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A Long-Awaited Adventure to Acadia


Our loyal readers will know we have a family tradition to camp for a week at a different national park each year. Once we've been to all the parks in our state of residence, we go to the next closest one in neighboring states. Florida and Texas are not neighbors, yet because we'd been to every national park in between, after Cuyahoga Valley, Big Bend National Park was the next-closest on our list, and we went there in 2010, as part of a long road trip which included a wedding in Boise, Idaho. 

Florida and Maine aren't neighbors either, but Acadia National Park was on the list after Big Bend. We knew we'd need two weeks of vacation time to make the trip; we didn't realize it would take twelve years to find that two weeks! (Note that we did have camping reservations in place for 2020, but the pandemic cancelled those plans.) To say we were excited to finally make the trip this year would be an understatement. Fortunately, it was definitely worth the wait!

Knowing there was no way we'd be able to do everything in one week, we did some research to try and narrow down the options. Driving the Park Loop Road was high on every list, and since our family goal is to drive all the roads in each national park, that was an easy activity to add to our list.

We learned that the carriage roads built by John D. Rockefeller, are one of the unique features of this national park, so checking those out was high on the list. Many people bike these roads, but we figured hiking them would be just fine.

Many people put "popovers and tea at the Jordan Pond House" on their list, but we don't drink tea, and we're not fond of overpriced food, so we omitted that activity, but we did take a picture of others enjoying the experience.

Jordan Pond and Bubble Mountains

Another consensus "must do" was sunrise on Cadillac Summit, one of the first areas in the country to see the sunrise. Starting this year, a reservation system was instated to limit the number of cars driving to the top of Cadillac Mountain. The sunrise time slots disappear in just seconds once they're made available online. We weren't one of the lucky few to snag one while we were there, so we switched from watching a sunrise to watching a sunset from the mountain top. That was actually much better; at least, we didn't have to wake up super early to freeze!


We also learned that the most exciting trail in the park is the Precipice Trail, which is really a non-technical rock climbing route. That sounded quite intriguing, so it was added to the list. We also decided to follow the advice to build up to that by hiking some other trails with iron bar sections first; we chose Jordan Cliffs and Beehive trails.

Champlain Mountain (Precipice Trail side)

Hike #1 in Wayne's new book is called Bar Island Trail. This one takes a bit of planning, because it's only available during low tide. The best day to do this while we were there was Tuesday, and we were really looking forward to it, but you'll learn that we "called an audible" and chose to go with Plan B. That just means we'll need to go back someday!

If you look closely, you can see the sand bar which connects Bar Island (center front) to Mount Desert Island (far right)

We packed a lot into our two weeks of vacation, so it will take several posts to capture all of our activities. We'll start here with the overall itinerary, and I'll add links as future posts are completed.

Somes Sound from Acadia Mountain Trail

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Location: Acadia National Park, Maine, USA

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