We camped near Acadia National Park because everything we read said there were a lot of great hiking trails in the park. And we think we found the best, a loop to Sargent and Penobscot Mountains.
With a sunny morning calling, we packed our lunch, filled our Camelbacks, donned our hiking duds, and set off to the top of the RV Park, where the Island Explorer bus picked us up. With a transfer to another route at the Visitor Center (seriously, this is like a city Metro system, only a) it’s smaller, b) the tourist to commuter ratio is seriously inverted, c) there’s no graffiti, and d) people look like they actually want to be there), we eventually were the only riders to the Parkman Parking lot. Why weren’t more people riding, especially hikers? The Parks staff had continually warned everyone that the parking lots fill early (they do), there’s no parking along the road (oh, really?) and the park needs our ecological help to reduce the growing number of cars (that was apparent, especially in the popular spots). The bus system is ideal for setting up a one-way hike which meant we didn’t have to do the usual out-and-back and risk tedium on the return.
Next, as we looked at the trail map, we understood why writers reported so many great trails in the park. There’s dozens of them! But they’re really short. So you have to plan a route that would be like driving through an old town, …take a right here, .2 miles to the intersection, take another right, then a left and you still may have only covered a half mile. Gosh, we were hoping to hike about eight miles. We took four different trails over three peaks, and we covered only 4.4 miles.
And then there’s the east coast elevation gain. In Norway, we were blown away by the regular local hikers who casually talked about 7000 foot gains in a day hike. We were pretty proud to climb Sourdough Mountain in the North Cascades with its 5000 foot gain. And I remember hiking up at over 14,000 ft and a few hikes at 11 and 12,000.
Our Acadia hike gained 1,078 ft to reach the peak at 1,377.⛰
The top of the hill behind our house is just under 3,000.
Context is everything, and these hikes in Acadia were truly fun, very pretty, and unique.
And for those of you who are snarking “well,..you could have gone longer or made it a round trip instead of sounding like some West coast hiking snob,” actually we couldn’t. A lightning storm came roaring in at mile 3.75 so we scrambled down off the peak and finished the day with blueberry lemonade and popovers to watch the storm and think about how tired we were[n’t].
–Fred
I truly enjoyed our hike, cool very different rocks, hiking along a open ridges with views of lakes, inlets and the Atlantic all around us. The clouds are amazing, every day I am in awe pretty much every time a cloud cover appears in the sky! After our hike and dinner we went back to Bar Harbor for really good ice cream and a drive up Cadillac Hill to watch the sunset. I did not know this was a thing, but it was, the parking lot was full of people enjoying nature and the setting of the day, what a way to end another enjoyable day!
–Milissa
