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Acadia National Park, Maine
Sometimes I feel like I'm holding on to nothing
Considering how often I've been to Acadia National Park in mid-coast Maine, one would expect that at some point it would lose its fascination, at some point I'd stop going, at some point I'd stop taking so many pictures. Eight and a half hours is a long drive, I've been on many (but not all) of the trails, I've done what there is to do. I've traveled to other places with rockier coastlines, higher mountains, steeper cliffs, more wildlife. Still I'm drawn to this place for many of the right reasons, leading (yet again) to more pictures and more slide shows.
Looking down the south ridge of Penobscot toward the Cranberry Isles and the open ocean, defying all sense of scale with giant rocks and miniature trees (or is it the other way around...)
A legitimately sized pond, 400 feet above sea level (sea level is to the left).
Even though the view looks a lot like that of nearby Penobscot, this one has a cool rock in it.
Scaling the thousand vertical feet of the east face of Champlain Mountain, the legendary Precipice trail uses iron rungs and ladders to help hikers regularly cheat death. (For scale reference, the two lane park loop road is on the left of the picture). For the last ten years or so, the trail has been closed May through August as endangered Peregrine Falcons have used the trail and its accommodating ledges to raise their young before their long flight south. Acadian bred falcons (mostly) end up as commuter birds, spending much of their adult lives in Manhattan, living on skyscrapers and feasting on pigeons. Mmmm, tasty.
CAUTION!
Looking north from the trail to the appropriately named Porcupine Islands in the inappropriately named Frenchman's Bay.
Kodak now makes black and white APS film, a fact that pretty much explains the rest of this slide show
I actually went to Bar Harbor and Acadia just a week and a half after 9/11. My “official” reason for this trip was to break in my new Lowa hiking boots before taking them on my planned epic Cambodia/Australia/Milford Track trip (which started in late September, only a week after Maine), and also as a bonus to get away from some of the awful feelings back home. But even in Acadia, people were talking about nothing but 9/11, and there were little American flags everywhere, especially on the rock cairns on the mountain summits. As someone who lives (almost) within sight of the World Trade Center (admittedly they’re pretty small and far away from here), it always seemed more like a local story, but as I would soon find out, even circling the globe and being halfway around the world wasn’t far enough away to forget about it.
