Adventure Trek 2026 — Katahdin Trip Report

What happens when twelve people, thirteen bikes and three cars go 470 miles north, ride into a park with no through roads, and give themselves five days to come back out the other side?

A mountain. A thunderstorm. Four crashes, two flat tires, one saddle that snapped ten miles from camp. The Perseids peaking on a new moon — which will not happen again until 2045 — and ten shooting stars in half an hour, several of them somebody's first ever. And a Friday that ended up nothing like the one on the schedule.

In August 2026 Troop 23 rode and climbed its way around Baxter State Park and Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in northern Maine. This is what actually happened, day by day, against the plan we published beforehand.

• 🚲 85 miles under our own power — 72 by bike, 13 on foot
• ⛰️ Baxter Peak, 5,267 ft — the highest point in Maine
• 📈 ~9,500 ft of climbing, 4,300 of it on the mountain in a single day
• ⛺ 6 nights in tents, 5 campgrounds
• 🛠️ 3 hours of service work in a national monument on its tenth birthday

The Plan and What Actually Happened

Our trip plan promised about 115 miles: four riding days around the park and one hiking day up Katahdin. We finished with 85. The difference is one day, and it was not lost — it was traded.

The rangers Steven spoke to on the phone while the permits were being sorted did not think much of that plan. Not the mountain on its own, and not the riding on its own — the two of them back to back. Their experience is that people come off Katahdin needing a day or two before they are good for anything, and here was a troop proposing to climb it on Tuesday and ride thirty miles of gravel on Wednesday. It is a reasonable thing to doubt.

Friday was the hardest ride on the schedule and the fifth day on tired legs — longer and steeper than the Thursday that had just emptied everybody. That evening at Lunksoos, under the tarps and in the rain, the leaders put the elevation profile next to the state of the group, added the weather and the one o'clock deadline at the service project, and made the call: the ride comes off.

It turned out to be the best day of the trip. More on that below.

Everything we rode and walked, in one map — five days in five colours. Vehicle legs are cut out, so the line below is only what moved under its own power: 85 miles, of which 72 by bike and 13 on foot. The map's own tally runs a few miles short of that. It adds up only the points the recorders actually logged, and above the treeline on Katahdin the pace drops low enough that the device decides we are standing still.

Five Days Under Our Own Power

📊 Trip Stats

Miles, climbing, nights and hours are what one person on this trip did. The rest is the whole group.

• 🚲 Under our own power: 85 miles — 72 by bike, 13 on foot
• 🚲 Bikes: 13 for twelve people — one spare, never needed
• 🗓️ Days on route: 5
• ⛺ Nights in tents: 6, across 5 campgrounds
• ⛰️ Katahdin: 10.4 miles round trip, ~4,300 ft of climb
• 📈 Total climbing under our own power: ~9,500 ft — ~4,300 of it on Katahdin in a single day, against ~4,900 spread over three days of riding. The mountain came within six hundred feet of what the bikes did all week
• 🏔️ Highest point: Baxter Peak, 5,267 ft
• ⏱️ Longest day: 12 hours 33 minutes on the mountain
• ⏳ Wednesday's 29 miles: 5 h 25 on the road, of which 1 h 55 standing — nearly all of it the faster group waiting for the slower one to get its ten-minute lead back
• 🎯 Top speed recorded: 26.3 mph
• 🛠️ Flat tires: 2
• 🤕 Crashes: 4 (no serious injuries)
• 🔧 Broken saddle mounts: 1, ridden out standing for ten miles
• 🚗 Miles by car: 1,158 for one of us, Brooklyn and back — about 3,900 across the three cars
• 🧊 Coldest night: 50–60°F
• 🍽️ Meals not out of our own packs: 5
• 🌠 Shooting stars: 10+ in half an hour — for several of us the first ever seen
• 🍦 Ice cream rounds: 1 — Steven bought one for everybody at Matagamon
• 🛠️ Service work: 3 hours per person, credited by the park

