{"id":125853,"date":"2019-08-08T14:02:06","date_gmt":"2019-08-08T18:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=125853"},"modified":"2019-08-26T16:27:43","modified_gmt":"2019-08-26T20:27:43","slug":"my-maine-summer-eben-sypitkowski-05-baxter-state-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2019\/08\/08\/my-maine-summer-eben-sypitkowski-05-baxter-state-park\/","title":{"rendered":"My Maine Summer: Baxter State Park’s Eben Sypitkowski \u201905 and a ‘step back in time’"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Eben Sypitkowski \u201905 was a child, he, his father, and two other father-son pairs went to Maine\u2019s Baxter State Park to camp once or twice a summer.<\/p>\n

On one of those trips, Eben thought it would be funny to \u201cget lost\u201d during a hike, hiding from the group and then stalking them for \u201cwhat I thought it was a hilarious amount of time,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was long enough that my dad got really concerned, ran all the way up the trail to the summit of the Owl and didn’t find me there, and ran all the way back down. Once I finally made my presence known to one of the other fathers, he just kept repeating \u2018\u201cStupid trick, stupid trick.'”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
My Maine Summer<\/h6>\n

From Kennebunk to Katahdin, from lobsters to lakes, we offer My Maine Summer \u2014 profiles of alumni<\/a> whose work, play, and family life has a distinctive Maine-in-summer vibe.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

Nowadays, Sypitkowski stays in plain sight at Baxter, the home of Maine\u2019s highest mountain and the Emerald City of wilderness recreation in the state. He became park director in 2018<\/a>, after several years as Baxter\u2019s resource director.<\/p>\n

This Lewiston native has always been an outdoorsman: During his Bates years, he spent summers maintaining wilderness trails in Idaho, learning to keep a log of bear and wolf tracks at Yellowstone, and, with pants tucked into socks, counting fire ants on Mount Desert Island for a UMaine researcher.<\/p>\n

\"Baxter<\/a>

Baxter State Park director Eben Sypitkowski \u201905 helps first-time Baxter visitor Tom Fegley of Germantown, Md., at the Abol Stream parking lot. (Kevin Bennett)<\/p><\/div>\n

The summer before his senior year, Sypitkowski also did field research for his senior thesis in environmental studies \u2014 the field being coastal mudflats, where he researched marine worms<\/a> and the people who harvest and sell them for bait.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that Baxter is a year-round destination \u2014 but with summer visitors totaling around 70,000, vs. 5,000 in the off-season, it\u2019s also true that there\u2019s something special about this unique Maine attraction in the summer.<\/p>\n

Along with Baxter, where did your family go for summer fun?<\/h5>\n

Peaks-Kenny State Park<\/a>, on Sebec Lake, was a particular favorite. And we did a lot of canoeing down the Down East rivers, the Narraguagus and the Machias and East Machias.<\/p>\n

Those were great trips. You have a four-day canoe trip and you get disconnected from your regular life, and you get \u2014 the only description that comes to mind is \u201cblissed out.\u201d Once you come back to your regular life, you carry that bliss with you.<\/p>\n

Is Baxter a symbol of Maine in the summer?<\/h5>\n

Maine as a whole offers a sense of a step back in time, back towards a slower time when the natural world was more a part of our lives. The park and Katahdin are just iconic expressions of that.<\/p>\n

Which perhaps makes Katahdin a victim of its own success.<\/h5>\n

We\u2019ve been trying to push people towards other places in the park. There are 40 other peaks and 200-some-odd miles of trail, only about 25 percent of which is on the mountainside.<\/p>\n

\"Katahdin,<\/a>

Katahdin, seen from a van carrying a Bates AESOP expedition to Baxter State Park in 2013. (Mike Bradley\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

It’s hard for people to drive by that thing without wanting to be on top of it. I try to remind people who haven\u2019t been able to get a day-use parking reservation, or have some other impediment to doing Katahdin: You know what? If you hike somewhere where you can see that thing, but you\u2019re not actually on the mountain itself, it\u2019s going to be an easier day and you’re not going to have much company, if any at all.<\/p>\n

How does your work change between summer and the off season?<\/h5>\n

In the winter there\u2019s often a focus on getting stuff to places, because it\u2019s a lot easier to move, you know, a bunch of 6-inch cedar logs into Russell Pond on a snow sled than hiking them in \u2014 that\u2019s pretty impossible.<\/p>\n

And we do have some visitors in the winter, too, 4,000 or 5,000 folks coming through, typically at Chimney Pond. So there’s a bit of making sure that those folks are okay. But a lot of it is about hauling materials and revisiting policy.<\/p>\n

Tens of thousands of people take their vacations at your workplace. Where do you and Lucy like to vacation?<\/h5>\n

Usually we\u2019ll grab a couple of days here or there and head down to the coast. Hopefully, once Maisie, our 2-year-old, can walk far enough, we\u2019ll head into the park and to someplace like Russell Pond for a few days.<\/p>\n

Aha, the proverbial busman\u2019s holiday. What other experiences of Maine in the summer would you like for Maisie to have?<\/h5>\n

I think all of them, right? One of the beautiful parts about Maine is that we\u2019ve got this giant place with so many different ecosystems and nooks and crannies.<\/p>\n

\"Baxter<\/a>

Eben Sypitlowski ’05 on the job at Baxter. (Kevin Bennett)<\/p><\/div>\n

This is such a wild place to call by one name \u2014 you\u2019ve got the coast, the mountains, the country of pointed firs Down East, the vast unorganized territory in the north. I just want to give her as a broad window on what\u2019s possible in this place as I can.<\/p>\n

For you, what are signs that summer has really begun \u2014 and is really over?<\/h5>\n

There are a couple of spots of snow that are on the south side of Katahdin, but they\u2019re tucked into an east-facing slope. We saw them last year on July 4th, when Lucy, Maisie and I and some friends were headed to one of the Debsconeag lakes.<\/p>\n

In the morning, those patches were there and by the time we came out in the afternoon they weren’t. It was so visible from so far away. This year, the same thing occurred on July 16.<\/p>\n

How do I know summer’s over? It\u2019s the bright colors on the bellies of brook trout coming up river to spawn, and just the fishing coming back. They\u2019re harder to find in the summer. When those fall rains start falling, the water\u2019s cooled down and the brook trout come back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sypitkowski runs Baxter State Park, an icon of summer in Maine and home to the state’s tallest mountain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":125856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"Bates College graduate Eben Sypitkowski '05 runs an icon of summer in Maine: Since 2018 he has been the director of Baxter State Park, home to the state's tallest mountain.","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[7,232,11009],"tags":[1549],"class_list":["post-125853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-environment-sustainability","category-the-college","tag-baxter-state-park"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125853"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126477,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125853\/revisions\/126477"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}