol Trail Descent

Hi, all, Patch asked me to recount the hike down, so here I go...

Before Patch and I met up on the 19th, we had a couple of brief conversations about which trail would be best to take down Katahdin after summiting. He, of course, had been talking with other hikers, while I was busy scouring Reddit for advice and firsthand accounts and searching YouTube for POV videos of the different trail options. What I kept finding were variations of “Taking the Abol Trail down is really scary and super steep, but no way in hell do you want to climb down the Hunt Trail,” with the occasional “I hiked down the Hunt Trail, and dear lord, I’m never doing that again.” Rob was hearing, “The Abol Trail is shorter, even though you have to hike back to Katahdin Stream campground afterward.” So, after triangulating our info, we decided — like most people, it seems — to take Abol down.

The hikers we’d summited with had headed down the mountain while we were still hanging out and exchanging contact info with people, so when the time came to start our descent, it was just the two of us. As Patch mentioned, I’d spent the previous five or six weeks doing everything I could to overcome my fear of heights so it wouldn’t impede my hike at all, or anyone else’s. The last thing I wanted was to slow Patch or his trail buddies down or have the focus be on me — rather than on the excitement of summiting — as I devolved into a quivering bag of nerves, blocking the trail. (Well, the last thing after falling and getting horribly injured or dying, of course.)

So, I’d repeatedly listened to a self-hypnosis session on acrophobia, watched countless videos of people going up the Hunt Trail, read a couple dozen Reddit strings, and had an official EFT (emotional freedom tapping) session with a professional, followed by several more self-directed sessions while watching the aforementioned YouTube videos. And as we were hiking up, I was amazed to find that I wasn’t all that scared! It had worked! There were two points where I did have to pause and take a beat before continuing, but that was basically nothing, compared to how I usually am. Seriously — if we have a hotel room that’s more than six or seven floors up, I’m not even comfortable standing within a few feet of the window. So climbing over uneven boulders for hours while more than 4,000 feet up with hardly a twinge felt like sweet, sweet victory.

And then... we got to the top of the Abol Trail.

Ho. Lee. Crap. If it looks like the trail just kind of goes straight down once you get to the edge, here’s a fun fact — that’s because it pretty much does. My fear of heights came raging back.

I immediately handed my poles to Patch, because I knew this was going to be an all-hands, crab-walking, butt-scooting endeavor, and he kindly put them into his pack for me. He kept his own out, but occasionally, he’d have to throw them down ahead so he could use his hands. I asked him to let me know beforehand when he was going to that, because if I’d seen his poles go ping-ponging down the side of the mountain, I would have probably started screaming.

In between the rocks, there were sandy areas with loose gravel, and a few times, I saw Patch jump off a boulder into one of these areas and slide.

For the first two and a half hours of the hike down, I felt like I could projectile vomit out of fear at any moment. I had to stop looking at Patch and just focus on getting over or down or around whatever rock was in front of me.

In a couple of places, I had to kind of scooch across the surface of a boulder and blindly wave my foot around underneath me, trying to find something to step onto. Once I found something, I’d then have to trust that if I continued to scoot down and put all my weight on that foot, I wouldn’t just pivot forward and dive headfirst off the side of the mountain. There were no trees or roots to hold on to, and grabbing the flat surface of the nearest rock face wasn’t going to be terribly helpful.

Of course, the pics we have of the hike down don’t even remotely convey the steepness, though that could be in part because I only took photos when I felt somewhat stable enough to take my hands off the rocks. But hopefully, they give you some idea. Similarly, I haven’t able to find any YouTube videos that do a good job of showing the hike down, which I assume is because everyone else was also too busy trying not to fall to bother recording the experience. This is probably the best one, but you have to forward to the 10:43 timestamp:

I did so much butt scooting on the way down, I was fully expecting the fabric on the back of my pants to be torn up or even worn completely away by the time we got to the parking lot. On the way up, an older hiker we passed had asked me whether I had a trail name. Of course, I didn’t, but as we made our way down, I started getting this horrible vision of reaching the campground at the bottom, having the seat of my pants be entirely gone, and subsequently getting tagged with the trail name “Mooner” or “Butthole.” Thankfully, my fears were not realized.

Eventually, we made it below the tree line, which severely reduced the feeling of impending death, and I could not have been more thrilled about that. But the trail continued to be primarily big rocks with slippery sandy spots in between, so it was very, very slowgoing, and I almost fell more times than I can remember.

When we had about a half mile or so to go, I think, we encountered a man coming toward us, hurrying up the trail. He asked us whether we’d seen some hikers in need of water on our way down, and we responded that we hadn’t. Apparently, this guy had driven 3.5 hours to pick up a friend who was finishing the trail today (turns out it was Carolina Sunshine!) and had gotten word that some ill-equipped day hikers were stuck up on the Abol trail with no water, so he was hiking up to bring them some. Talk about a Trail Angel!

I’m not exactly sure what time it was when we finally — finally! — reached the parking lot, but I think it was at least 5 o’clock. We walked up on Salamander, her parents, and Carolina Sunshine, who remarked that they’d just gotten there about 20 minutes before we did. So apparently, as slow as we felt we were going, we’d actually made pretty good time and almost caught up to those guys.

Groovy and Half Boot were there as well, and Groovy had seemed to have a fantastic time on the hike up. She’d certainly set a wicked pace for the rest of us, and her big smile never wavered for one second. I had also heard that she generally enjoyed rock scrambling. So I said to her, “I’m guessing that hike down was pretty fun for you!” And she replied, “No! That was awful!” which made me feel less like a wimp.

Salamander’s dad generously gave Patch a ride to the Katahdin Stream campground to retrieve our rental car and pick up Carolina Sunshine’s things from the ranger station (everything she’d removed from her backpack for the day). While he was off doing that, I hung out with Carolina, who was now waiting for her Trail Angel friend to return from heroically delivering water to the needy hikers, and a thru-hiker named Quasimodo, who was going to be summitting the next day with his hiker group and had lots of questions for us. I asked him whether he and his friends would be interested in some extra food, and he said absolutely, so when Rob returned with the car, I loaded him up with granola bars and packs of crackers and a bag of jumbo marshmallows we hadn’t opened and that they planned to roast over the fire later that night. We also invited him and some of his fellow hikers to refill their water bottles from our water jugs.

Eventually, it was time to say our goodbyes, and we headed out of the park to make the hour-long drive to Millnocket.

I’d rented us an AirBnb with a washer and dryer and a back yard (so I could give Patch an outdoor haircut the next morning), and after we checked in, we headed immediately to the Hannaford grocery store around the corner, where we picked up two frozen pizzas, a six-pack, and a $28 bottle of Buffalo Trace to celebrate with. (Finding Buffalo Trace at all, let alone for such a ridiculously low price, is practically unheard of back in Charlottesville, in case you’re wondering why this is worth mentioning.)

After that, we showered, got some laundry going, took down both pizzas, and watched YouTube videos until we both got too sleepy to keep our eyes open anymore. Our plan for the next day — after a haircut and shave for Patch — was to find a UPS store and ship home all of our hiking gear.