Kennebec Highland Adventure

 Today, Nancy, Tracy and I decided to ride the Kennebec Highland Trails. None of us had been there before but we had a map. Tracy picked up Nancy and we all met at Exit 43 truck stop. It was a cool day only in the 60's and overcast. Tracy led the way with Nancy as our navigator. We planned to park at the Round Top Trail parking area on the Watson Pond Rd. We were happy to find there was room for both of our rigs to park there. We tacked up and headed out on the Round Top Trail. Very quickly it became clear that this trail might not be a good idea. It was very rocky with large slabs of rock to go over. It was slick for the mules and horse and we didn't feel comfortable with this. At first we hoped it was just a short piece of the trail but we came to on particularly nasty spot and decided to turn around. Lily was a little excited which made going over all the rocks even more nerve wracking There was only one other trail we saw but it didn't go in the direction we wanted to go. We rode back to the parking lot. After a bit of deliberation and a call to Amy Beem for ideas on another place to park, we decided to drive up to the Roxy Rand Rd and park there. We loaded up our saddled equines and off we went. We found the Roxy Rand Rd. with no problem. There was a good spot to park at the end of the road by a farm. It was starting to sprinkle at this time but nothing bad so we didn't care. We were soon on our way again. This time we stated out on a nice easy tote road. Our plan was to ride to Kidder Pond, ride down the east side and then make a loop that would bring us back to the north side of the pond.

We got to one spot on the trail where there was a stretch of water and rocks that Lily was very worried about walking into. She froze up on me so Nancy came up on Goodie. Goodie didn't really want to walk though either but started in and got just a little ahead of Lily then she stopped. But, Goodie getting just a little ahead was just enough to get Lily to unfreeze. It still took a lot of encouragement but I finally convinced her to go through. And on one spot on alone a tote road, just ahead of me on the left side of the trail I see a sapling tree bent over with the top nearly to the ground and the tree is bobbing up and down! The brush was very thick on the sides of the trail so we could not see into it so didn't know what was pushing that tree down but it had to be something fairly large. Lily was watching the tree but did not seem concerned. I, on the other hand, was very concerned. Nancy and I started to talk loudly and making a lot of noise. The tree popped up and was still. We never heard anything move off or saw anything but Lily was still not worried so we rode on without incident. 

We knew we had to keep taking left turns to make our loop. We got to Kidder Pond without problem. We made our first left. It took longer than we expected to come to our second left turn. We took this and after going a a 1/2 mile or so and going down a long hill, the trail ended. We went back to the intersection and figured it must be the next left turn we were looking for. We rode for quite a while and as I was watching my GPS, I see we we are traveling south, southwest. We know this is the wrong direction. We come to another intersection. There is an open gate on the south trail and a trail leading east. There were some snowmobile signs here saying that Flying Pond Variety store is on the south trail in 4 miles. We decided to take the east trail. We rode for quite a way down this trail and it started heading south also and we know this would not get us where we needed to go. We eventually turned around and headed back to the gate. Lily did not what to turn and go back and gave me a little attitude here. Just pinned ears and a head shake and I had to give her a boot to get her moving back the way we came. Once back to the gate, we discussed again what we should do. We had no idea at all where we were. Should we try to find a road? The weather had cleared by now and the sun was out. We didn't want to back track all the way but knew we had plenty of daylight hours to make it back the same way and decided that was our best option. I had my GPS to keep us on course to track back. So, back we went. We took it easy on the way back as neither Lily or Goodie have had a lot of conditioning. We got back to our trailers with no trouble.  We had a great ride though there was the brief moment where we thought we might be spending the night in the woods and were deciding how we were going to dole out or 4 granola bars, 1 P&B sandwich and 2 bottles of water.