We barreled down the unplowed, frozen road at dawn. Ivory white—no one had been down it since a storm had dropped a blanket of snow just a couple of days before.
I pulled the car into the parking area at the trailhead and turned off the engine. We sat inside in the quiet. It was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and my brother and I were making our first winter ascent of a 4,000-foot peak in the mountains of western Maine.
I’d hiked Bigelow in the fall and summer, but in winter had only gazed at it across Carrabassett Valley during trips to ski Sugarloaf. I bought microspikes for my brother and ritualistically followed the weather. There had been a washout, followed by a few days of dry air and then a snowstorm just before our drive north from New York for Christmas—enough to freshen things up and cushion our footing, but not so much to make the road inaccessible for our Subaru. My brother and I filled our day packs with smoked salmon, a bag of cranberries, and enough warm water poured into our Nalgene bottles to last the day.
The first leg was the three-mile trek to the foot of the mountain. The snow was like something from a Bing Crosby movie. Flurries sprinkled down from the trees above and exploded like glitter bombs when they met the rays of the rising sun. We were walking on cotton candy.
A mile or two in, we hung a right at the fork to keep to the Fire Warden’s Trail. There were some inclines after that. But the trail was clear under the powder.
From the Moose Falls campsite it’s a steep series of stone steps to the Bigelow Col. The snow quickly deepened. There was ice. We strapped our spikes onto our boots and readied the rest of our gear: ski poles that stood in for proper trekking poles and, even more clumsy looking, ski helmets and goggles that could make the difference between a sore noggin and a trip to the hospital in the event of a fall. We looked like idiots, but we were capable idiots.
At the intersection with the Appalachian Trail on top of the ridge, we found a tent platform where there were fresh moose tracks, no more than a few hours old. We shoveled some smoked salmon into our mouths and replaced our fleece liners with heavy snow gloves to begin the ascent up Avery, one of the twin peaks crowned with snowfields.
The way up is longer and more treacherous than it looks from the col. The trail narrows quickly; filled with loose rocks with deep holes in between, we found ourselves using our hands to grab icy rocks and trees. The snow became deeper, the drifts nearly waist-high. Soon the reality of the weather day was upon us.
We’d been protected from heavy winds for most of the day by the southern slope of the mountain. Once we crested the tree line and got our first exposure to the northern sky, the wind hit us like a freight train—with an audible roar to match. Our faces numbed quickly as we admired our surroundings.
Avery is the most majestic peak in the Bigelow Preserve, and one of the most scenic in Maine. I unpacked my camera and started shooting. My brother pointed out a cloud in the distance. I took a few more photos, including one of my brother as he mustered a frozen smile to yell through the wind, “Winter hiking is fun!”
I bent down to pack my camera. By the time I lifted my head, the sun was gone. The cloud in the distance had quickly grown, and a dense cloud of heavy snow had covered us faster than any fog bank I’d ever encountered.
We took our spikes off so we could make faster progress on the way down but paid for it below the tree line where the snow covered ice. We slid a lot, and more than one tree branch saved me from bouncing down the rocks.
Back in the col, we had a decision to make. Back down the Fire Warden’s Trail to the parking lot? Ascend West Peak and turn back there? Or we could take the full loop over West Peak, along the Ridgeline, over The Horns, down into Cranberry Pond, and back to the trailhead from there. Fourteen miles.
We chose the full loop.
“I figured we’d end up going the long way,” my brother said as he slung his pack over his shoulders.
As we ascended the eastern slope of West Peak, we came across a stretch of forest where the wind hadn’t blown and the snow lay settled. A tunnel of spruce standing like marble statues in a museum looked like they had been holding their poses for millennia.
The moment was quickly broken as we crested the ridge, hammered again by the northwest wind. From here, the highest point, we could see the Bigelow Range from end to end. In summer, the landscape can seem tranquil, even idyllic. Yet this terrain was the setting for one of the harshest wilderness expeditions in American history.
The British occupied Quebec in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Benedict Arnold attempted to conquer the territory via a military campaign beginning in September 1775. Over the subsequent months, he and over 1,000 soldiers attempted to navigate up the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, over the Western Maine mountains, and down toward the St. Lawrence River, where they would lay siege on the Canadian city. But the colonists still considered the territory a true frontier then, little known and poorly mapped.
Arnold and his company learned the hard way that the distance was twice what they thought, and the conditions much more difficult. Half the soldiers starved to death or abandoned the campaign. Driven by desperation, Major Timothy Bigelow climbed the mountain that rose above their camp to survey the land and see if he could see the city of Quebec in the distance. (If the current view is any indication, he was disappointed.) The mountain was named for Bigelow, but many of the survivors were either killed or captured in the subsequent failed invasion.
We did not linger to consider the mountain’s past for long and headed across the ridgeline toward The Horns, beyond which the mountain abruptly descends into Cranberry Pond. We kept our ice spikes on, leaning at a hard angle to counter the wind, and descended into the trees. From Sugarloaf, the ridgeline looks like a flat break between arduous peaks. It’s a cool stretch of trail on a summer day, shaded by pines. In winter, it was a divine length of undisturbed snow.
We descended to Cranberry Pond. About a quarter mile past the campsite, we left the Appalachian Trail to return to the trailhead. The biting winds of the higher elevations were long behind, now just a heavy whisper coming over the peaks. The evergreens were replaced by birch, and the sun was setting behind the shoulder of the Crocker Mountains. We stopped periodically to watch the changing light, the last rays streaming between tree trunks and forest floor. The last few miles were as mellow as they had been when we began. The silhouette of the Subaru came into view, still alone in the parking lot, as the stars began to glow above us. The North Pole had tilted as far away from the sun as it would do in any year, and my brother and I had hiked fourteen winter miles together. The solstice set in.
John Bohorquez ’13 is a marine conservation specialist, third-generation Sugarloafer, and former member of the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ alpine ski team. He lives in Colombia, South America.
This story first appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ Magazine. Manage your subscription and see other stories from the magazine on the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ Magazine website.
