Acadia National Park in Clouds

Friday, June 28 to Sunday, June 30 – Days 10 –12

It rained all three days that we spent in the Acadia National Park area.  We made several attempts to drive to the top of Cadillac Mountain, which is the highest point on the east coast, north of Rio de Janeiro.  We actually were able to make it the 1530 vertical feet but we couldn’t see any of the spectacular views that we’d been promised.  The wind blew rain in from the ocean and if it did clear we were never there.  The wind was so strong it almost blew us over.  We purchased a book about the park from the Visitors Center, so hopefully there will be images in there.

As mentioned in a previous post, Acadia National Park was at one time a summer retreat for many of the wealthy people from New York and Boston and they did leave a legacy of carriage roads throughout the park.  Stone bridges were added by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which had been set up by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as a work project for unemployed youths during the depression.

The park is located on Desert Island so named because when it was first seen by European sailors it’s top was bare rock.  The shoreline is generally rocky with steep cliffs in areas and there seems to be a single sand beach, named just that, Sand Beach.  It was the setting for the beach scene in the movie “Cider House Rules” with Charlize Theron and Tobey Maguire. 

There is a wild flower garden in a secluded area of the park that was exceptionally well interpreted.  The plants were segregated by habitat – marsh, bog, roadside, meadow, etc. and then each individual plant was identified.  One plant that I used to see as a child in Hamilton was the Jack-in-the-Pulpit.  They also had a “Showy Lady Slipper”, which has not been seen in the park for the last 30 years.  They set-up cages around it to protect it from loving hands.