Elevation gain is sampled from the USGS 3DEP terrain model along the GPS track rather than read off the device, and rounded to the nearest hundred feet. Each day is measured separately, and within a day the breaks are bridged only when the group stayed put — the drives between work sites on Friday add nothing. Distance is counted the other way round, including the slow stretches the recorder logs as stops — above the treeline on Katahdin walking pace drops to about a mile an hour and the device calls it standing still, which is a mile of real walking. The method checks against known heights on this same track: it reads 1,087 ft at the Hunt Trail trailhead against a published figure of about 1,076, and 5,261 ft at Baxter Peak against a surveyed 5,267 — inside eleven feet both times. The day’s climb comes out a little above the 4,180 ft that summit-minus-trailhead gives, because the trail dips on the way up and those dips are climbed twice. The daily figures add up to the totals above: 1,100 Monday, 4,300 Tuesday, 1,400 Wednesday, 2,400 Thursday, 300 Friday. Baxter Peak’s 5,267 ft is itself a surveyed elevation.

Sunday, August 9 — 470 Miles North

The plan said 7:00 a.m. from OLA. We rolled at 7:30, which by troop tradition counts as early. Bikes went in one car, Scouts in another, and the third carried the Eagle Scout crew — three of our own, home from college and back for a week on the road.

Eight and a half hours later we pulled into the KOA outside Bangor, having stopped for burgers on the way and a supermarket run in the evening. The adults came back with three rotisserie chickens; the Scouts cooked their own dinner on the camp stove from the same shopping trip. It was the last shower, and — give or take a bar that came and went in odd corners of the park — the last cell signal any of us would see for five days.

Monday, August 10 — Into the Park

Breakfast was an unplanned stop at Tim Hortons, because it turned out the Scouts had no breakfast with them. Then Pat's Bike Shop in Brewer — a stop that had been on the schedule since Saturday.

At the packing session Trevor mentioned a knock in his crank. It had been looked at already and it was still there, and it was still bothering him. Sherman took that seriously: a thirteenth bike went onto the rack as a spare, and a bike shop in Maine went onto the itinerary.

He was right to. The square hole in that crank arm — the taper that keys the arm to the axle and stops it turning on it — had rounded off almost completely and was barely gripping any more. It would not have let go on a descent, where nobody is pushing on the pedals. It would have gone on a climb, under a rider standing up on them: the arm slipping or working free with somebody's whole weight coming down on it. The mechanic had it diagnosed in five minutes and fixed in ten, replaced exactly the one part that needed replacing, showed us the rounded-out square, explained what had happened to it, and charged about twenty-one dollars. The spare bike stayed on the rack for the rest of the week.

Pat's Bike Shop — Brewer, Maine

We were at the Togue Pond gate a little after noon, and then we stayed there for an hour and a half. There is a pond at the gate and a beach on it, and lunch there turned out to be the last unhurried meal of the week — the bikes were still on the rack, nothing had started yet.

Then the maps came out on the picnic table, and that is where the week's other thread starts. Steven taught map work: the route in sections, rulers laid across it, distances measured off and marked up in highlighter, everyone with their own sheet. It carried on at the campsites, and it went up the mountain with us — nobody was drawing contour lines at four thousand feet, but the map came out on the way up and again on the way down, and the point of the lake session was that by then everyone could read it. The last thing the troop did before riding into a park with no cell signal was work out on paper where it was going.

Togue Pond Gate — where the riding began

Then it started. One car stayed in the gate lot. The other two escorted the column up the gravel Tote Road, one leading and one sweeping.

The dust was the surprise. Monday was the only day with real traffic on the Tote Road, and every vehicle that passed — our own two included — put up a cloud that hung there and took its time settling. A day of it was enough to start a genuine worry about what a week of it would be like. The worry turned out to be misplaced: by Wednesday and Thursday there was almost nothing on the road at all.

