WRITTEN BY JULIA BAYLY
There was a time you could have driven from Australia through North America to Africa without ever getting wet. And along the way, you could have taken a break at what is now Moosehead Lake.
Of course, that was more than a billion — yes, that’s billion with a “B” — years ago, when the Moosehead Lake area, along with the rest of North America, was part of a massive supercontinent called Rodinia.
The area was in the section of Rodinia called Laurentia, where an eon later modern day travelers head up Route 2 to Greenville and Moosehead Lake.
In the mind-boggling span of years in between, tectonic activity, volcanoes, and the movement of glaciers all played a part in turning the Moosehead Lake area into what it is today — a mecca for lovers of the outdoors.
Take Mount Kineo, for example.
Every year thousands of hikers take their own canoes, kayaks, or boats or hop on a regularly scheduled ferry to the mountain island in the middle of Moosehead Lake.
Once there they tackle hiking trails ranging from easy mile or so walks through the woods to the more challenging 8-mile path to Kineo’s 1,789-foot summit.
From there the views are expansive. The blue waters of the lake itself, the mountains of western Maine and the Appalachian Mountains in the far distance. Those mountains were created thanks to plate tectonic activity pushing rocks to the surface and higher up millions of years ago.
What a lot of hikers may not know is they are actually walking on an extinct volcano — not a feature you would think is in Maine. The last eruptions were during the Mesozoic era, between 252 and 66 million years ago.
When the lava cooled it formed a kind of rock called rhyolite and it’s pretty unique to the area. It’s called “Kineo Flint” and was one of the reasons Indigenous peoples came from near and far to trade with local tribes for the flint used in tool and weapon making hundreds of years before the first European colonizers arrived on the scene.
Kineo’s final shaping by Mother Nature came a relatively short time ago when the movements of glaciers during the last ice age around 15,000 years ago carved the mountain into its distinct shape.
Kineo is an imposing sight jutting up from Moosehead Lake.
Not to be outdone by the mountain, Moosehead Lake has its own impressive geologic pedigree.
The largest lake in Maine, Moosehead is 40 miles long, covering 75,000 acres with 400 miles of shoreline. That’s enough to make it one of the largest freshwater lakes in the country and the largest lake east of the Mississippi entirely in one state.
But it used to be even bigger. It was part of a large, shallow sea during the Paleozoic area 541 million years ago until the start of the Mesozoic area.
When that sea slowly receded, leaving behind the land formations that eventually became Maine, a whole host of critters and plant life moved in, including dinosaurs.
All that is left of those dinosaurs today are fossils, but visitors can see moose, deer, bobcats, and scores of other mammals and birds that call Moosehead home.
Those same glaciers that carved out Mount Kineo also shaped Moosehead Lake. They created the jagged shoreline, more than 80 islands, and scraped out a hole big enough for the lake to reach 246 feet deep at its deepest point.
It also left modern day explorers plenty to look at with all those coves and islands, whether you’re traveling by boat or hiking along the shoreline. The cool waters are teeming with fresh fish like salmon and trout and attract sport fishers from all over.
So next time you are hiking, boating, bicycling, fishing, or hunting around Moosehead Lake, take a moment to thank those geologic forces that have been working for billions of years.
Without them Moosehead would be a very different place.
