Pull into the gravel lot off Watson Pond Road on a Saturday morning in October and you'll see three or four trail signs pointing in different directions from roughly the same twenty feet of ground. Round Top Trail. Sanders Hill Trail. A sign marked simply "A," unlabeled beyond that letter, meant for mountain bikes but open to hikers too. Most people study the signs, pick one, walk it, and drive home thinking they did "a hike in the Kennebec Highlands." They did one trail. They parked at the intersection of all of them.
That's the part the trail-review sites don't spell out clearly. Round Top, Sanders Hill, and the route to McGaffey Mountain aren't three separate destinations that happen to sit near each other in Rome. They're three branches of the same trail system, built off the same reserved public land, sharing one parking area and one starting point off Watson Pond Road, which runs south from Route 27 about a mile north of where Route 27 meets Route 225. Walk far enough on any of them and you'll cross paths with one of the others.
One Lot, Four Directions That Meet
The Round Top Trail climbs north from the parking area and, at about 2.1 miles, joins the broader Kennebec Highlands Trail, a wide gravel corridor that also forms half of the Sanders Hill loop. Bear right at that junction and you're on your way toward Sanders Hill. Stay on Round Top and you'll pass a spur at 1.7 miles that leads to two overlooks, one facing north and east toward Round Pond, French Mountain, Mount Phillip, North Pond, and Great Pond, the other facing Watson Pond, Sanders Hill, and Vienna Mountain through the trees.
The "A" Trail branches off within a quarter mile of the same parking area, on an unsigned left turn a short walk past the trailhead kiosk. It was built for mountain bikes, and it rides like it: natural surface, frequent rocks and roots, real elevation gain. But it's the route hikers use to reach McGaffey Mountain, the highest point in Kennebec County at 1,288 feet, named for a nineteenth-century Mount Vernon resident. AllTrails lists that combined route at roughly 9.4 to 9.6 miles and rates it "hard," though the difficulty is mostly about distance and time on your feet rather than steepness.
So the choice isn't Round Top or Sanders Hill or McGaffey. It's how much of the network you want to cover from a single car.
What Each Direction Actually Delivers
| Trail | Distance | Summit / High Point | What You Actually See |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round Top Trail | 4.7-mile loop, about 921 feet of elevation gain | Round Top Mountain, 1,133 feet | Long Pond, Belgrade Lakes Village, and Great Pond from the main overlook; Round Pond, French Mountain, and Mount Phillip from the spur |
| Sanders Hill Trail | 2.9-mile loop with the Kennebec Highlands Trail | Sanders Hill, 854 feet | Watson Pond from a boulder near the start; ridge-line views of Watson Pond, Mount Phillip, and French Mountain from exposed granite slabs near the top |
| "A" Trail to McGaffey Mountain | Roughly 9.4 to 9.6 miles round trip | McGaffey Mountain, 1,288 feet, highest point in Kennebec County | A wooded summit without a cleared overlook, but a genuinely quiet, rugged corridor through some of the wildest ground in the county |
Round Top gets the AllTrails traffic, and it earns it. Sanders Hill is the one people underrate because its own summit view is limited through the trees, but the ridge walk to get there, over open granite with Watson Pond below, is arguably better than the payoff at the top. McGaffey is the one almost nobody does on a whim, because it's long and the reward is solitude rather than a postcard view.
The Granite Under All of It
The exposed rock on Sanders Hill's ridge isn't scattered debris. It's granite that formed when magma cooled before reaching the surface, part of a much larger intrusion that Maine's Bureau of Parks and Lands notes underlies most of Rome and the surrounding towns. What you're walking across on that ridge is the same bedrock that sits under the lake camps, the town roads, and the fields a few miles away. It's why the summits here tend to be bare rock rather than soil and brush, and why the overlooks feel so open compared to a typical wooded Maine hilltop.
The Kennebec Highlands protects roughly 5,400 acres of this landscape, with more than 18 miles of old logging roads and informal trails threading through it, five undeveloped ponds, and over half a mile of frontage along Long Pond. Moose, deer, bear, coyote, bobcat, and fox all use this ground, which is part of why the trail signage asks hikers to keep dogs leashed and to give wildlife room, particularly around Round Top, where porcupines are common enough that trail reviewers mention them by name.
Bear Spring Camps Closes While the Highlands Peak
Fall in Rome carries its own quiet handoff. Bear Spring Camps, the family-run sporting camp on Great Pond's North Bay that George H. Brown established in 1910, closes for the season on October 1. For most of the summer it runs on a strict weekly rhythm, Saturday to Saturday, three meals a day in the main dining hall, guests fishing and swimming off private docks along the shore of Great Pond, the largest of the Belgrade Lakes. Once October 1 passes, that particular corner of the lake goes quiet until spring.
The timing lines up almost exactly with when the Highlands hit their best hiking window. The camp closes right as the granite ridges and hardwood cover start delivering the fall color that draws hikers to Round Top and Sanders Hill in the first place. One side of Rome's outdoor calendar is winding down while the other is peaking, and they're happening on the same lake system, a few miles apart.
The Highlands After Dark, and Before the Leaves Are Gone
Hiking isn't the only reason to know this trailhead. The 7 Lakes Alliance, which co-manages the Highlands' non-motorized trails alongside the Bureau of Parks and Lands and works with the Central Maine chapter of the New England Mountain Bike Association on the "A" Trail specifically, runs a Night Sky Tour in Rome led by John Meader, an astronomer, educator, and Maine State Guide, walking small groups through that evening's constellations, visible planets, and the Milky Way under skies dark enough to actually see them. The Alliance also organizes a guided birding walk in Rome with Julia Hanauer-Milne, a Maine Master Naturalist, through what she describes as a habitat sitting right between forest and field, the same terrain the trail network cuts through.
Neither event requires summiting anything. Both use the same protected acreage that Round Top, Sanders Hill, and McGaffey sit inside, and both are reminders that the Highlands function as more than a hiking checklist. They're a piece of ground people in Rome use in a dozen different ways across a single season, sometimes without ever reaching a summit.
Next time you're standing at that gravel lot on Watson Pond Road deciding which sign to follow, remember you're not choosing between three unrelated hikes. You're choosing how much of one connected system to cover before you're back at the car.
I've spent enough years walking Maine's woods and working its waters, first as a wildlife biologist and now as someone who helps people find their place in this state, to know that the best local knowledge usually isn't a secret. It's just never written down in one place. If you've got questions about Rome, the Highlands, or anywhere else in Central Maine, Joe Saltalamachia is glad to talk. Let's Connect.
