PORTLAND, Maine — In early January, Cam Held knew how he was going to spend the next two and a half months. He had set an exceedingly ambitious goal for himself: climb to the summits of Maine’s 14 4,000-foot-tall mountains and chronicle his adventures with video and photos. The plan was to complete the hikes by March 20, the last day of winter.
Held is editor-in-chief of Maine the Way, an online and print publication that is now releasing the Maine Winter Summit Series, the short films he made about his ascents. To watch the videos is to experience—vicariously, of course, from the comfort of your plush recliner—some measure of how exhausting it is to climb Maine’s most rugged mountains in the heart of winter.
“You can do these hikes in the summer. And of course an 8.5-mile hike regardless of the season is a tough day out there,” Held said. “But when you add a couple feet of snow and some really cold conditions or high winds, it quickly goes from difficult to truly daunting.”
Cold, wind, and snow were obviously all to be expected. But expecting something and actually experiencing it are two different things.
“We had a stay up on the Bigelow Range, and I believe it got down to negative 10, negative 15 degrees that night. And we were just in a lean-to,” Held said. “Even in a zero-degree [sleeping] bag and with an extra jacket and everything on, it's miserable. It's not even so bad sleeping, but it's when you have to get up in the morning and make coffee or get water boiling that you just don't want to move.”
In the summer some hikers like to pack light and move fast. In the winter that’s rarely an option. In addition to food and camping provisions, Held, who always hiked with a companion, had to bring snowshoes and video equipment, including batteries for several cameras.
“A battery that might last four hours of shooting in warmer conditions would sometimes last only 20 minutes in the cold,” Held says. “So that was a constant challenge, keeping batteries in pockets, sleeping with them in your sleeping bags.”
In the end, Held reached the summits of six of the 14 peaks. Safety was his top priority, and he’s philosophical about not having accomplished what he set out to do. His hope is that people who watch his Maine Winter Summit Series will perhaps be motivated to try their own cold-weather hiking even if it’s far less ambitious than what he did.
“It's worth throwing on some snowshoes, and doing a 2-mile hike right around here in Portland,” he said. “There's great ways to get outside [for] adventure, and I hope I inspire people to do that.”