Rangeley Lakes

I had been on the Maine coast for ten days before I turned inland, following Route 4 north from Auburn through the little mill towns of the Androscoggin valley, the landscape getting hillier and emptier and more purely forested as I went. The transition from coastal Maine to interior Maine happens without ceremony. One hour you are in the orbit of lobster shacks and galleries and people in L.L.Bean jackets; the next you are on a two-lane road between walls of spruce and birch, and the only business visible is a bait shop and a fuel station, and the radio has mostly stopped producing signals. This is the Maine that the coast exists in front of: old, big, deeply quiet, and completely uninterested in whether you find it hospitable.

Rangeley is a small town at the eastern end of Rangeley Lake, a body of water roughly four miles wide and twelve miles long that sits in a bowl of hills at an elevation of sixteen hundred feet. The water is cold even in August, fed by streams coming down from the surrounding mountains, and clear in a way that clear water rarely is — you can see the bottom at fifteen feet, the stones distinct through the water with a magnifying quality. The town itself is modest: a main street with a diner, a hardware store, an outfitter who rents canoes and kayaks and sells fly fishing supplies to the serious people who come here specifically to cast for brook trout in the streams above the lake.

The moose are the main event for first-timers, and I don’t say that dismissively. A moose is a genuinely shocking animal to encounter in the wild — not because it is dangerous, which it is, but because of its size and its bearing, the way it stands in the world as though the world has been arranged around it. Mine appeared at dusk beside a small beaver pond off the main road: a cow moose, knee-deep in the water, pulling up aquatic vegetation and eating it with the methodical calm of something that has not needed to hurry in several million years of evolution. She was aware of me and unimpressed. The light was going pink on the water around her legs. I watched for twenty minutes before she walked, slowly, into the treeline.

The Appalachian Trail crosses through this region — it enters Maine at the New Hampshire border on the Mahoosuc Range and eventually reaches Baxter State Park and Katahdin, the northernmost terminus — and the section that runs through the Rangeley Lakes area has some of the better ridge hiking in the state. Saddleback Mountain, accessible by trail from the Rangeley area, rises above treeline at its summit and offers views over a landscape that, in every direction, is unbroken forest to the horizon. No roads visible. No towers. Just the hills folding over each other toward Canada in the north and New Hampshire in the west, with the lakes sitting in the valleys between them catching the sky.

Rangeley is also, unexpectedly, home to the Wilhelm Reich Museum, which preserves the laboratory and observatory of the Austrian psychoanalyst and controversial scientist who spent his later years in western Maine before dying in federal custody. The museum is earnest and strange and very Maine in the way it holds this unusual history without apology. The view from Reich’s observatory, whatever you think of his theories, is extraordinary.

When to go: June for the fishing — the brook trout season peaks early. July and August for the lake itself and the hiking. The moose are visible year-round but most reliably at dawn and dusk in June and September, when they frequent the wetlands. October turns the birches gold and empties the campgrounds.