Gus Yates did not set out to break the law. Instead, he wanted to climb a mountain. He took calculated risks that could have resulted in death. In the course of his climb he broke Baxter State Park regulations. He doesn't want to encourage anyone else to do the same--either break the law or climb the mountain: he doesn't want his climb to serve as any kind of example. Instead, he emphasizes that what he did raises certain important questions about "civil liberties and the pursuit of happiness."

Mt. Katahdin, Maine's tallest mountain, is just short of a mile high. During clear summer, spring and fall weekends its rockstrewn summit is always crowded. Besides offering an impressive view, Katahdin marks the starting-point of the 2000-mile Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia.

In summer, a solo hike to the summit, though permitted, is impossible because of the number of other people. Crowds thin out significantly during winter, when severe weather locks the mountain in ice and snow, but solo-hiking is illegal. Baxter State Park winter regulations ban parties of fewer than four people from camping or climbing anywhere above the treeline. However, despite the rules, groups of one, two or three campers often attempt the climb. Last winter, rangers apprehended a pair of climbers; two weekends ago they caught Eugene B. (Gus) Yates '79.

In response to a Waterville, Me., newspaper editorial which criticized the selfishness of the climb, Yates explained, "When I started out I was aware that some form of park regulations did exist and endeavored to climb quickly and secretly in the hope that I would be done and out before the rangers became worried or irritated." Unfortunately, before Yates even entered the park he ran into a ranger.

Hiking into the park on a hard-packed, snow-covered road, Yates expected to hear a snowmobile before he saw one. That would give him time to duck into the brush and escape notice. The ranger who spotted him, though, was riding on a snowmobile with a muffler. The ranger caught Yates trying to disappear into the woods. Although Yates offered the alibi that he was heading for the nearby Appalachian Trail and not Katahdin, and though he was not yet within the park bounds and there was little the ranger could do, the ranger's suspicions were aroused. Likewise, Yates now knew that park authorities would be on the lookout.

Yates continued to hike that night, by the light of a full moon, until he reached the trailhead where he set up camp. The next day involved most of the climb, 3000-3500 feet up the A-ball slide--an old and steep rock slide. This is where Yates "got the mountaineering aspects I was after. There was a lot of delicate crampon work under variable snow conditions."

At dusk, he camped on a ledge barely large enough for one person. As it was, he couldn't pitch his tent properly or use his stove. The tent fabric whipped back and forth in 35-40 m.p.h. winds and the Harvard senior occasionally worried about dehydration--since he couldn't use the stove, he was unable to melt snow for water.

After a 14-plus-hour night, Yates broke camp the next morning in wind that threatened to carry off all his gear if he wasn't careful. He then set off for the summit. It was on the way up that he heard and spotted an airplane which looked as if it might be searching for him. Later that afternoon a national guard helicopter replaced the 2-man Cessna airplane.

As he began the descent from the summit, Yates decided to leave the trail and bushwhack the rest of the way down, mindful of the plane and the ranger he had run into two days before. He continued to hike into the night, hoping to avoid rangers, get out of the park and station himself near the road for the trip back to Cambridge the next day. Unfortunately, he did not go far enough. Although he was outside the park boundaries, the rangers, who had been on his trail for two days, tracked him down early the next morning.

Since it was Sunday and local government offices were closed, the rangers took Yates to the county seat, an hour away. To do so, they had to go through the formality of arresting him on a civil charge--failure to register for the climb, which entails a $25-to-$30 fine. Bail was set. However, Yates didn't have the money to both pay the bondsman and buy a bus ticket back to Cambridge. Plus, there was the lure of spending a night--on civil disobedience charges--in jail. So jail it was.

The jailer took out a large metal key and opened a heavy steel door. Beyond that were "grungy guys and dingy, dark cells where you have to scrounge for toilet paper. The floor was grimy. The walls had been repainted about 25 times." There were four or five men in their mid-20's arrested on drug charges. After listening to the six-hour-long conversation of one prisoner with the chaplain. Yates was convinced the man had been framed on a rape or child-molesting charge.

After three days of intense hiking and climbing, the 23-year-old geology major was ready to eat a hearty dinner. What he and the other prisoners got instead were three dill pickle spears, a bologna sandwich, re-warmed canned hash, three-day-old stale cake and cold milk. Not allowed to eat any of the food he'd brought in his backpack, Yates eventually went to sleep on a mattress mounted on a steel lathe platform, without sheets.

Yates was only too glad to leave when his hearing came before the Dover-Foxcroft District courtroom. Though he was able to write a long letter, read as many paperbacks as he wanted to and watch T.V.--"Ironically the movie on Sunday night was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'"--Yates realized that "time goes very slowly. You're trapped. You've nothing to do except what you can generate yourself. Ten days in jail would have been too much. One hundred days would have been out of the question."

Before his courtroom appearance, Yates learned that he faced a criminal charge for violating park rules, rather than a civil charge, and that it entailed more than a mere $25-to-$30 fine. The new maximum penalty he could receive was a $1000 fine and 100 days in jail. He was scared.

Sitting in the courtroom, Yates realized for the first time "just how much power a judge really has. She was handling cases at an average of three minutes each." When his turn came, Yates pleaded guilty and made a "philosophical rather than legal argument" in his defense. Yates believes his argument, as well as overcrowding in the Piscataquis County Jail, influenced Judge Jesse Brigg's decision. She handed down a $50 suspended sentence, and, when reached for comment later, said that "the crime was not particularly worth a night in jail, which Yates had already spent."