Poking Around in Maine
The Lubec Loop
Bangor Area
by Craig Mains
The Lubec Loop
Bangor Area
by Craig Mains
At the end of September, on her off week, Chain-Wen and I decided to take a mini-roadtrip. Someone had suggested to Chain that she'd like Quoddy Head State Park near Lubec. Rather than drive up and back on US Route 1 I thought we'd drive out on Maine State Route 9 and come back on 1 making a loop out of it.
We were planning to spend the night camping at Cobscook Bay State Park, spend part of the next day exploring Quoddy Head, and then make our way back to Bangor along US Route 1. The map above shows the loop. Bangor is point A at the western end, Cobscook Bay is point C, and Quoddy Head is point D at the eastern end.
Maine Route 9 runs in a generally southwest to northeast direction and spans the state from the New Hampshsire border at Berwick to the Canadian border at Calais. The section from Bangor to Calais, which is slightly less than 100 miles, is known as the Airline. This name has nothing to do with aviation but is said to be an old term for a direct route, similar to what we might call a "straight shot." The other, more established route from Bangor to Canada involved driving up the coast on US route 1 and then cutting back inland towards Calais, making a broad arc. The Airline was indeed a straighter shot but, although there had been a road in some form along that route since the 1850s, it was not until 1973 that the entire length of it was paved.
From Bangor to Clifton, about 20 miles east of Bangor, the drive is rural but with occasional small towns and roadside businesses. The 80 miles beyond Clifton, however, was practically all woods. The photo above and the next photo are not mine. However, they very closely match the conditions on the day we drove that stretch. The trees were starting to change colors but had not yet peaked.
There was very little traffic to contend with and there were occasional passing lanes on the uphill stretches. At one time it was estimated that 700 logging trucks used the Airline each day. Only a handful passed us in the opposite direction. It was pretty much open road the whole way.
Shown above is Route 9 with Lead Mountain in the background. Lead Mountain has an elevation of 1479 feet. It's name comes from presence of the mineral pyrrhotite, which was mistakenly believed to be lead. This photo is pretty representative of traffic on the Airline. There were long stretches of time where there was no one in front of or behind us, at least on the day we traveled.
We did not follow the Airline all the way into Calais, which, in Maine, is pronounced "callous." We took a couple backroad shortcuts to the state park that took us through the suburbs of Meddybemps, Maine. We got to Cobscook Bay State Park by lunchtime and had plenty of time to set up camp and relax
It took me a while to even partially wrap my head around the geography of the area because it's complex. Cobscook Bay would make a good example for explaining the concept of fractals because of the recurring patterns of bays and inlets at smaller and smaller scales. The bays have bays, which in turn have bays, which have inlets, which have coves. The red arc above shows the two sections which are considered to be the main part of Cobscook Bay.
The gray line down the middle of the map is the US/Canada border. Cobscook Bay opens up onto Passamaquoddy Bay, which opens up onto the Bay of Fundy
The red dot towards the lower left corner of this map shows Cobscook Bay in relation to the Bay of Fundy. It is close to the mouth of the bay where the Bay of Fundy meets the Gulf of Maine. According to the Cobscook Bay Resource Center, the average daily tidal variation is 24 vertical feet, occasionally up to 28 feet. This is considerably less than the maximum 52 foot tidal variation at the head of the Bay of Fundy at the far ends of the two eastern arms but still much more than the average Maine tidal variation of about nine feet.
According to the resource center, at low tide about one third of the bottom of Cobscook Bay is exposed, with another large portion covered only by shallow water. Sunlight is able to penetrate to the bottom everywhere in the bay during some part of the day. The bay provides for a diversity of animal and plant life and is considered to be in relatively good health, presumeably because it is not heavily populated by humans. Scallops, mussels, soft-shell clams, periwinkles, and sea urchins are harvested commercially from the bay as are some types of seaweeds
The red dot near the lower left hand corner shows the location of the state park. Despite its name, the park is not on the main part of Cobscook Bay, but on a backbay called Whiting Bay. In addition to the many bays, there are also many small inslands.
When we arrived at the park, we were checked in by a pretty ranger with a nose stud and a tattoo of a pileated woodpecker. She asked me if I wanted to drive around the park and select our own site or whether I'd like her to recommend a site. I opted to let her recommend a site and she registered us for what she said was her favorite site in the park. The red dot on the aerial photo above shows the location of our site, which was on a peninsula connected to another peninsula. There were five walk-in sites on the tip of the peninsula with a small parking area at the end of the bigger peninsula. At the parking area there were a couple two-wheeled carts for moving one's gear from the parking lot to the camp site. There did not seem to be many people in the park in general. By the end of the day, there would be two other groups of people sharing the mini-peninsula with us. However, they were quiet and not within sight so it worked out well.
The view looking out onto Whiting Bay from our campsite, 56T. I had wondered if the ranger told everyone she checked in that she was giving them her favorite campsite. I think it would have been hard to beat this one though.
A view of our campsite. I doubt there were more than a dozen campers in the entire park. It was a nice change of pace after having recently camped twice in more crowded campgrounds at Acadia. It was also one of the quietest places and, after sunset, one of the darkest places I have been in some time. The only time it wasn't quiet was when a jet flew over. It must have been along one of the trans-Atlantic jet routes because there seemed to be a lot of jets. In between jets though it was very quiet. And starry.
The view from the tip of the peninsula. At low tide all three of these islets became connected. We didn't get to see the full extent of low tide on Whiting Bay as it occurred after dark.