Eleven miles is a short day, and it was short on purpose — but the first half of the climb humbled almost everybody. One rider cleaned it: Clyde, one of the returning Eagle Scouts. The rest of us pushed our loaded bikes up the hill on foot and arrived at Foster Field with about 1,100 feet of climbing behind us and a healthy respect for the week ahead.

Monday — Togue Pond to Foster Field

Tuesday, August 11 — Katahdin

On the trail at 5:05 a.m., in the dark, with headlamps.

The Hunt Trail climbs some 4,200 feet in a little over five miles, and it changes character three times on the way up. It starts as a walk in the woods. Above the treeline it becomes a boulder field, with sections where the route goes straight up rock faces on iron rungs driven into the stone — you climb them with your hands. Then the Tableland opens out, nearly flat, exposed, with the wind coming across it hard enough to lean into.

Our turnaround time was eleven o'clock, and it was a soft one — the kind of deadline that exists so that somebody has to think before breaking it. The first group topped out on Baxter Peak at 10:47 a.m. — Calvin, Trevor and John, with Clyde and one more adult. They spent sixteen minutes on the summit and started down at 11:03.

They met everybody else on the descent, still climbing. By then the top was a quarter mile away and in sight, the weather was holding, and nobody was going to turn around for a number. They went up.

The mountain hid itself on the way up. Above the treeline the cloud was down and visibility was about ten feet — the boulder field and the rock steps went by without anyone seeing what they were on, or what was below them. It cleared during the descent, and the mountain showed itself from above instead. There is a case that the fog did everyone a favour: what these photographs show, seen from the bottom on a clear morning, is a great deal to ask of anybody starting up it for the first time.

The descent took longer than the climb — six hours thirty-five minutes down against five hours forty-two up. That is the part nobody expects and everybody remembers: legs that worked fine going up have nothing left for six hours of picking down boulders. We were off the trail at 5:38 p.m., twelve and a half hours after we started.

Tuesday — the Hunt Trail to Baxter Peak

Wednesday, August 12 — Foster Field to Trout Brook

Twenty-nine miles of gravel along the Park Tote Road, the morning after the mountain — the day the rangers had doubted. The scouts were all on their bikes. Three of the adults were not: Wednesday was the day the car shuttle came due, and solving it took them until the middle of the afternoon. That story is further down, with the cars.

Which is why the day did not start until noon, and why the morning at Foster Field went to knots. Steven had given every Scout twelve feet of paracord, and the tables under the pavilion filled up with it: a fire lit off a ferro rod at the ring, sticks and cord on every table, half a dozen Scouts bent over their own lashings with someone going from one to the next. Legs that had done Katahdin the day before were glad of a morning sitting down. The bikes rolled at 12:18.

Keep those twelve-foot lengths in mind. They come back on Thursday.

The day's one bad moment came early — three miles into twenty-nine. One of the adults went down on the gravel, and the scout riding immediately behind him saw it happen, panicked and went down too. Scraped knees and elbows between them, and a bruised foot that was X-rayed at home the following weekend and turned out to be nothing broken. Steven came round the corner a minute later to find a first-aid kit already open at the roadside. Everything washed, ointment and band-aids, and the group was riding again ten minutes later.

The day ran on the two-group leapfrog: the slower group away first, the faster group giving them ten minutes and then riding until it caught them up.

The Perseids over Trout Brook

The evening began with the North Star — every scout is supposed to be able to find it — and then Steven took over and kept going: constellation after constellation, pointing out what sat where. Somewhere in the middle of that, the first one crossed the sky.

It was August 12, and that was not luck: Steven had the date in mind when the week was being planned. It still landed as a surprise. And 2026 was the year to be out under it — the Perseids peaked on the night of August 12–13 against a new moon, no moonlight at all, the best conditions the shower has had in years, and the peak will not fall on a new moon again until 2045. Trout Brook, with the nearest town lights a long way down a dirt road, is about as good a seat as that gets.

We lay down where we were and stopped talking. In half an hour we counted more than ten — one every couple of minutes, most of them faint and quick, one or two that drew a line clean across the sky and hung there a moment after. For several of the group it was the first shooting star they had ever seen, and then it was the second, and the fourth.

