Unfortunately, he had walked down the north side of the mountain in a very different direction from where his family was camped at Katahdin Stream. He walked further down the mountain until he was in a forest. Lots of big, jagged rocks and all covered in clouds. This is the kind of scene Donn would have seen while coming off Baxter Peak. He needed to get down below treeline to protect himself from the weather. He soon lost the trail in the jumble of rocks and couldn’t find his family. So he began walking alone down the mountain. But Donn was cold and didn’t want to wait.

Henry wanted to wait for the man to arrive at Baxter Peak so that they could walk back with an adult to rejoin the rest of the group further down the mountain. They saw a man walking toward them from the Knife Edge, a long ridge that extends generally east from Baxter Peak. It was very cold up there with clouds swirling around like fog. See the Google map below to find out just how far!ĭonn and his friend Henry Condon walked ahead of the group and reached Baxter Peak on Mt. He wandered far off this map to the north over the next 9 days. Donn crossed the Saddle Trail at least once while coming down. You can see the Saddle Trail headed in that direction. Donn wandered north into the Great Basin area. The Hunt Trail that Donn climbed the mountain on approaches it from the left. Compare this one with the Google map below. My only complaint (and this is just me) is that Donn is very religious and credits his survival to the Christian god, with quite a lot of this brief tale devoted to the semi-lucid experience and praise thereof.This map can be hard to read in spots, but it gives you an idea of the area. Donn seems to have made quite the career of telling this story over and over to young people, hopefully preventing some foolhardy youngster from disengaging from his or her party on some future trek. It was interesting to read about Donn's experiences in the same vicinity, before the trails were half as well-marked as they are now.ĭonn's frightening adventure was suspenseful, and he and his ghostwriter did a good job of narrating from a 12-year-old's perspective. My boyfriend picked up this book after we'd had our own unfortunate incident summiting this peak after an act of similar stupidity (he was using carbide-tipped hiking sticks to brace himself, ended up falling over 20 feet and dislocating three fingers).

He gets separated from his party (he admits to his own stupidity in wandering off) and spends the next 9 days surviving alone in the wilderness, covering a staggering amount of territory and beating almost impossible odds. In 1939, at the age of 12, Donn Fendler went on a hike with his dad and brothers to the top of Mt Katahdin, the highest point in Maine, and the second highest on the East Coast.

Book lost on a mountain in maine