Not far offshore from our campsite was a big rock with a cluster of birds on it. We watched as the tide came in and the cluster of birds got tighter and tighter. Eventually the rock was completely water covered and they had to move to higher ground. The darker birds, I'm pretty sure, are cormorants.
We enjoyed our stay at Cobscook Bay. It was one of the best designed campgrounds I've seen as most of the sites had privacy from nearby sites. However, it wasn't a large park and most of the acreage was devoted to camp sites. There were only three trails in the park and they weren't long. We took an afternoon walk on one of them and had the trail to ourselves.
Maine seems to have ideal conditions for a diversity of mosses, mushrooms, and lichens
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Lots of different kinds of mushrooms. Chanterelle?
A spur from the trail we walked took us up on top of a rocky hill with a view of one of the innumerable inlets along the bay. This one is called Burnt Cove.
The inlet on the other side of the peninsula we were camping on was called Broad Cove. This photo was either slightly before or after high tide.
This photo taken closer to low tide shows the entire bottom of the cove exposed as a large mudflat.
The next morning, after breaking camp at Cobscook Bay, we headed to Quoddy Head State Park, which was not far away. Quoddy Head is almost an island. It's only connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of marsh. And, that strip is being slowly eroded away by the surf at Carrying Place Cove. If left to nature, it has been predicted that Quoddy Head will become an island in a couple hundred years. That, however, might be accelerated by rising sea levels.
The first thing you see when you come into the park is the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse. Quoddy Head is known for frequently being enshrouded in fog and there has been a lighthouse at this location since 1808. The current lighthouse, which replaced the original, was built in 1858. It had resident lighthouse keepers until 1988 when the light was automated. The Fresnel lens, visible in the photo, is five and half feet tall and helps project light 15 to 18 miles out to sea in two short flashes every 15 seconds. The lighthouse has been part of the park since 1998.
This marker proclaims the peninsula to be the most eastern point in the United States. Some people dispute that assertion based on the technicalities of measuring east and west, which is more arbitrary than measuring north and south for which there are fixed poles from which to measure.
Longitude is measured east and west from the Intermational Reference Meridian (0 degrees) in England to the 180th meridian. The Aleutian archipelago of Alaska is so long that several small islands are on the western side of the 180th meridian, which gives them eastern longitudes. The Aleutian island of Semisopochnoi has a longitude of 179.772 degrees East. You can't get much further east than that! Of course, this is all nitpicking since, if we looked at the US as a whole, Quoddy Head clearly would be the most eastern point. The Quoddy Head claim would have been perfectly acceptable on that basis except the company that donated the marker made the mistake of engraving the longitude on the marker. If the basis of "most eastern" is decided by longitudinal measurement then the honor would have to go to Semisopochnoi.
The beach at Quoddy Head had a different character from those at Acadia. Besides the difference in the rocks, there was a lot of kelp stranded on the beach, which we did not see elsewhere. While Chain gathered a bag we debated whether it was likely to be legal or not (it was). When we got back to Bangor, we added some to our soup.
From what I've read, the bedrock geology at Quoddy Head is primarily gabbro, which, like the granite at Acadia, originated as an intrusive layer of magma that cooled underground and was, over time, exposed. The rock in this photo, because of the deformation of the layers, appears to be metamorphic, however.
The Cliffs of Quoddy. The island had a number of small pocket beaches like the one shown here. At a couple of them you could hear the surf tumbling rocks, some of which appeared to be about the size of bowling balls.
We decided to hike the loop around the park, which was estimated to be about 4.2 miles and was rated as moderately challenging---which turned out to be true for us, except for maybe the moderately part. This kind of wide, well-maintained, level trail didn't last long.
We walked the loop counter-clockwise, meaning we did the interior part of the hike first and returned on the part that ran along the coast. Both parts were beautiful. The interior part was through a spruce/balsam forest that smelled wonderful. The entire forest floor seemed to be in moss, lichens, and miniature plants. I think these are powderhorn lichens and bunchberry.
The park contained an arctic bog that was a spur off of the loop.
A pitcher plant in the morning sun along the bog walk.
It seemed to us that most visitors walked as far as the bog walk and then turned back. The trail condition past the bog was noticeably more primitive. In particular there were numerous intermittent places where it was really muddy. It was the kind of mud that if you got a step too far into it, it went over the top of your boot and then would suck your boot off when you tried to pull it out. Although the woods were beautiful we ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to circumvent the muddy places. Sometimes it was easy and sometimes is wasn't. The detours ended up adding to the distance and the time it took us to finish the loop. On the plus side, beyond the bog, we mostly had the trail to ourselves.
Once we got on the ocean side of the loop, there was less mud but more up and down with some occasional rock scrambling. There were a few spots where the trail had, as they say here, "some exposure," which means the trail ran alongside a vertical or near-vertical cliff. There was one spot that we both found a little unnerving, where erosion had worn away the trail to the point where only about 15 inches or so of trail remained, with a big drop off to a pocket beach on the ocean side. And, the bit of remaining trail sloped down towards the cliff and was also wet and slippery looking. Fortunately, there were some well-placed tree roots on the uphill side that provided some handholds.
By the time we got to this low, grassy peninsula in the photo above we were happy to be finished with the more challenging parts of the hike.
The island on the horizon in this photo is Grand Manan Island, which is in Canada.
We still had about a mile left to get back to the car but the trail was easy for that last mile. We had planned to take our time driving back to Bangor and stop and explore some other places along the way. However, we were both tired enough that we agreed to drive straight back. Maybe another time.