Day 7.224: Family hike at Mount Kineo

We only had one full day in Greenville (Monday of this week), and if you only have one day at Moosehead Lake, you hike Mount Kineo - or so we'd heard.

When we saw it, we were not so sure:

The island has a few homes, a mountain and a golf course. The golf course owners run a boat shuttle during the golfing season. It was running once per hour in each direction and the cost was $10 per person for the round-trip. We pretty much cleaned ourselves out of cash to get there.

The trails start out along the coastline - where we saw evidence of beavers and got an amazing view of a squirrel right by the trail.

We took the intermediate difficulty trail (Bridle Trail) on the way up, it was steep in places and quite wet, but not too difficult by any means.

There are no views from the Bridle Trail, but there is a viewpoint very close to where it joins the Indian Trail and right at the top there is a rather terrifying climb up a fire tower to just above the tree tops providing panoramic views of the lake.

We also saw all this:

On the way down we braved the Indian Trail (no pun intended) which basically picks its way along the ridge with spectacular views and very steep climbs/descents. We were quite pleased to make it down to water-level, look back at the heights we'd climbed and then get the shuttle back to the mainland.

In total, we walked just about 4 miles, with 750 ft of elevation gained and lost again in about 4 hours. We were ready for a rest after that and then three of us managed a small canoe outing as I posted at the time.