Trip Report: Acadia National Park, Day 1

(A quick note before we begin.  I just looked back over last week's post.  How can you not think those photos are awesome?  I felt kind of guilty about my indulgent mountain photo post, but in retrospect, I think the photos are beautiful.  Perhaps I should indulge myself more frequently.)

The week before my classes started, Beth and I went on one final summer trip.  We decided that, despite the 6 hour commute it entails, we would go to Acadia National Park.  We'd both been meaning to go there for a while.

Acadia is a national park on the Maine coast, and while it is fairly small, it has many trails that span mountaintops, lakes, and shorelines.  I'm using "mountaintops" in a different way than I was in last week's blog post, of course -- different by about 12,000 feet -- but I'm starting to like the hills of the East Coast.  They have their own charm about them.

As a matter of fact, standing on top of a peak in Acadia, I remember looking over at a neighboring peak and thinking, "Look, a pretty East Coast mountain" instead of "Wow, that is pathetically tiny."  This struck me as novel at the time.  ...But I actually mean this as a compliment.  I'm starting to like the wilderness out here.  Really!

On the first full day in Acadia, Beth and I hiked the "Precipice Trail."  Why is it called the Precipice Trail?  Well, here's a picture of me hiking on the trail...

That is literally the trail.  And yes, that is a cliff next to me.  My left hand is holding onto the rock for a reason.  Fortunately, by the time my parents read this and get worried about the trail, they will have the comfort of knowing that I made it through without ...mishap.

Other areas of the trail had railings:

The proximity of the cliffs wasn't the only strange part of the trail.  The trail was, in general, a bit weird.  For example, spot the trail in this photo:

Yep, those boulders are the trail.  Ok, spot the trail in this photo:

This, too, was part of the trail:

Yeah, that's a very steep trail.  Acadia is known for having a couple of trails that you have to climb on iron rungs.  Here is Beth's foot and the view back down one section of the "trail:"

Some other steep sections of the trail:

Here's a view back down to the parking lot, giving an idea of the steepness of the grade:

And here's a view of the cliff face "trail" (The Beehive) that we descended:

We came to the top of the Precipice Trail.  The summit had these little lakes that seem to exist on the summits of many East Coast peaks.

A bird cheated by flying, and it met us up there.

There were also some interesting markings on the summit.  10 points to the first person to tell me what caused them (or to state, with certainty, that some of them were caused by glaciers dragging rocks along the peak).

We made our way down to a lake.

Here, we captured a new desktop photo for you!  So take down that old one from Sedona, click on this for the full version, and enjoy! :-)

ribbit.

We continued through the woods...

...down the Beehive Trail (really, this is only barely a trail)...

...and along a beach of which we have no photos.  Then we walked along a road that wound through oaks.  We spent about a half hour trying to figure out exactly what type of oak trees they were, using my handy plant-identification guide that I'd bought before the hike.  We narrowed it down to two, but now I forget which two they were.

We finished the hike with a view back to the original Precipice Trail, over a pond and some reeds.  Something about this view reminds me of Black Butte, in Oregon.

That was all the hiking for day 1, though we did go check out the whale museum in the town.  It featured baleen, a huge, whale jaw, and a whale movie narrated by Patrick Stewart.

Next week, I will write about the second day of our Acadia trip, which featured the rocky coastline and a beautiful lake!  There will also be another brand-new desktop photo, if that's the sort of thing that motivates you to come back and read more.

See you next week!