Acadia National Park
New England’s Acadia National Park offers peerless beauty and diverse terrain for walkers, from seaside to mountain.
It is a rainy morning in bar harbor. The cosy town is the gateway to Acadia National Park, which covers half of Mount Desert Island, the biggest of the barrier islands off Maine’s coast. Across Frenchman Bay, more isles rounded, spruce covered rise up, theirforested silhouettes like the backs of porcupines. Among them is Bar Island, lying ahead on the horizon.
In the many cafés that dot the streets of Bar Harbor, people are waiting as the tide goes out. Sitting beside glowing fireplaces, they patiently sip coffee, orimpatiently pace back and forth by the windows. Little by little, the tide recedes until a narrow sandbar between the two islands is revealed. Suddenly, a flurry of activity, as people wrapped in raincoats and clutching umbrellas step out into the pattering rain.
There’s only one time of day to make the hike to the uninhabited BarIsland, and that’s the few hours when the tide is out. Then, people stream across the shell littered sand bar, a strip of solid earth that has appeared as if by miracle and will soon be swallowed again by the waves. The pilgrims who cross have an air of elation and purpose.
And the island that awaits is no small reward. The soft trail winds through a hushed cathedral of spruce and white pine that gives shelterfrom the rain. Deer huddle in the trees, their ears pricked, turning their graceful heads to look. In only a mile, the trailreaches the highest point on the island, wth its sweeping view of Bar Harbor and the rest of the park and its ranging mountains. And then it’s back down, while there’s still time to cross the sand bar.
During high tide, there are othertrails to explore. On the Great Meadow Trail that leads visitors from downtown Bar Harbor into the park, naturalist Karen Zimmerman lingers along the edge of a meadow. She points out where beavers have dammed a creek, turning it into a pond. In autumn the meadow’s palette is rustic burnt copper and flame red forbs and grasses. In the distance is a line of trees, theirleaves fiery and golden, everything vibrant afterthe rain.
Karen has been here more than 40 years, watching the seasons change. ‘I moved here in 1978,’ she says. ‘And I knew I’d found my place. It offers comfort, as well as adventure.’ As a naturalist, she has 38,000 acres, with 60 miles of coastline to explore,right in her backyard. South, down the road, is Sand Beach, one of herfavourite places. It’s a deeply sheltered inlet with two peninsulas like long fingers going out into the Atlantic ‘a pocket beach,’ she calls it. As we walk along the shore, the airis scented with salt, crustacean and seaweed. A fine mist is spewing, the breath of the ocean, the sky or both. Globs of kelp are strewn out like the dark snaky tresses of mermaids.
To wit, the ‘sand’ at Sand Beach is 80 per cent shell, Karen says. She unfolds a magnifying glass that hangs on her neck, scoops a palmful, and brings it up close to herface, herright eye peering through the lens. ‘I see mussel shells, sea urchin spines, sand dollars and crab shells,’ she says. This is the eye of someone who has spent four decades looking, already a kind of magnified. ‘Oh, and there’s periwinkle shell, and quartz and feldspar,’ she adds. ‘The whole microcosm of the ocean in my hand.’
To Karen these grains are precious fragments of the living world, on which sunlight is fading for another day. It will return in the morning to Cadillac Mountain, just north of here Acadia’s highest peak and the first place on the continent to see sunrise. The light will touch the crowns of the spruces, the birds will begin to sing, the tide will wash out, and the day’s cycle will begin again.