Maine 2017 – Acadia Day 4

8/25/17

After two days of kayaking we decided to do a bit of hiking. We went back to the Park Loop and found our way to the Precipice Trail. This was reportedly the most strenuous climb and involved a lot of scrambling and a good number of ladders and ledges. I’m not much for heights, but I like the climbing part so I figured I’d see how far I got before deciding we needed to turn back. We ended up making it to the top – nothing quite so bad as the walking along a ridge style of Angel’s Landing. We descended via the Orange & Black Trail which was the recommended route to avoid a lot of crossing paths and having to navigate around hikers coming up.

Overall the trail wasn’t too bad, but to my entertainment, we crossed paths a few times with a couple who apparently were not in agreement about either how far the hike was going to be or how concerned one of them was about the climbing. There were several stages of a somewhat stressful debate observed over the course of the hike.

After the Summit we made a quick stop a Hunter’s Beach (near 6). The beach is on a small inlet that faces the ocean just right to capture rocks and then hold them there for years while they wear smooth. It’s known for the sound that the round rocks make as the waves hit the shore. You can thank Janet for the video, including the fact that it’s shot in portrait orientation.

The third item for the day was to do some biking on the carriage roads. We went back to the Jordan Pond parking to do a quick ride around a few of the carriage roads in the area. We didn’t have any particular destination and ended up doing a of the couple loops. I didn’t take many pictures on the roads, but we did stop at one bridge where a fellow cyclist pointed out as having a particularly unique architecture of a slanted arch – meaning that the road crossing was not perpendicular to the river passage under the bridge. Apparently this was done by the designer to preserve a view directly through the arch to the waterfall behind and was an incredibly challenging feat.

Overall, I think the biking the carriage roads was only so-so. If visiting again, I would probably opt for hiking or paddling and leave the bikes at home. For reference, this has been my general take on biking while on vacation. We’ve taken bikes a few places, and with the exception of Mackinac Island, never really had reason to use them.

Our final stop of the day was the Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse (12). The lighthouse is on a cliff on the South end of the island, and positioned well for sunset pictures. The house itself is privately owned and occupied, but there is a public parking lot from which tourists can hike down to the ocean side and find a perch on the rocks to watch sunset. There were a large number of viewers and photographers staking out spots there. Although not official, there was a pretty universal understanding of where the front of the lineup was where people wouldn’t cross. It was somewhat entertaining to see the occasional person(s) wander down and decide the place to be was right in front of everyone else until the crowd informed them otherwise with varying levels of kindness.