Flocks of rocks

Mt. Katahdin (5 ,267 feet high), in Baxter State Park, Maine. The park was a gift to the people of Maine from Gov. Percival P. Baxter, who used his personal wealth over a 32-year period to buy and donate the original 201,018 acres of the park, starting with a 6,000-acre purchase in 1930 from the Great Northern Paper Co. Since Governor Baxter's death, in 1969, the park has been expanded to a total of 209,501 acres, including the 2006 addition of a parcel of 4,678 acres. The park includes gorgeous Katahdin Lake. Hiking along the  famous "Knife Edge'' of the mountain is not for the faint of heart.

On the Appalachian Trail near the summit of Mt. Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine, and the northern terminus of the trail.

"Having slumped, scrambled, rolled, bounced, and walked, by turns, over this scraggy country, I arrived upon a side-hill, or rather side-mountain, where rocks, gray, silent rocks, were the flocks and herds that pastured, chewing a rocky cud at sunset. They looked at me with hard gray eyes, without a bleat or a low.''

-- Henry David Thoreau, in  The Maine Woods