It rises from the waters of Moosehead Lake like a stone beast, its sheer rhyolite cliffs looking dark yet glittery from the shoreline, and its haunches speckled with beech and spruce. Mount Kineo might be the most dramatic looking mountain in Maine, and this is saying something for a state where you have summits that are accessible via iron ladder rungs or knife-edge ridge trails. The island sits on a peninsula that’s just barely connected to the land, surrounded by more than 117 square miles of cerulean water. (Moosehead Lake is Maine’s largest lake and the second largest in New England!) A cool 18-ish miles from the lakeside town of Greenville, Mount Kineo is renowned for its unique profile. But simply reaching the base of the mountain is its own adventure.
Driving from Greenville to the base of Kineo might seem like the intuitive thing to do here, but the only road that leads to the mountain is a sparsely-maintained logging road that snakes for miles and miles through the timberlands on the eastern shores of Moosehead before emerging from the forest onto the peninsula. Between the distance and the near-certainty of your axles making contact with rocks, you don’t want to rely on Google Maps for this journey. What you want to do is drive 25 or so minutes northwest of Rockland, along the lakeshore, park in the waterfront lot at 62 Village Road in Rockwood, and catch the Mount Kineo ferry for a whitecapped ride to the foot of the mountain. From a lonely dock, you can climb the damned behemoth.