Walking Into the Picture: First Light and Acadia National Park

Sunrise on Frenchman Bay

29 May 2018

I'm sitting on the deck of our hotel room, computer on my lap, mug of coffee next to me, looking out  onto Frenchman Bay. It's warm and sunny; I had to change into shorts after breakfast. There's a line of puffy cumulus over the Porcupine Islands. The Margaret Todd is out there, all four sails up, making her rounds through the harbor. Two sailboats are moored a few hundred yards from the edge of the Shore Path. The tide is still coming in. I've been watching it cover the last few rocks. Once in a while a lobster boat comes through. Sound carries far; I can hear the motor long before the boat comes into view. It's a reminder that, despite the tourism here, this is a working harbor. Between the waves against the rocks and the rumbling motors, it's noisy out here. Jack is inside, feeling droopy and napping. So here I am, doing nothing, which I'm really bad at doing.

I took slightly more than 200 pictures yesterday. I only deleted a few. Most of them I'm going to upload now.

I: Sunrise

I had set an alarm for 4:45 a.m. but the light woke me first. At 4:45 I was on the deck of the hotel room. In the space of 20 minutes I took around 50 pictures. (Oh, hello Margaret. She's within a few hundred yards of the hotel now, coming back to her harbor mooring. Sheesh! She's got 5 sails up and a sixth one down already. Four masts, 6 sails.) Anyway, sunrise:

On the hotel grounds a hoodied Millenial was watching too.

A runner crunched past on the path. How early did he have to get out of bed? Kudos to him. The door in the room to my left slid open and a Gen Xer stood groggily on his deck for half a minute.

 I heard the lobster boat motor long before it came into view. I followed it across the sunrise. How early did they have to get up to be on the water at 5:00 a.m.? Kudos to them.

There's the sun!

It went right behind the clouds.

I climbed back into bed. I took me a while to fall asleep again, and by the time I woke up for real it was well after 8:00 a.m.

II: Schooner Head

Our hotel serves a continental breakfast as part of our room charges. I had my doubts, expecting a few stale muffins and a pot of even staler coffee. The spread was a pleasant surprise: hard-boiled eggs, nonfat yogurt, melon, muffins, cereal, pastries. Considering the price of our room and the selection, I exercised a good amount of restraint.

Leaving the planning up to me, Jack was okay with late lunch reservations at the Jordan Pond house and a drive through Acadia.

I took Schooner Head Road and stopped at the little pond. I now have three years of pictures from this vantage point. It's the Mount Airy Cows of Mount Desert Island.

Once on the Schooner Head path I tried not to take the same pictures I took last year or the year before.

But there was Egg Rock lighthouse, and now I had a 40x zoom lens. (Oh, ick. There's a big tourist ferry lumbering past right now. To my half-deaf ears it sounds like a helicopter.) 

Spring is later up here. The cherry blossoms are just starting.

We went farther along the path than we did last time, climbing out on the rocks that we didn't know we could get to last year. Jack was wearing a brand new pair of hiking boots and, given the pain a new pair of boots can induce when the're a bit too large, he did rather well.

I got an even better view of the lighthouse.

There were other people on the trail with us. I waited for them to move along before I took any pictures.

I sat on a rock and watched the waves smash against the shore.

A lobster boat motored into view. I zoomed in on it.

All hail the 40x zoom! I couldn't see a thing with my naked eyes.

More lighthouse. (I tried zooming in on the sign on the little building when I uploaded this photo, but it's too pixelated to read.)

More breaking waves:

And a foot selfie:

III: Ocean Path

We drove up to Thunder Hole and parked there. We got onto the Ocean Path and headed north towards Sand Beach. The plan was to walk for an hour or so then drive to Jordan Pond. From the path there were frequent granite stairways down to the rocky shore. I followed a few, Jack following me.

If you're gonna be a tree with galls, you might as well be a tree with galls where there's some scenery.

There were hundreds of cones on the underside of the branches on this tree:

One little path led past a shady tree. I sat down for a while to watch the water.

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IV: Sand Beach

We arrived at Sand Beach sooner than I thought we would, so we went down the long stairway to the shore. Jack found his long-buried aversion to sand and parked himself at the edge of the stairs. I crunched around on dried seaweed.

