After bumping the new Five Finger all the way to Ellsworth, we stopped at Wendy’s for some lunch and brought it to the Mardens parking lot to eat. Mardens parking lot? Yes, you see it was once Walmart, which is where Jaime worked when we first met. So when I spent my first summer up here with her, I would meet her at the Walmart parking lot for her breaks. Now when we’re passing through and need a place to stop and eat our meal, we park in the far corner facing the woods where we used to sit on her lunch breaks.
Today, I was finding those damn Hanging Steps. Pretty sure I knew where they were, I set out by myself to find them and then come back and get Jaime. If they were where I thought, it’d take just a few minutes. So I started out on the rock climber’s trail like I’ve done a few times before and made my way to the boulder field beneath the cliff. I knew the stairway was somewhere on that cliff so I went to the bottom of it and followed it, past the talus caves, past the gnarled old Birch tree, past the rockslide gully, up past the climbers, and up, up, up until the cliffs got smaller and covered in trees. I knew I missed the steps again, but I kept going just in case, all the way to the top of the slide, then veering to the right and going above the giant cliff, keeping a good distance from the ledge as it’s a looooong way down. I actually found another rockslide high up on the mountain above the cliff and followed that up a ways but no stairs. So I circled back and made my slow descent down the treacherous rockslide. My legs got a bit scratched up along the way but luckily I had my Neosporin in the, damn it, on the counter in the bathroom.
So back down the rockslide, I stopped at the rockslide gully I checked out on my way by because it looked pretty cool but was way too close to the road to be the Hanging Steps. And then I noticed some stone steps going up the slide, like I’ve seen so many times this summer. Brunnow was a master of the stone stair. I followed them, looking up high for signs of stairs or the metal rungs you hold onto as to not tumble over the side of the cliff. And there it was, the iron railing at the top of the stairs. I stopped dead in my tracks. Holy shit I found them. After searching all summer, reading over old maps, hours of climbing, miles of hiking up and down the side of that damn mountain. Turns out they’re right there, five minutes from the road. I laughed at myself because I pulled a Matt, not seeing something that was right there. I’d passed by that spot multiple times this summer and never explored it fully. How I missed those blatant steps up the rockslide is beyond me.So I ran, yes ran back to the car to get Jaime. Since she was with me on almost all of our searches, there was no way I was going to find those steps without her so in all of my excitement, I didn’t even go to see them, just saw where they were and left. I did the same thing with The Great Cave last year, but unfortunately it was too hard for her to get to that day but this one she’d be able to do no problem. An hour and a half after I left the car, I returned.
We made our way up to the spot I saw the metal railing atop the cliffs and searched for the stairs. It didn’t take much, rock steps lead right to them. Iron poles hold the giant blocks in place, just like I’d read. The stairway just seems to balance there, nothing on either side of it for most of the way up, then it passes through a crack in the cliff where the stairs are carved into the ledge naturally. As soon as I saw that I realized this is what Brunnow was trying to preserve, the stairway had once been all natural but overtime the rock erodes, quite quickly with the winter weather on the island. Just like Old Man Of The Mountains was completely natural but held together with iron and cables for years, that’s what Brunnow had done here. The stairs on the lower half had fallen or eroded so he connected his artificial staircase with the natural one. It is beyond amazing, I still can’t figure out how he not only built it but got it to stay there.
I slowly climbed the steps, careful not to fall into the chasms on both sides of the stairway that looked like they’d be cool to explore, if only you could get into them. At the top I walked out onto the viewing area above where the metal railing was used to stop you from falling over the edge. It is a little dilapidated now but it feels safer to hold onto something when up that high. The view was amazing. The cliffs, the rockslide, the ocean, the steep side of Champlain we’d spent most of our searches on, just a tenth of a mile away. Jaime decided she had to go up the stairs too after taking pictures of me doing it.
We made our way down the steps and into the shallow chasm on the easy side of the stairs that looked like it had a cave at the bottom. It did. It was a tight squeeze but Jaime filmed me as I crawled into the cave. During not so dry weather there would be a tiny pool of water down there but it was mostly dry today, just a little damp. There was another passage that lead away from the dry pool but it was just a tad too small to squeeze into. The part I could have crawled into only went about five feet before turning a corner and getting smaller. It was still cool to crawl into a cave though.
Then I decided since I made it into there, maybe I should try to get into the chasm on the other side of the steps which looked like a giant pothole filled with boulders, including one that dangled above it, wedged between the towering cliff and another bigger boulder. It turned out that beneath the dangling boulder there was a gap you could climb through. It required pulling myself up a rock, hanging over the side of it and shimmying through the hole. I thought it would be too hard to get out but Jaime told me to go for it, I’d find a way out. So I did. I got some cool pictures in there and explored a bit, checking out the cracks and crevices and the ferns and moss we admired from above. And she was right, there were a couple more crevices I could squeeze out of so rather than go out the way I came in, I made it a loop trail and squeezed through another crevice on my belly, of course with her filming me, making me laugh. I did find a neat little rock on my belly slide out.
