Acadia Revisited (06-20-13)

When we went on the road 4 years ago, one of our first destinations was Acadia National Park.  Well, 4 years later, we’re back! 

I specifically wanted to hike the Beehive trail again because I remember feeling pretty nervous the first time, but I’ve done a lot of hiking since then and I wanted to see how it would feel.

At 1.6 miles round trip, it was shorter than I remember, but it was still a little nerve-wracking. In this picture you can see two people climbing up the cliff side.

In many places there were handrails and/or iron-rung ladders

But not every spot that I felt needed handrails actually had them. 

Of course, once we got to the top, the views were amazing, and worth a few minutes of anxiety:

 

So, I enjoyed the Beehive again, but it doesn’t come close to my favorite trail, Picacho Peak, in Arizona.

That hike didn’t take very long, and we didn’t want to overdo it our first day hiking after a long winter, so we toured the rest of the park by truck, enjoying the sounds and smells of the ocean while we ate our lunch. I wish we could move Maine further south.  It would be a pretty perfect place to live!

There aren’t very many long hiking trails in Acadia, so if you want to hike for more than a mile or so, you have to put trails together.  We bought the trail map so we could do that. 

The trail we pieced together was about 7 miles long, but we were feeling pretty good, so we figured it would be worth it, to make it to the top of Penobscot Mountain.

Once again, the day was perfect and the views were amazing:

Unfortunately, after hiking to the top of Penobscot Mountain, we found out the trail we wanted to take to complete our loop (Jordan Cliffs Trail) was closed due to nesting Peregrine Falcons. 

We took a different way, but ended up hiking down the other side of Penobscot Mountain, which meant that to get back, we had no choice but to hike back up and over the hill ( we could have taken the carriage road but it would have added 3 miles to our trek.).

In  the end, it was an 8.5 mile hike with 2000 feet of elevation gain.



  I guess it’s no surprise that we decided to take it easy the following day, and drove into Bar Harbor to check out the shops and restaurants.  The day was so beautiful we ate lunch outside with a view of the harbor.




One of the fun things to do in Acadia is ride bikes along the miles and miles of carriage roads in the park, and we were so optimistic that we’d do that, we took the bikes off the rack and put them in the truck so we could go biking at the drop of a hat.  Didn’t happen.  Yesterday we were really too tired, and it started sprinkling later in the day. We figured we’d go home, get some stuff done around the house, then set out this morning with the bikes.  It might have worked, but we woke up this morning to the sound of rain beating on the roof. 


So, instead, Paul is cleaning the “nose” of the trailer, and I am writing my blog.  If it clears up this afternoon, we may go for a bike ride or a short hike, but early tomorrow morning we cross the Canadian border, so we have to make sure we have everything ready.


The only internet connection we’ll have in Canada for the next two months will be whatever we can get at campgrounds and coffee shops. I am downloading maps onto my ipad that I can use offline and our laptop has some mapping software so hopefully that will help. We added Canada to Paul’s cell phone, but service might be pretty spotty.