O Acadia!

Perhaps it was only a coincidence that the settlers of Bar Harbor, the idyllic Maine town that anchors Acadia National Park, originally chose to name their village after a British statesman with the surname Eden.  Still, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting description of this area’s paradisiacal confluence of water, land, and sky. Giovanni Verrazano, the first European who sailed by, in 1524, noticed it too, calling the region Arcadia, after the idealized wilderness of Greek mythology.

The name morphed a bit over the next five centuries, but this year Acadia is celebrating the centennial of its declaration, by President Woodrow Wilson, as a national monument. A few years later, in 1919, Congress designated it a national park, the first one east of the Mississippi. Home to 20 mountains (one, Cadillac, the tallest on the East Coast), some of the clearest lakes in the state of Maine, and a stunning network of carriage paths built by John D. Rockefeller Jr., it was visited last year by roughly two million people. The vast majority travels across a single road from the mainland to Mount Desert Island. “That’s a 50-fold increase in traffic since the park opened,” says National Park Service spokesman John T. Kelly. “Our challenge today is to manage this beautiful place’s popularity,” he continues, citing a long-term transportation plan, including improvements to the bus system.

Like its beauty, Acadia’s popularity is nothing new. By 1880, Eden had 30 hotels, and Gilded Age travelers arrived by train and ferry. In 1883, a cog railway ran up then-Green (now Cadillac) Mountain, bearing carloads of tourists until 1890, when it was dismantled and sold to the nice folks over at Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Around the same time, some wealthy summer residents were becoming alarmed (perhaps a touch ironically) by how much of the area’s land was passing out of state hands and into private ownership. Two Bostonians in particular—Charles W. Eliot and George B. Dorr—worked tirelessly to place more and more of the area back under public control, forming the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations in 1901. By the time President Wilson declared Sieur de Monts National Monument in 1916 (in homage to an early French explorer), there were 5000 acres in trust. Over time, this would grow to 47,453 acres, comprising much of Mount Desert Island, Schoodic Point to the east, and several offshore islands, including Isle au Haut.  Today, the NPS’s Kelly says, the park continues to acquire acreage from a patchwork of privately owned plots within its boundaries. With its roots in a particular kind of turn-of-the-century noblesse oblige, the park early on benefited from well-heeled individuals’ acts of generosity and dedication.  George B. Dorr built the iconic spring house at Sieur de Monts Spring in 1909, carving “The

Sweet Waters of Acadia” on a nearby rock. Rockefeller financed, designed, and directed the construction of 45 miles of carriage roads and 16 stone-faced bridges, with the idea of keeping automobiles from spoiling the most glorious parts of the park (and his own rides on horseback). The 16-foot-wide roads are the country’s best surviving example of “broken stone” construction, built of three layers of various coarsenesses, with a pronounced crown for good drainage and grades gentle enough and corners soft enough for horsedrawn carriages, and lined with rough-hewn native granite coping stones fondly known as “Rockefeller’s teeth.” They require continued attention, however, and in this era of budget constraints, the Park Service has been joined by the Friends of Acadia, a non-profit supported by volunteer labor and contributions that has, among other things, established an endowment to maintain the carriage roads in perpetuity. 

Like its grand national park brethren in the West, Acadia has many beloved landmarks.  But whereas Yellowstone scatters its geysers, falls, and valleys across more than 2.2 million acres, Acadia compacts its pleasures into about a fiftieth of the space. The granite top of Cadillac Mountain, scarred by the last Ice Age, is the first place to see the sunrise for six months of the year. Jordan Pond, a glacier-formed tarn, is 150 feet deep, with clarity down to almost 50 feet. Otter Cliff, towering 110 feet above the Atlantic, is one of the tallest headlands north of Rio de Janiero.  Nearby is Thunder Hole, a water’s-edge cavern that, when wave conditions are right, explodes with trapped air and water, shooting spray 40 feet into the air. The Seawall is a natural granite and boulder wall facing the ocean, and the Precipice, on the east side of Champlain Mountain, is nearly 1,000 vertical feet of dizzying climbing trail and home to nesting peregrine falcons in season. Somes Sound is a narrow ocean inlet running deep into the interior of Mount Desert Island. It was once called the only fjord on the East Coast, but because it lacks the requisite steep side walls, it’s now considered a fjard, or drowned glacial valley. There are oceanside paths, woodland trails, two sandy beaches (one freshwater, one saltwater), and an island that can be walked to at low tide across a natural gravel land bridge (1.5 hour stay max!). No wonder the official visitor count last year was 3.97 million—many folks come again and again to soak up all the wonders. 

With so much to see and do, good visit takes planning. Aside from the Park Service’s excellent website, author and photographer (and Maine native) Greg Hartford has built an encyclopedic and user-friendly online guide called AcadiaMagic.com, with some 2000 pages of photos, maps, tips, historical facts, and tourism information. “This is where the mountains meet the sea,” says Hartford. “It’s rugged Maine, but with great sophistication.” He loves all parts of the place, but when pressed cites a magical moment at dawn on the top of Cadillac Mountain. The rising sun broke through a layer of fog below, casting the people in front of him into silhouettes against the blazing orange. “It was almost tribal,” he says.

He also likes the fact that cellphone reception can be poor in the park. “It’s great to see people lift their faces from their screens, get focused, and really see what’s in front of them.” Sounds like paradise.