Two years ago I photographed this tree from a different angle. The tide was in then; I had been hopping along the rocks. Today there was a lot more beach exposed.

A group of people gathered around a plein air painter.

On our way back up the stairs we met a couple from South Dakota who had driven their camper across the country. Each carried a bag holding an elderly Yorkshire terrier.

We chatted as we walked up the stairs and back onto the Ocean Path towards Thunder Hole. We weren't far from the Hole when we crossed paths with a man holding binoculars. "There's a whale out there!" he said, and showed us where to look as he passed his binoculars around. I tried to get pictures but by the time I could process that there was a bit of whale in the foam and hit the camera shutter, the whale would be gone again. I zoomed to 40x and took a bunch of pictures. In a few there might have been a bit of whale. I couldn't tell.


V: Thunder Hole

We had a little time to walk on the rocks at Thunder Hole. I went back to look at my favorite tree.

We were closer to the whale now, so I zoomed in again. This time I caught some whale on camera.

You'll have to trust me on this; it's a whale.

VI: Jordan Pond

We arrived at Jordan Pond House just in time for our reservation. Our seat was at a window overlooking a construction site above the pond. After lunch I was determined to find the Bar Harbor camera trained on the Bubbles. There was an observation deck, so we went up there and I did my best to imitate the Bar Harbor Cam point of view.

Then I turned around to look for the camera.

Found it, I think.

(This is out of chronological order; I took the screen grab and the next two photos after we'd walked around the pond.)

The Jordan Pond trail is 3 miles. We went maybe half a mile in and then turned back.

There was something like an azalea growing wild on the trail.

We crossed a little dam.

VII: Cadillac Summit

As we left Jordan Pond I noticed some clouds rolling in. The light now had that slightly polarized look to it. Thinking it would make for some interesting pictures, I turned the car onto the Cadillac Mountain road. If nothing else it would help me remember the inclines and turns ahead of taking Miss Piggy here in a couple of days. I paid special attention to the switchbacks, making note of where I would this time not, under any circumstances, look over the edge.

At the summit we were level with the clouds and at the edge of a fog that was moving in. I like fog. It makes for interesting pictures.

I zoomed in to the town of Bar Harbor, Bar Island, and the land bridge.

The true summit isn't where the parking lot and paved path is. To see the summit marker we walked in on the South Summit trail, which was wide enough for a car and looked more like a gravel road. On our way in we passed a group coming out. They told us where to look for the marker. I'm not sure I would have found it otherwise.

I stood on top of the rock where the marker was embedded. Jack looked on.

The fog was getting thicker.

We watched a rabbit take a dust bath on the trail.

There is good cell reception at the top of Cadillac Mountain. While I was taking pictures Jack was snarking out on Facebook, telling the world that he'd climbed to the summit of Cadillac Mountain (all the way from the car!)

VIII:  Blue Hill Overlook

I pulled into the Blue Hill Overlook parking lot on the way down. Looking at the fog, Jack opted to stay in the car. "This bears a remarkable resemblance to the Isle of Skye," he said. Ha, ha, ha. I got out. I was the only one there.

The fog was blowing around me. I took a quick video.

IX: Et Cetera

It was all downhill from there. Between the fog, the steep curves, and the 35 mph speed limit, I think we ran electric all the way into Bar Harbor. When we parked at the hotel the trip summary said we'd averaged 99.9 mpg for 6.3 miles.

We made reservations for a late dinner at Havana, a restaurant founded by College of the Atlantic graduates and with a wine collection that made Jack whimper. If he could drink their wine every night maybe we could move up here. In the twilight the mountain to the south of town (Dorr, I think) was still shrouded in fog.

One of the ice cream shops was still open when we left the restaurant well after 9:30 p.m. Despite the chill we sat outside with our ice cream. I had some raspberry thing, something with "raspberry" and "disaster" in the name. It was good. We'll have to go back because the flavors were creative and none involved lobster.

We'll also have to poke our heads into Cool as a Moose, among other touristy souvenir shops loaded down with moose paraphernalia.

X: Nothing

It's almost 1:00 p.m. now. The tide is going out again. I've finished my coffee (Dead Man's Brew from Homestead, which I brought from home, along with a grinder and a press, because I have little faith anyone can provide me with the proper fuel up here). I should upload this post and get a move on before the Margaret Todd comes back for her afternoon sail.