Big & Little Niagara Falls

Maine Week Travelog #19
Baxter State Park, ME - Friday, 18 Jun 2021, 3:30pm.

Visiting Toll Dam on the Appalachian Trial (see previous blog) wasn't the end of the line for us. It wasn't even a planned stop! We were hiking to Little & Big Niagara Falls further downstream. "Downstream" is a good news/bad news proposition. Good news: the hike is mostly downhill on the way in. Bad news: it's uphill on the way out.



We arrived first at Little Niagara Falls. As its first name implies, it's not terribly big. The falls drops maybe 30' over a series of cascades.

We hiked out on the granite ridge visible in the right of the picture above. There were nice views of the whole area up there. Then I scrambled down a dry falls on the granite and made it to the bottom of the basin where I took this picture.

The fact that this was Little Niagara Falls increased our expectation for Big Niagara Falls further downstream. Alas...



...While Big Niagara Falls was definitely bigger than Little Niagara Falls, neither of them were comparable to their famous namesake, Niagara Falls. But they were nice as destinations for a walk in the woods.



The big falls, like its little sibling, is composed of several drops in a row. Unlike at the little falls there was no safe way down the rocks from the top at big falls so we continued further on the Appalachian Trail to try climbing up from the bottom. Further down we did see some of the lower cascades (pic above) but it was too hard to wade/scramble upstream to get back to the bigger falls.

We turned around here and made our way back to the trailhead. It was uphill but not steep except for two brief stretches.

I Accidentally my Camera!

Maine Week Travelog #20
Baxter State Park, ME - Friday, 18 Jun 2021, 4pm.

I accidentally my camera. 😰 Fortunately not the whole camera; just one lens. But still: 😰.

It happened when I was climbing the Beehive on Wednesday. My 10-24mm super-wide angle lens popped out of the mesh pocket it was tucked in in the back of my daypack. I was climbing one of those iron rung ladders at the time, so the lens suffered a drop of more than 2m onto a fairly hard surface. The lens cap and sun shade popped off and rolled off a cliff. The lens itself was at the bottom of the ladder, where I could climb back down to retrieve it.

Surprisingly the lens worked okay in the immediate aftermath of the accident. I took a few more pictures with it in the next half hour or so, and those pictures turned out well. But by later in the hike the lens stopped working. The camera would signal errors every time I attached that lens. I tried cleaning the lens's electrical contacts and re-seating it several times but to no avail. It was kaput.

What's the Impact?

Breaking photographic equipment sucks, though it's not like I have no practice at it. This isn't the first time I've accidentally a lens— or the whole camera. Here are two instances out of at least 4 I can think of:

• I accidentally a lens 3 years ago. It was an inexpensive kit lens so the financial loss didn't bug me much... though when I did replace it earlier this year I bought a much larger and more expensive lens, aka "The Brick".
• I accidentally my whole camera under a waterfall in Brazil in late 2018. That was a more expensive accident as the old camera had cost me almost $1,000 new. But I was looking to replace it soon, anyway, so the loss didn't sting too badly.

Compared to those losses, this one stings a lot more. The 10-24mm zoom lens is pricey.

UPDATE: It's $1,000 to replace it! 😨 And it's been so critical to my style of photography for years. Several times during the past 2 days of hiking I've wanted to get a wider angle shot than my 16-55mm ("The Brick") can reach. I'm going to need to do something to replace the 10-24mm soon. But spend a grand— yikes!

UPDATE 2: Duh! I can send it to the manufacturer for repairs. I can't believe I only thought of this two months later.

Dinner South of the (Canadian) Border

Maine Week Travelog #21
Bangor, ME - Friday, 18 Jun 2021, 10pm.

First let me say: Whew. It's been a long day. We left the hotel this morning, drove a few hours north to Baxter State Park, and hiked not one but two trails— Katahdin Falls trail and Little and Big Niagara Falls. We thought maybe we could squeeze in a third trail at the park. We had one picked out; we just didn't have the energy left for it after 4pm.

On the scenic drive back down to central Maine we decided to get dinner before driving all the way back to the hotel in Bangor. And we decided to splurge a bit, at least from a calories standpoint, as we'd exercised quite a bit and our lunch had been stuff like protein bars and water.

"Let's get Mexican!" we agreed.

Haha, easier said than done. Our first Yelp search for Mexican restaurants turned up only one restaurant within 50 miles, and it was Italian. Maybe they list a Mexican pizza on their menu? Not that we expected much, of course. We knew were were less than an hour south of the border— the Canadian border! In fact, we were so close to Canada the park had all of its signs in English and French.

We searched again within an hour of Bangor. Several choices popped up: a few in Bangor we'd looked at and decided against last night (the menus and food looked too Americanized) and one in Orono, a college town a bit closer than Bangor. The menu, pictures, and reviews of the joint in Orono made it look not too Americanized, so we went there. Plus, there were plenty of other eats nearby (college town) so if we walked into the Mexican restaurant and it looked like a bad pick there were 5-6 other restaurants within a block's walk.

So, how was it? Well, it didn't suck. The chips tasted like they came out of a bag and the salsa tasted like it came out of a jar— a jar labeled "Pace", no less— but we were both experiencing taste amplification after the long day. The Negra Modelo on tap was cold and delicious and washed away many of the food's shortcomings.

Tonight we're back in our hotel. I'm glad we called an audible yesterday and got here a day early. As long as today was it might not have been tenable with an extra hour of driving plus the logistics of packing, checking out, checking in, and unpacking.