Wednesday — Foster Field to Trout Brook

Thirty miles, and about 2,400 feet of climbing — just over half of Katahdin's 4,300, on bicycles, two days after the mountain. And the storm. The three Eagle Scouts had driven home that morning, which is where the week's best story starts, though nobody knew it yet.

The morning took us out through the Matagamon Gate, and a mile and a half beyond it the road passes Matagamon Wilderness — a hunting and fishing lodge with a camp store and a dining room, and the only place to buy food anywhere on the route. We stopped for an hour and a half. The burgers were enormous, the room inside is all dark wood and old photographs, and Steven bought ice cream for everybody. By Thursday, being indoors at a table was a holiday.

Matagamon Wilderness — the only food on the route

Part of the route is a working logging road. Not one truck came past.

A good deal of that climbing was not ridden. Thirty miles of road threw up nine separate pitches at eight per cent or steeper — about 4,350 feet of them in all, the steepest touching fourteen — and on a loaded bike at the end of a long week the steep ones simply do not go. They were walked — bikes pushed up on foot, one after another after another.

Fourteen per cent does not sound like much written down. The next section is about what it actually means.

Somewhere in the middle of it a tire went flat, and the group pulled into a campsite by the road to deal with it. That turned into the only proper bike-maintenance lesson of the week: wheel off, tire levered, tube out, the hole found, new tube in, wheel back on — with everybody watching who had not done it before. There was food as well. It took well over an hour, and nobody was in a hurry about it.

Two more riders went down during the day, one before the rain arrived and one after it did. And ten miles out from camp the mount on Sherman's saddle broke clean off. He rode the rest of the way standing on the pedals.

By the time we reached Lunksoos the rain had been on us for hours — one short break somewhere in the middle, then more of the same — and arriving changed nothing at all. It was also the one camp of the three with no pavilion: Foster Field and Trout Brook each had a roof with tables under it, and here there were only trees.

There are no photographs of any of this. The camera went away when the rain started and did not come out again until the tarps were up — the last hours of the day, the pitches and the puncture and the road into Lunksoos, exist only in the track.

So two tarps went up between them on telescoping poles — and the guy lines were the paracord. Every Scout had been given twelve feet of it two days earlier and had spent Wednesday morning tying knots in it for practice; at Lunksoos in the rain the practice cord got knotted together into lines long enough to reach the trees. It is not often that a Scouting exercise gets its exam three days later, in the dark, in weather.

Everything that mattered happened underneath: dinner cooked, water boiled, knees and elbows cleaned and dressed. Tents went up in the rain — except one. Sherman's had ridden the day strapped to the outside of a loaded bike, unpacked, and it arrived as wet as he did. He slept in the car.

Thursday — Trout Brook to Lunksoos

What a Gradient Actually Is

Gradients written as percentages mean very little on their own, and drawn as an angle they mean less — fourteen per cent is about eight degrees, and the eye refuses to take eight degrees seriously. What makes a hill hard is not the angle. It is the height you lift yourself and a loaded bike over the ground you cover.

You can see it in what the rider does. At 3.3% you stay in the saddle and pedal. At 8.1% you come out of it and put your weight on the pedals. At 14%, with a week of kit on the bike, you get off and push. The slopes in the drawing are steepened about twofold, so that three gentle angles read apart on a page — but they are steepened equally, so the three stand in true proportion to one another. The real angles are in the charts below.

Put in those terms it stops being abstract. Over a single mile, 3.3% lifts you 174 feet, 8.1% lifts 428, and 14% lifts 739 — nearly three times the height of a Brooklyn Bridge tower, in one mile.

New York has a climb that makes this easy to feel. The bike path over the Brooklyn Bridge rises about 100 feet over a little more than half a mile — some 3,000 feet of road, an average of 3.3% — from a start around 27 feet above the water up to 127 feet at the middle of the span, which is where the roadway is highest. The towers go up to 276 feet. It is a real climb: you feel it, you change gear, you are glad when it flattens.

