BAXTER STATE PARK, Maine — If hikers want to trek to the most impassible recesses of Fort Mountain and see the 65-year-old remains of a downed C-54A Skymaster, Jensen Bissell knows that he can’t stop them.
The park director recognizes that, like wrecked ships, downed aircraft have a palpable, almost magnetic, allure. It’s strewn wreckage, the detritus of disaster, remorselessly overgrown by nature; a memorial shot through with mystery. How did it happen? Why? How could it have been avoided?
To Bissell, the crash site is a non sequitur to the park’s mission — to allow people to experience nature at its most unfettered — but as a hiker for more than 30 years (and who, with four friends, visited the site last year), Bissell respects what it represents. He knows how seductive it is.
“Fort Mountain has been an attraction for a different set of reasons,” Bissell said recently. “People have been hiking there for historical and personal-interest reasons. This is a very different kind of draw, but we recognize that people are going to be interested in it.”
Tacit discouragement marks the park’s approach to crash-site visits. Baxter offers no site maps or other descriptions of the journey. If the wreckage weren’t so inaccessible, park workers would have removed it long ago, Bissell said.
“We would prefer,” Bissell said, “if visitors set their sights on a remote pond or a high mountain. People who are not experienced can get in a lot of trouble.”
But if they must go, Bissell advises caution. Though it’s only 6 miles, the hike is a rugged all-day affair, dangerous even for experienced travelers.
“You have to bushwhack to get to the last known trail point and it can take a long time. It is a very strenuous hike,” Bissell said. “There are a lot of gnarly mountaintops and scrubby undergrowth. It is just difficult going and it is very high, about 4,000 feet, so whatever weather you have at the beginning you will have a lot of when you get there.”
Spring or fall hikers can start on clear ground and end on 3 feet of snow. Sudden winds and squalls are common. No paths or markers define the site. Hikers must start before dawn to return by nightfall. They won’t have much time at the crash site — if they can find it, Bissell said.
Crash-site hikers should leave at a park visitor center their names, departure and expected arrival times and a description of their route, Bissell said. They should have all appropriate supplies and equipment. It’s smart to set a “turnaround time” — an estimated time of arrival — and to head back if behind schedule.
“When you are up there, you are likely to be there by yourself. It’s not a heavy-use area,” Bissell said. “You might not see any other hikers the entire day.”
Hikers who make the trip in good time and find the wreckage could find it disappointing, Bissell said.
“This is a wreck of a large plane and it was a very catastrophic event. There really isn’t a lot there to see,” Bissell said. “It is very tangled and very distributed, very hard to find the pieces.”
It is also a monument, and should remain untouched, Bissell said.
Yet the devastation that remains visible is haunting, Bissell said. The wreckage still manages to tell the grim, sad story of the men who died, and the path the airplane plowed through the area shows how close they came to avoiding the crash that so suddenly killed them.
“I don’t think they had any idea of where they were and even now, you can kind of see that they almost would have made it through all right,” Bissell said.
“It is a pretty somber place. You can’t get that out of your mind.”