Litchfield, Maine - 17 miles

This ride was actually done on July 29 but I'm only now getting around to writing it up.  It's raining so today's planned ride got cancelled. 

I headed out Rt 126 towards Gardiner, ME with a plan to mountain bike a woods road off Pine Tree Road that I had hiked many years before, but got no further than a mile up the road where I came across the old trolley line that used to run through Litchfield between Lewiston and Gardiner.  This was the site of a famous (in our family) hike one vacation up to the Country Store.  It had been my day to decide the family's activity for the day-how was I to know that there would be more mosquitos than trees?  Since then neither of my kids has ever liked to hike.  The trolley line is now a snowmobile trail - the tracks are long gone, but a modern bridge spans a brook which otherwise would be a wet nuisance to cross. 

When the line crossed Huntington Hill Road, I crossed and proceeded up a private drive in search of the trolley line, but before I could find it I was asked if I could be helped by the apparent lady of the house, she and her husband both were out in the yard unexpectedly in the early afternoon of a week day.  Learning my desire to follow the trolley tracks brought about the declaration that they had closed the trail.  They both chimed in about snowmobilers speeding past their bedroom at 3 pm in the morning, drinking, carousing, partying and clogging their sewers with sex toys.  Eventually it came out that the trail had been re-routed around the other side of their property, so I thanked them and turned back to find a very overgrown and rough trail cut through the woods.  The opposite of the straight and nearly level trolley line, this wound up and over and through the woods and swamps till it rejoined the trolley line-so I had been told and I've not doubt that it did, if you knew the right sequence of turns-I did not and not surprisingly, given my handicap sense of direction, stumble upon them.  Instead I came out on a gas line which ran straight as an arrow up and down a succession of steep hills with no regard to moderate the slope whatsoever. 

I followed the gas line up and over a long hill which was too steep to ride up (at least for me) but at the top discovered that the trail descended even more steeply down the other side to a series of mudholes, before climbing again up an even longer hill.  Having little desire to slog through the mud in the July afternoon heat, I turned back to try the trail on the other side of the gas line.  This wound up the same hill through the woods parallel to the line.  I was merely retracing my route, only this time in the woods.   I was getting tired and none too happy with wandering around retracing routes and wondering how long it would take to find my way out when, at the crest of the hill, the trail took a sharp left turn away from the line.  This pleasant wood road ran pleasingly level so that I could ride again.  After a half a mile it came out in the back yard of an apartment building, or so it looked.  Although not marked, I supposed the trail ran along the back of the yard and so I went, hoping that no  resident dogs would be prowling about.  At the other side of the yard was another woods road heading back in the direction of the line.

This section had some nice old cart paths and at one point skirted a field that glowed a vibrant green under a pure blue sky, before descending almost precipitously into a sandpit where the trail literally disappeared off a twenty foot cliff.  If was only because I cautiously rode the brakes all the way down that I avoided catching some serious air.  The owner of the sandpit, which I believe is the town of Litchfield, partly because it was directly across the road from the town garage obviously had the right to dig out the sand irregardless of the presence of the trail, which now seemed doomed as there appeared to be no way around.  I was forced to carry the bike around the very edge of the pit and clinging on to trees and tree branches to keep from falling over the edge. 

At the time I had only a vague idea of where I was.  Following the dirt road which rose steeply up and out of the pit, then wound down a good sized hill and came out across from the town office, and quite a distance from my original goal.   In hind sight, I should have turned and headed for home, but I still had energy and decided to continue to North Adams road, which I did and pressed on further than I had in a previous year.  This was a nice woods road, which would have been even nicer if a good section of it had not been torn up by a logging operation, which evidently was far more concerned with getting logs out than they were with the condition of the road after they were done.
I got only a mile further than this before a combination of fatigue, thirst (I had foolishly not brought any drink), and mosquitos overcame what little exploratory adventuresome spirit I had left.  I felt now very much like my family must have felt on our famous hike.  Turning around to avoid having to cross a flooded section of trail, I headed back wearily, my sole motivation the thought of reaching the country store for a cold drink.  The same store as that fateful trip.  Eventually I made it.  How wonderful was that Mello Yello!