Elephant - 11 Oct. 2014

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Last weekend I took my fourth and final annual New England Fifty Finest trip to western Maine. This report is for Saturday, when I climbed Elephant.

Since Elephant is on some other list, there's a fair amount of information about getting up it on the web, which was good, since I don't know if I could have figured it out from the maps.

In order to get to the Elephant trailhead, or rather herdpathhead, take South Arm Road (a paved road) north from 120 in Andover a little east of the bridge. It's not signed as "South Arm Road" but it is signed as the road to South Arm. Take this 9.9 miles and turn right onto Elephant Mountain Road, a dirt road. Elephant Mtn. Rd. isn't signed at all. After 0.5 miles it forks; go left. After 1.2 miles (from S.A.Rd.) it forks again; go right. The next section of road has some real tricky spots, in terms of not bottoming out on rocks, but my Civic made it. At 3.1 miles from So. Arm Rd. there's a parking area. Park there. Walk further up the road about a tenth of a mile and turn left onto an ATV road. Walk about a quarter mile on the ATV road, and where it widens a bit there'll be a cairn to the left. This marks the start of the herdpath.

I climbed the mountain using the old Follow a herdpath - Lose the herdpath - Whack uphill - Find a herdpath - Repeat this cycle method. The herdpaths were more plentiful down low, and the main problem in this section was guessing which branch to take when a herdpath forked. The whacking was mostly through either fairly open or moderately dense fir and spruce, with a swampy area thrown in for variety. Twice I hit very thick spruce but both times it ended quickly; the total distance for both times was maybe a hundred feet. Near the top I came across a very well defined herdpath, which brought me to the canister. After hanging around the summit a while, and heading a little past it to a partial view, I went back down, starting with the well defined herdpath, which went quite a ways before I lost it. I didn't hit any thick spruce going down, but I did hit the swamp again. At one point I thought I heard voices, but I wasn't sure. Eventually I found myself on the same herdpath I'd started on and followed that out. When I got to my car there was another car parked next to it which hadn't been there before. The whole hike took me 67 minutes going up and 55 minutes going down.

Elephant was number 41 on the New England Fifty Finest list.

Here are the pictures.

--

Cumulus

NE111: 115/115 (67/67, 46/46, 2/2); Cat35: 32/39; WNH4K: 32/48; NEFF: 43/50
LT NB 2009

"I don't much care where [I get to] --" said Alice, "-- so long as I get somewhere," ...
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
- Lewis Carroll
 
The swamp's annoying for navigation (your options are pretty much go through the swamp or eat spruce, although a more serious herdpath may have formed recently), but man it's a certain kind of pretty.
 
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