The diagram takes that climb and re-runs it at other gradients from the same start, and it reads two ways. Across the same length of road: the bridge's own 3.3% brings you to that high point at 127 feet, 8.1% would carry you to about 270 — the height of the tower tops — and 14% to about 450 feet, well above them. Or to reach that height at all: 3.3% needs the whole run, 8.1% needs about 1,240 feet, and 14% only about 710 — a quarter of it.

That middle line is worth dwelling on, because three unrelated things land on the same number. To finish level with the tower tops you would need 8.3%. The steepest ramp a building in the United States is allowed to have is 8.33% — accessibility rules cap a ramp at 1:12. And the most famous mountain in the Tour de France averages 8.1% the whole way up: twenty-one hairpins to Alpe d'Huez, eight and a half miles, bottom to top. Ride the Brooklyn Bridge at the gradient that decides the Tour de France, and you arrive at the top of the towers.

Fourteen per cent was Thursday's steepest pitch, measured across about 560 feet of it. That is past where Alpe d'Huez is at its worst: its hardest hairpins touch 13%.

That comparison deserves its exact shape, because the differences are as interesting as the likeness. Alpe d'Huez holds 8.1% for eight and a half miles — some forty-five thousand feet of road, every foot of it climbing. Thursday had about 4,350 feet of road at 8% or steeper: roughly one part in ten of what they ride. Their steepest hairpins are tarmac and the riders go up them on racing bikes carrying nothing. Ours was loose gravel — a stretch of about 560 feet averaging just over 14% — with a week of camping kit strapped to the bike, on the fourth day of five, and we did not ride it. We walked it, pushing, at half of walking pace.

So the claim is not that a Scout troop from Brooklyn did what the Tour de France does. It is narrower and, we think, better: for a few hundred feet at a time, the road under us was tilted more steeply than the most famous mountain in professional cycling. They are professionals. We are scouts.

Thursday climbed about 2,400 feet across thirty miles — nearly nine Brooklyn Bridge towers, one stacked on the next.

The roadway height, the towers and the spans are published figures; the length of the climb follows from them without any working out. The high point is the middle of the main span and the bridge is symmetrical, so the climb is simply half the bridge: 6,016 feet total, 3,008 to the top. Everything else here is rounded to match. Our own gradients are measured from the GPS tracks against a terrain model, across about 560 feet of road at a time; read over shorter stretches the same pitches come out steeper still.

Friday, August 14 — A Park's Tenth Birthday

The ride came off. What replaced it was better.

We drove first to the Tekαkαpimək Contact Station — the monument's visitor centre, opened in August 2024 on a ridge above the East Branch of the Penobscot and designed with the Wabanaki Nations. Then to Katahdin Overlook, on the tenth birthday of Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. There was a ribbon cutting. There were speeches. And then, a few miles further on, there was the work: a loop hike identifying plants and logging them in iNaturalist for the monument's records, a little over a mile of it, which the park credited as three hours of service per person.

And then the part nobody had told us about. We knew the date: the tenth birthday of the monument was why the service project sat on Friday at all. What nobody had told us was that it would be a proper occasion — an opening with a run of speakers and a reception afterwards, and the people who had spent ten years making the place exist. A troop of scouts from Brooklyn had come to put in three hours of work and walked into the ceremony.

And when the guests had eaten, what was left of the reception came to us. Nobody kept count of the croissant sandwiches.

Friday — the service loop in Katahdin Woods

We drove south that evening, ate in Augusta, and made camp on the Salmon Falls River at half past ten.

Saturday, August 15 — The Road Home

The campground office did not open until nine, so there was no early start to be had. Keith drove out to a Dunkin down the road and came back with breakfast for everybody — on him. It is the kind of thing that never makes the stats block and gets remembered anyway.

