After a handful of harrowing rescues in recent months, town officials are warning hikers to come prepared and pay attention when hiking the town-owned Cliff Trail, behind the Harpswell Town Office on Mountain Road.
The town is in the process of adding new trailhead signage, as well as a new sign at the point where the popular trail goes from accessible to more challenging.
“(Some hikers) get on that section, where it’s rooty and rocky and uneven, and they’re not prepared,” said Mike Drake, the town’s fire administrator, warden and emergency management agent. “They’re twisting ankles, (getting) heat exhaustion, various stuff like that.”
A few incidents have been even more serious. In October, an adult hiker was seriously injured when she fell roughly 25 feet from the cliff section of the trail above Long Reach onto a rocky intertidal area.
The Orr’s and Bailey Islands Fire Department responded with assistance from Harpswell Neck Fire and Rescue, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, the Maine Warden Service and the Harpswell harbormaster.
Emergency responders located the hiker and then called upon the harbormaster and Sheriff’s Office to deploy Harpswell’s airboat. It was used to bring another paramedic and medical supplies to the scene.
The woman, whom officials didn’t name, was loaded onto the airboat and transported to Princes Point Landing, in Brunswick, where a waiting ambulance rushed her to Maine Medical Center, in Portland.
Drake said such rescues can tie up over a dozen emergency responders for hours. “One of our victims this year, her phone died, so that really hindered us trying to find her.”
The trail’s popularity has skyrocketed since the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset, Drake said. Increased usage has caused some parts of the trail to become rockier and less stable, while the number of hikers showing up unprepared has increased.
The Cliff Trail is a roughly 2.2-mile loop through the woods that climbs a moderately steep incline to a cliff walk above Long Reach, a scenic tidal inlet lined with exposed bedrock and intertidal terrain.
Online trail encyclopedia AllTrails rates its difficulty as “moderate,” noting that the trail gets more difficult after the first 0.3 miles. “The Cliff Trail is the longest and most difficult trail in Harpswell,” it says. The total elevation gain is listed as 262 feet, although Drake said he thinks it’s closer to 500 feet.
Drake said the most important thing hikers can do is come prepared. “Don’t wear flipflops — wear sturdy hiking shoes. Have proper clothing. Have water with you. Charge your cellphone.”
Rescuers can pinpoint a hiker’s location if their phone is working, he said, but GPS alone won’t do it. The trail hasn’t been entered into detailed GPS mapping systems, so it just appears as a single point instead of a trail line.
Regardless of whether a downed hiker has a working phone, it can still take hours to round up the volunteers needed to perform a rescue, Drake said. “I’ve only got two people working down here, and the last rescue took 15 people to get one person off the trail.”
Drake said the town is doing what it can to make rescues easier and quicker by identifying alternate access routes depending on the hiker’s location, tide conditions and whether a boat can reach the area.
The new signage will make it clearer — especially to summer visitors and others not familiar with the area — what the trail’s challenges are and how to go in prepared, according to Drake.
“The thing, unfortunately, that we had to add to all of these signs is, ‘Hike at your own risk.’”
