Distance: 10.1 miles (9.9 without my one mistake) for the whole McGaffey Trail A lollipop
Terrain: Medium
Elevation: Medium
Gear to Test: Wrightsock Merino Coolmesh, Freeze Dried
I found myself the weekend before my Conservation Trail hike in Maine visiting family and I had a morning to spare but not enough time to get to a big mountain. So I pulled up peakbagger.com and found a mountain that checked something off a list, McGaffey Mountain, the high point of Kennebec County. I don’t usually target these, but the hike was 10 miles on paper and fairly easy looking so it seemed like the right type of thing for the week before a big challenge.
It started off in the parking lot for the more popular and much shorter Round Top hike (which I haven’t done). The trail on the map is labeled “Trail A”, but my Gaia overlay didn’t have it mentioned at all. It’s on a several websites, I liked this one from Maine Trail Finder. There was no one there when I got there at 7:30am on a Sunday, but the parking lot was pretty crowded when I left three hours later. The trail to McGaffey is more of a mountain biking trail than a hiking trail, but it’s nice to have any trail that isn’t a bushwack.
The first mile or two you go over a little hill (400 foot elevation) which is like bonus gain. 🙂 Then it follows a fairly flat ATV looking path for a while and then you climb a switchback that goes up the main mountain. Finally, there is a lollipop loop in the highland section after you climb the ridge that is pretty windy. The trail is not blazed essentially at all (maybe three blazes in total). But when I was there the path was really well raked so it was pretty obvious where to go. In the fall, this might get a lot more “interesting”.
The only real view was on the southern side of the lollipop where you can see some body of water (Long Pond?) in the distance. This was nice, but probably not worth climbing up here just for that.
The summit was a flat, open rock with a big cairn. I kept getting nervous I had missed the summit but it’s more obvious that I expected so I shouldn’t have been. I stopped there and fixed a second breakfast to test out some more freeze-dried.
I missed the junction for the lollipop loop on my ascent, so if you’re looking on going the northern route for some reason, look closely for a raked rise on the right. Note also that when I was there someone had started blazing a new trail a bit above the main junction and I went down it accidentally when I was looking for where the lollipop came together (and not using my GPS). I came to a wheelbarrow in a clearing and realized something was wrong.
Overall, this was a pleasant enough trail, especially for a conditioning hike. It has some elevation but it’s not going to kill you. The summit doesn’t have a view and the only view is not amazing, but it’s better than nothing and the summit is nice place to sit down. If you have a mountain bike, I imagine most of the fun is in the track itself.