Four to five hours, we said. It took seven to eight — stops, fuel, and then Manhattan, where whole streets were closed and police cars were moving in columns for reasons none of us ever established. We were home in Brooklyn through the afternoon, and the car with all the bikes pulled in twenty minutes behind everyone else.

Three Cars, Six Nights, No Through Road

Baxter State Park has no road across it. Getting a group of cyclists around the outside of it, with their gear and their food, means moving cars the long way round all week. The two ends of our week were the Togue Pond gate and Lunksoos: fourteen miles apart as the crow flies, and about sixty by road, because there is no road between them that does not go all the way around the park.

So the cars leapfrogged. Two of them escorted the column in on Monday and sat at Foster Field for two nights — which is why Monday's dinner, the one before the mountain, was the only fresh meal cooked out of a cooler all week.

Wednesday was the day the shuttle came due. Sherman and Matthew drove out in the morning to the Togue Pond gate, where Matthew's car had been sitting since Monday. From there they took both cars the sixty miles round to Lunksoos, left Matthew's there, drove back to the gate in Sherman's and left that one at the gate. Keith, who had been in camp at Foster Field all morning, set out around half past twelve to collect them, and the three of them were back with the bikes by three o'clock.

Then Keith and Sherman got on those bikes and rode the twenty-nine miles to Trout Brook. They came in forty-five minutes behind the group — three hours down at the start, and they made nearly all of it back by not stopping once.

Matthew drove Keith's car through to camp. He had turned his ankle coming down Katahdin the day before and was not riding that day; he caught the group up in the middle of the transfer.

So the group was never without a vehicle: Keith's car came through to Trout Brook with Matthew driving it.

Over the week the three cars covered about 3,900 miles between them — roughly 1,370 on Sherman’s, 1,320 on Keith’s and 1,220 on Matthew’s. That is what it took to put eighty-five miles under our own power.

Thursday was meant to be the Eagle Scouts' last day on the bikes — set off ahead of everybody, ride the leg to Lunksoos at their own pace, and be on the road to Brooklyn by early afternoon with eight hours of driving still ahead of them. That is not how it went. With Matthew's ankle keeping him off the bike, the three of them gave up the ride and spent the morning on the cars instead: Keith's back out to the gate, then both vehicles the long way round to Lunksoos, with Spencer, Sherman's son, driving his father's car. They left for Brooklyn from there, having traded their last day of riding for the shuttle.

That trade is what made Friday possible. The plan had one car returning to the gate on Thursday for a ride back to close the loop. Instead two cars were waiting at Lunksoos on Friday morning — and two cars at Lunksoos meant the visitor centre, the service project, the ribbon cutting, and the drive south that evening. The Eagle Scouts paid for the best day of the week with their last day on the bikes.

What This Trip Counted Toward

A week like this is not only a week. Here is what it converts into, and where each piece stands.

BSA 50-Miler Award — distance and days are met

The award asks for at least fifty miles under human power and at least five consecutive days on the route. We have 85 miles and five consecutive days: Monday riding, Tuesday on Katahdin, Wednesday and Thursday riding, and Friday's service project inside the monument. Nine of the twelve are eligible — four adults and five Scouts. The three Eagle Scouts drove home Thursday morning and are not claiming.

Service — an official National Park Service project

The award also asks for real work on the land the route runs through, and Friday's was the official kind: the monument's tenth-anniversary BioBlitz, run by the National Park Service, with our nine participants surveying plants for the park's records and three hours each credited by the park. And that was one afternoon. Through the rest of the year the troop is out on conservation projects closer to home, and between the two the service side of this award is well covered.

NPS Resource Stewardship Scout Ranger — in progress

The National Park Service runs a joint programme with Scouting America that recognises time spent in national parks: five hours earns a certificate, ten hours earns a patch. Unlike the 50-Miler, it counts organised educational programmes as well as work — ranger-led activities, interpretive programmes, guided hikes. Friday's three hours of service, the visitor centre, the anniversary programme and the iNaturalist hike all took place inside Katahdin Woods and Waters, which is a national monument administered by NPS. Baxter is a state park, not federal land, and does not count.

