Trouble on Mt Sagamook

It's been a while since I updated this notebook, I have a story to tell!

H, I and our intrepid canines took a lovely road trip out east, full of hiking, microbreweries, and sight seeing. We had started to wind our way back home, but wanted one more hike. We had been hiking more and more during the trip, one last good trek to cap things off seemed like a great plan before 2 days of driving to get the rental back and sadly go back to work.

The plan

We rolled into Mt Carleton provincial park on Thursday night, planned to hike the Mt Sagamook loop Friday morning and hit the road home after. Sagamook is a challenging 4 hour hike, but we're pretty experienced hikers. Totally doable, right?

Peaceful beginnings

We stayed at Armstrong campground, absolutely lovely spot. October is very much off season for camping in New Brunswick, we had the whole campsite to ourselves! We had a incredible view of Nictau lake, and got a plan for the morning. The forecast for Friday morning was grey, with projections for rain starting around 1pm. Lots of time to get up and down the mountain as packing up a campervan is incredibly fast, and it would be a quick 20 minute drive to the trailhead.

We snuck in a quick hike to the William Falls, beautiful spot.

It all started well

We caffinated and prepped, packing pretty light for the hike, hitting the trail in good time. Mt Sagamook has a steaper side and a more gentle side. The general recommendation is to hike up the steap trail and then come down the easier decsent. It was challenging hiking, offering challenging rocky paths, steep inclines. Beautiful forest, but real care needs to be taken on the trail. We were trying to keep a brisk pace in the cold, damp early morning. 2/3s of the way up, a very light snow started to fall. Not ideal but we were so close to the top, we thought it would be better to sumit and come down the other half of the trail.

Nearing the summit the terrain gets even more challenging, with large boulders to wind your way up. Even our dogs, aussie shepherds who are possibly part mountain goat, needed some help for some of it! Around this time it started to seriously snow - our mood was shifting to unease, this was quickly turning into a bad situation. We were quite aware of the risk at this point, an injury on the trail would be quite serious. There was cell reception near the top, but after about 1/2 way down I only had access to the spotty iPhone satellite services.

The trees thinned out, what normally would have been an amazing panoramic view was a strange sea of white below. Mental alarm bells were ringing quietly.

Dude, where's my keys

It was around then when I put a layer back on, and some primal part of my brain fired a dire warning - DANGER, your keys are not in your pocket. After an extensive search of my pockets, hoodie, camera bag, indeed, the keys had fallen out somewhere on the mountain! This was a huge problem, the rental doesn't come with a second set, and the weather was turning quickly. Mt Carleton park is quite remote - we had about 1 day of food for us and a little less for the dogs. We could stay the night, but the logistics of our situation were going to become very inconvenient quickly.

We decended the same way we came up, looking for the keys as we went. The snow was accumulating. Getting to the car, we went back up a half of the hike again, but were both getting really tired and the snow was at a point where we thought it was unlikely we'd find them. Cell reception rapidly dying with the snow, I managed to get a satellite message to a friend and my family before it totally cut out.

Thankfully the van had a keypad, so we could get into it for food and some respite from the snow that was falling. H stayed with the dogs in the van. The trailhead had no cell reception, there was a visitor centre about 45 minutes that had solid WIFI. I trekked to the centre, getting a lift from some wonderful frenchmen 2/3s of the way there.

Waterlogged, a bit frozen, shaky and quite possibly a little at shock at this point, I got a coffee and started to make calls. It turns out the automotive industry has been taking the problem of auto theft a little too serious, getting a new key for a modern vehicle is difficult. The best the company could do was send the key by courier, and it would arrive in 2 to 3 business days. W. T. actual. F.

Given this was on a Friday, that meant the very real possibility of us being stuck there until the following Wednesday. I generally internalize my stress, but at this point it's fair to say I was getting foggy. The number of problem scenarios was high, and we only had one happy path out - find the damn keys and get gone.

Camp Nictau

While I was trying to arrange a key delivery with the rental company, a security guard came but sadly was in a hurry. They were supposed to give me a ride back, but left me there while I continued to sort out the key situation. Grr.

Getting the despiriting plan of a Wednesday key delivery in place, I had our first stroke of good luck, there was a small campground near the Mt Sagamook trailhead, with a open cabin for rent! While the campervan could easily weather the storm that was rolling through, it had limited battery power for it's gas heater. The cabin would feel a little less doomed than staying in a dead campervan.

None of this felt like a great plan, but sometimes you have to push forward with shaky ground and adjust as you go.

Around the point when I was about to gloom / grumpy hike back to the camper van on shaky legs, an absolute saint of a maintance worker struck up a conversation with me. He drove me back, helped us get our bedding down to the cabin, helped me get wood, start a fire, showed me around. Absolute hero. His company and help was truly wonderful, good people exist in this world. If you ever read this good sir, thank you so much! I wish you good luck repairing cabins in the park! Seriously, thank you.

The storm that befell the Pine Cabin

We stayed at the inventively named "Pine cabin" (I'm not making this up). It was about a 12x12 pioneer log cabin, big enough for a table, bed, and a wood stove. It did the trick for the night as an absolutely wild wind and rain storm whipped through. Occasionally the cabin would make a log structure noises, or something would bump into it. We had a fresh supply of low quality pine lumber to burn. I turned the place into a sauna for a while. A new plan was hatched; in the morning we were hiking back up that hill and finding those keys.

SUCCESS

In the morning, our luck continued, the rain storm at night had wiped out the snow! Hiking back up the hill with determination, cold instant coffee highs (would not recommend undermixing cold instant coffee) and uncertain legs, we stared the search. Slowly, and methodically, we made our way up the hill. It was a needle in a haystack search, we had about 2.5km of trail to search, and really no indication of I had lost the keys. The problem with a search like this is the constant fight with focus, and it is very easy to second guess how long one should be spending at any given point.

H ended up finding the keys 1/3 of the way up. The dogs had started to play with a stick on top of them, directing her focus to the area they had fallen. We shouted woo so much Reggie joined in with a celebratory howl. HECK YEAH.

Anyway, that's my story, I hoped you liked it. I'm so glad we didn't get hurt on the mountain, and didn't get stranded out there.

What went well

• no one got hurt on the mountain.
• we found the keys.
• my high cut boots were fantastic on the trail - avoided a number of abbrasion injuiries and slips.

What could be better

• losing the keys feels pretty sloppy, won't do that again. Gooooood grief.
• The rental company campervan backup plans for key replacement were pretty poor.