Active Acadia

As an outdoor writer, I've been to Maine's Acadia National Park numerous times. But until a week or so ago, I'd never spent any time in the real Acadia.

I didn't have to get far from the crowded "Park Loop Road" to discover a secluded paradise surrounded by cold ocean.

Walk the hiking trails and beaches, bike the carriage roads, paddle the bays, and perhaps even climb the rock cliffs of this craggy island and you'll enter a world most visitors to this popular park never see. 

Even in the height of tourist season, not all of the area is quite as busy as the loop road and Bar Harbor, where a ferry makes daily runs to and from Nova Scotia. Marilyn, my constant travel companion, and I discovered the village of Southwest Harbor, which rightly bills itself "the quiet side of Acadia." We enjoyed a very nice room in the Harbour Cottage Inn Bed and Breakfast.

Several excellent restaurants were within easy walking or biking distance, and we ate very well. Try Sips or Eat-a-Pita for a creative lunch, Red Sky and Café 2 for an upscale dinner, and The Seafood Ketch (a distance away in Bass Harbor) for traditional seafood-on-the-dock.

You'll need lots of outdoor activity and exercise to justify all that eating.

Every morning, we took a sunrise tandem bike ride on the road that loops past the Seawall and Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse. We'd be out before the tourists awoke and get back in time to shower before a lavish breakfast. Then we'd get serious about burning off some calories.

Marilyn's favorite activity was the biking on Acadia National Park's famous network of carriage roads. There are 45 miles of immaculately maintained gravel roadways designed originally by John D. Rockefeller for horse-drawn carriage.

If there's any better place on earth to ride a tandem mountain bike, I don't know what it is. Folks on solo bikes seemed to be having fun, too. If you don't have your own bike or don't want to transport it, Acadia Bike Rentals has good equipment. Park your car at your lodgings, and take advantage of the free, propane-powered public buses that link hotels, inns, campgrounds and destinations in the park and neighboring villages. The Island Explorer Buses all carry bikes as well as people to the trails.

Each day we'd just park where the carriage roads meet the highways, get on our bike and start pedaling. One day we looped around Eagle Lake and nearby roads. Another day we did the "Around The Mountain Loop" from Jordan Pond, starting out our day with a mostly gentle but seemingly endless climb. Spectacular views were our reward.

The carriage roads twist, turn and intersect in intricate patterns. It's easy to lose track of where you are. If we got "lost," we'd just pedal on to the next junction. Excellent signage and the map given out at the park visitor's center would set us off again in the "right" direction.

Actually, there was no "right" direction at all. Just pointing our bike toward the unknown and pedaling these roads from another era was as right as right could be.

Beyond the Bike

While Marilyn and I share a particular passion for tandem biking, Acadia also touched some of my other hot buttons.

One afternoon, I joined National Park Sea Kayak Tours for a three-hour paddle on Western Bay. We launched near the aptly named Pretty Marsh, paddled along the shores of Bartlett, Hardwood and Moose Islands and ended our tour roughly five miles away at Seal Cove. We saw seals and seabirds galore on the way. Most of the people on the tour had never been in a kayak before, but the big, stable tandem kayaks handled the wind and waves with ease. 

Another morning, I trusted my life to the capable hands of instructor Silas Rossi of Acadia Mountain Guides Climbing School, an outfit that's certified by the American Mountain Guides Association.

Silas let me choose between the higher rock faces that offer panoramic views of Acadia, and the sea cliffs which drop directly into foaming water. I chose the sea cliffs, sharing the air with a variety of gulls and Atlantic black guillemots (which look like winged footballs when they fly).

Stopping to catch my breath after climbing a pitch, I could look out and watch lobster boats working the bail. Sailboats breezing serenely past were perfect for calming my pounding heart.

Climbing routes range from easy, beginner-friendly rock to very challenging. Often you can change degrees of difficulty on your climb just by moving a foot or two away from your original line. And all the time, you're safely suspended from a top rope, so you can never fall more than a couple of inches. It's perfectly safe; it just doesn't feel like it.

Silas displayed the exact balance of patience and precision I look for in a climbing guide, and we had a wonderful morning.

And More Acadia

With all the pedaling, paddling and climbing, we never tried the 125 miles of hiking trails that lace the mountains here. Lots of folks hike to the top of 1,530-foot Cadillac Mountain and end up in the same parking lot they can drive to. Others explore some of the lower, less-known peaks like Sargent Mountain (1,373 feet) and Bernard Mountain. (1,071).

The park website lists all trails by degree of difficulty. An excellent book "A Walk In The Park: Acadia's Hiking Guide" by Thomas St. Germain is available at the Visitor's Center.

We may sample this part of Acadia in the fall.