Directionally-Challenged on the Carriage Roads

Trail Marker, Acadia National Park Carriage Roads

5 June 2021

The forecast threatened afternoon rain, and the winds were up, so I headed to Acadia's carriage roads. There are 47 miles of wide, well-groomed, crushed gravel paths. And the path that nearly all the trails link to, the one that goes around the long, north-south Eagle Lake, is closed. 

To get around this, I created a double-loop course. The northern half would cover the Witch Hole Pond and Paradise Hill roads, and the southern one would be on parts of the Aunt Betty Pond and Around Mountain trails. 

This involved some doubling back, which my GPS couldn't handle. It was telling me that the turn I needed to take was both correct and wrong. Which was correct, but I chose the opposite direction from the one I'd planned. At this point, my GPS gave up entirely and lost the course. Fortunately, I had a paper map with me. I ended up missing a stretch of road I'd wanted to be on, but it's a stretch I've done several times before.

I passed a beaver dam near the start of the ride.

Then I started climbing. Paradise Hill overlooks Hulls Cove, which I could see between the trees.

Sort of.

Witch Hole Pond has obvious beaver activity. There's a stand of dead trees on the far side.

After stopping a few more times, not to take pictures, but to restart my GPS and make sure I was going the right way, I got to where the Eagle Lake trail work was going on. The second part of my route involved a hundred yards of Eagle Lake trail to get to the Aunt Betty road. Fortunately, that was open, but, as a group of cyclists told me as they came down from it, I would have to walk my bike to the entrance. So much for a continuous video for Rouvy.

I started climbing. I'd been on this stretch before, so I didn't stop for pictures at Aunt Betty's Pond (sometimes it's Betty, sometimes Betty's, depending on the map and the markers).

The biggest climb was on the Around Mountain road. My GPS was kind enough to tell me that it would be a long one. What it didn't do was update where I was. Not one to stop on hills, my plan was to power through it. But I could feel my legs starting to go, still tired from yesterday's ride. So when I saw a good view, I decided to stop to catch my breath.

I looked down at my GPS just as it was updating. I wasn't halfway up. I was 75 feet from the top.

So I pedaled a few more yards, around a turn, to a real overlook, and took some more pictures.

I took the hairpin turn to the top, where the view was the same, only higher. I didn't stop. 

There were some more spots on the way down that were worth stopping for, so I did.

But mostly I was grabbing the brakes through gravel that was clearly less worn through than the more popular places in the park. I decided that, while the 25 mm tires on Miss Piggy were mostly OK, what I would need to bring with me next time would be Fozzie, my new gravel bike with 40 mm tires. 

As I descended, the temperature dropped by a good ten degrees.  By the time I got back to the Aunt Betty trail, the wind had kicked up considerably and the sky had clouded over.

This time I stopped at the pond.

At the top of the final ascent, I stopped, mostly because fog was rolling in and I wanted a picture of it.

I got back to the Eagle Lake trail, walked my bike down the hill, and took a short detour to the head of the lake, where the wind was blowing so hard that there were whitecaps.

There were raindrops on my windshield as I began the drive back to Bar Harbor.