How I Spent My Unemployed Vacation

Last fall, with a month to spare between jobs, I spent a week hiking through Maine's Hundred-Mile Wilderness on a freelance assignment from Maine magazine. It's just been published in their September issue, and illustrated with photos by Craig Dilger. Here's a short excerpt:

...right before our group descended below the tree line, a gust of wind suddenly cleared away the clouds. All at once, the vast forest across which I had trekked over the past week lay spread out below us under remnant wisps of valley fog: wrinkled piles of mountain ridges streaked with yellow birches, red sugar maples, boreal greens, and shimmering ponds.

From up here, it certainly looked like a wilderness. But that name glosses over the complexities of this landscape: it’s a solitary place populated with personable people, and a wild place entangled in the often oppositional industries of tourism and forestry.

Read it online if you're from away and can't find the magazine at a newsstand. Otherwise, buy a copy on paper, because this issue also contains writer Chelsea Holden Baker's and photographer Mark Marchesi's amazing profile of the people and businesses that wrangle huge oil tankers in and out of Portland's harbor.