While making our way down, a couple girls were coming up with their rock climbing gear. They were heading up the Hanging Steps to climb the cliff around the corner, so apparently the steps aren’t very secret. Climbers use them like its nothing, no clue they’re on a century old trail that some people have been searching years for. I searched specifically for that online so many times too, seeing if there were stairs that the rock climbers used but there was no mention of them anywhere so I assumed it wasn’t possible. She also referred to the giant standing slab of rock as ‘the tombstone’, so in my book, that’s how it will be referred to. It seems silly, we searched for months for something people use all the time. There’s actually a rock climbing route directly across from the stairs, metal clasps in the rock and everything, just a regular route they take up the headwall. I bet those stairs are climbed at least once a week and none of them think anything of it.
I explored some of the talus caves beneath the boulder field on our way back to the car, some went nowhere, others traveled beneath multiple boulders, weaving in and out between rocks where daylight was visible above. I would have loved this as a kid, what am I saying, I loved it now as an adult. There were multiple chambers and entrances and chimneys to crawl up. Jaime waited patiently while her 31 year old child explored.
Overjoyed with our ‘discovery’ of the Hanging Steps, we moved on to find Tilting Rock also known as the Sea Stack on Day Mountain. Last time we went the wrong way and followed the easy ‘trail’ which was once the road, not realizing we had to leave that path early on. But this time we found the path we should have taken, someone had actually marked it with neon tape on the branches every few feet, as well as the cairns that can get pretty hard to follow in the woods. And the tape lead us right to the Tilting Rock which was much bigger than it looked in the old pictures. I’d seen a couple of modern day photos from some other explorers who found the Sea Stack earlier this summer. So I knew it was pretty big but wow, that thing is massive. I’ve been researching it for awhile now and its called a sea stack because the ocean actually piled those boulders there back when the mountain was lower and along the shore. The waves threw the boulders around, and created a stack that leaned against the rock cliff. This thing has to be about twenty feet tall. I see why there was once a trail to it, but don’t get why there is no trail to it anymore. So thank you to whoever marked the trees along the abandoned trail. I climbed up the Sea Stack almost to the top while Jaime peed nearby. She decided today that we would photograph the places she tinkled, post them on Instagram and hash tag them #Ipeedthere. That was the second of the day as she also relieved herself in an indent in the cliff by the Hanging Steps.
We followed the tape on the trees, taking us directly beneath the carriage road that circles up and around Day Mountain. The ‘trail’ brought us past some cool rock ledges with small caves and crevices. This is where I quoted the term ‘squirrel-lunking’, spelunking for squirrels, the small caves I can’t fit into but small woodland creatures certainly can. What I need to do is befriend a squirrel, strap a GoPro to his back and have him explore the small caves for me. We did find some that I could fit into though, mostly giant cracks where the cliff began to split and I could squeeze inside the narrow passage. They were pretty cool and fun to climb around in. The neon tape markings brought us right back to the old roadway path we had taken last time which lead us right back to our car. Feel kind of stupid for missing it last time.With only a half hour left of sunlight we began our journey home which included a stop at Giant Sub for Jaime, where she used to get lunch everyday when she worked at Walmart just up the road. Then to Tim Hortons for an ice cream since we didn’t go to Blueberry Hill. Then to Asian Palace for some Chinese food for me.
Shortly after we got home, Donnie called from prison so we talked for a little. He got moved to a different cell block which is like starting over again but he has a job there now sweeping floors at night. In prison its good to have a job because unlike people think, you don’t get stuff for free in there, they have to pay for everything and I mean everything. The jobs pay next to nothing but it gives him something to do. Like he said in his last letter, the judge only took off one year from his sentence but some good news came as well because he might be able to get his sentence reduced more. His lawyer had agreed to the deal he wasn’t supposed to agree to five years ago, which doubled Donnie’s sentence, a law changed right after that which meant Donnie had to deal with it and serve the time given to him. But, when the lawyer agreed to the sentencing, that law hadn’t been in effect yet and one of the judges contacted Donnie about it and wants his case to basically be retried. If that goes through, he could be out like, immediately because he’s served more than the four years he was originally supposed to serve. Bad news, the doctors are pretty sure he has a tumor in his brain which hopefully is benign. He goes back in a couple weeks for another MRI to see if there’s been any change in it. We’re hoping it was caught early enough and isn’t cancerous. If praying meant anything I’d do it, but since it doesn’t, I’ll do what I’ve been doing for the past five years and simply have his back and do whatever I can to help him pull through. He appreciates whatever I do for him immensely since no one else does a damn thing. So I’ll end this with a piece of advice from both Donnie and myself, if you know someone going through hard times, don’t waste your energy on a prayer for them, use that energy on doing something for them instead. Anyone can pray for a better outcome, it takes a friend to make it happen.
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