Day 6: Thursday September 6th
After a busy day, we were in no rush to pack up and leave the perfect little plot of land we called home. We all slept in and spent some well-deserved time sitting around drinking coffee and relaxing. This was our last day in North Maine Woods, and we had some pretty serious miles to cover to reach our tentative campsite on Flaggstaff Lake.
We would be exiting NMW through the southwest and head into Jackman on Old Kelley Dam Rd. I spent a long time reviewing the gazetteer to find a route which would take us southwest from where we were down onto the road where we needed to be, but there was no route.
A recent bridge failure had closed a crucial road for us to travel that direction. Funny enough, the only way we knew of this bridge out was from Mim at the 20 Mile Checkpoint. She had a sign hung in the check-in booth altering traffic of the obstruction, and she had also marked the spot in my atlas. Without her knowledge of the land, our day could have looked very different.
Regardless of the bridge out, there were several other potential tracks to take us that direction. However, not a single one showed as being passable. Each road ran had an impassable mark. There was one potential route, but it was risky. It showed a path down a secondary road, then turning onto a tertiary road (light double dash in the atlas) that cut over to another secondary road. The route would snake us up and down, and was by no means a straight shot. It even had a couple "sometimes passable" spots marked.
It would take us the better part of an hour to get over there before finding out if the track would work or not. After our previous experiences with the inconsistency of the roads, and how the map does not show definitively the condition of a road, we opted to play it safe and take the long way around on the main roads. This was truly the definition of “you can’t get there from here.”
Not trying to drive that route might be my biggest regret of the trip. A failure could have meant spending an extra day in NMW, which we had not paid for, but would not have disturbed our trip immensely. The biggest issue was not being able to communicate to the NMW staff that we were planning on spending an extra day and that we were not lost or in trouble because we didn’t check out when expected.
We looped down and around to Golden Rd before splitting off near Pittston Farm headed west. On this road we stopped at one of the electronic gates to call the main office and check out of NMW.
From here we continued down out of the woods until we eventually intersected with Rt 201 north of Jackman, just a few miles from the Canadian border. It was a good feeling to be back on a paved road after 3 days of rough dirt. By this time I was low on fuel again and the Jeep was occasionally hiccupping. I pressed on, knowing that gas was not far away. About this time I was also able to get some English-speaking music back on.
I pulled into the gas station in Jackman literally spitting and sputtering as my failing fuel pump threw a temper tantrum. I was ecstatic knowing that I had made it back to civilization after successfully estimating fuel usage and traveled over 300 miles unsupported and having used all of the 10 gallons I brought just to roll up to the pump with not very much to spare.
Gave the Jeep a walk around and chuckled at the vegetation that was stuck in my winch. There was quite a bit of hood-height grass in between the two tires tracks on some of the roads we had driven.
We got some questionable lunch at the gas station before saddling up for the next jaunt. We weren’t going to be on pavement for long.
Southbound out of Jackman, then hung an abrupt right to put us westward on Hardscrabble Rd, which turned into Spencer Rd, then Beaudry Rd. This was a very well maintained and apparently not well traveled logging road that put us over to Rt 27 near Chain of Ponds.
Arriving at the end of Beaudry Rd, we all aired our tires up for the first time in days.
We drove down through Eustis as the end of the day neared. We were headed for a site on the western bank of Flaggstaff lake. I had my eyes on this site after seeing a post on reddit of a gorgeous beach campsite on the water looking directly across at the Bigelow mountain range.
Upon arrival, we found that we could not actually get the vehicles down to the beach campsite, as the road was blocked. However, there was a wooded site set farther back that met our needs. It wasn’t the prettiest campsite we had for the trip, but with more weather rolling in, it served its purpose.