We are collecting the paperwork now. This was not on our radar before the trip — a ranger asked whether we were working toward a patch, and that question is the reason we know about the programme at all.

What We'd Do Differently

Every trek teaches the next one. Six things we are carrying into 2027.

A noise nobody has explained is a noise you plan around

The crank that nearly failed was reported by the Scout who rides that bike, at the packing session, before anyone left Brooklyn. It had been looked at and the sound had not gone away. Sherman's call was to treat an unexplained noise as a real one — a spare bike on the rack and a shop stop on the itinerary, at a cost of twenty minutes and one rack slot. The other way round it would have cost a crank arm letting go under a standing rider on a loaded gravel climb. The rider who hears his own bike every day is worth listening to twice.

Two groups on a ten-minute leapfrog is not the answer

The riders were not all the same speed, and over twenty-nine miles of gravel that difference turns into miles of empty road between the front of the column and the back. The answer tried on the first riding day and kept for the rest was a leapfrog: the slower group set off first, the faster group gave them a ten-minute start, rode until it caught them, then stopped and waited ten minutes before setting off again. In practice the waits ran longer than ten.

Measured, it does exactly what it was built to do. Riding, the two groups were genuinely different — 8.6 mph against 13.2. Measured against the clock, in miles per hour of the actual day with the waiting counted in, they came out the same: 5.7 against 6.4. Nobody was left behind, and neither group had to spend the day riding at the other one's pace.

And it is still not much fun for anybody, which is the part worth writing down. The faster group spent 43% of the day standing: ride hard, stop, cool down, stiffen up, start cold, do it again. There is no rhythm in that, and rhythm is most of what makes a long day on a bike worth doing. The slower group rides all day knowing it is about to be caught. Twenty-nine miles took five hours and twenty-five minutes, and for one hour and fifty-five of that the faster group was standing at the roadside waiting to be ten minutes behind again.

So the conclusion is not a better leapfrog. It is that a day like this wants a group that rides at one speed — which is an argument for the occasional trip built for part of the troop, on top of the trips the whole troop does together, rather than for splitting a single trip down the middle.

Day one breakfast is not automatic

We lost time on Monday morning to a breakfast stop that existed because nobody had packed one. The first morning of a trip is the one where the packing list has not yet become habit.

Read the elevation profile against the group, not against the plan

Friday's decision was the best one of the week, and it was possible because somebody put the profile of the remaining day next to the actual state of nine tired people — and did it the evening before rather than the morning of, while there was still time to change what the morning looked like. That comparison is worth making the night before every long day, not only when the day already looks impossible.

Know which camps have a roof before you need one

Of the three camps inside the parks, two had a pavilion — a roof with tables under it — and Lunksoos, the one where it rained all evening, did not. Two tarps and a set of telescoping poles covered the gap, and they were the difference between cooking dinner and not cooking it. Carry them whether or not the forecast says so, and find out in advance which nights have no roof of their own.

The sleep kit rides waterproof or it is not a sleep kit

One tent spent a rainy riding day strapped unpacked to the outside of a bike and was unusable by the time camp went up. Its owner slept in the car. Everything you will need that night — tent, bag, mat — goes inside a dry bag or a lined pannier before the first drop falls, because the moment you find out it failed is the moment there is nothing to do about it.

Where to Next

The plan we rode against is still up: Adventure Trek 2026 — the trip plan, with the route files, the packing list and the logistics as we published them beforehand.

Every trek since 2018 is on the High Adventure page. The most recent: 2025, Buffalo to Syracuse along the Empire State Trail; 2024, the Upper James River by canoe; 2023, the Presidential Range on foot; 2022, the C&O Canal Trail by bike; and 2021, five days on the James River by canoe.

And if you are working out how to feed yourself for five days without a cooler, that is its own subject: Trail Food.

Report and photographs by Dmitry Vorobyev, Assistant Scoutmaster, Troop 23 Brooklyn. GPS tracks recorded on the trip.