Jordan Pond, Acadia National Park
4 July 2022
2 June 2022
I didn't need the alarm this morning either. There's heavy cloud cover over everything except the horizon, and my camera is not having an easy time with this situation. It's bright over there, so I have to adjust the exposure time. That makes everything else dark. Also, I feel sort of fumbly this morning.
I think my camera has decided that we're doing abstract art this morning. Who am I to argue?
We do not want to get this lobster boat in focus, do we?
Switch to auto, everything is washed out.
Switch back, and it's apocalypse.
Fine. Zoom in.
Zoom out.
Zoom in.
Zoom out.
What is going on with these clouds?
Whoah! Duuuuuuude!
For real!
I go back to bed when it's too bright out for good pictures. When I wake up again, it's in time to see one of the season's first cruise ships motoring into the harbor.
Before we left for this trip, I found a website that lists all the ships by arrival date and mooring site. Every one of them here when we are will be anchored out of sight, behind Bar Island, instead of in front of our hotel. Somebody must have complained to the manager.
The hotel grounds are impeccably groomed, but they missed this little vine on the steps leading to the stairway to our second floor room.
Today I'm going to do a series of figure 8s on the carriage roads, starting from the hotel.
It's uphill for two miles to the Duck Brook Road entrance. I'm going to loop north first, up to Paradise Hill, then come back to Duck Brook, head south on the east side of Eagle Lake, climb Day Mountain, and come back up on the west side of the lake. The route is 32 miles, 28 of them on gravel, with 2500 feet of elevation gain in 30 miles. I can handle this.
Until I hit the gravel. Then I remember how much harder it is to move on this stuff. Oh well. Too late now.
I fear that my GPS will glitch out on me with all the crossings. I have yet to do a carriage road ride where I don't miss a turn and have to double back at least once. This time, I've written it all down on paper, the first physical cue sheet I've made in years.
I make it around the Paradise Hill loop without messing up. That's a good start. I stop at Witch Hole Pond for some pictures.
There's clearly been some beaver activity.
Last year, the east side of the Eagle Lake carriage road was closed for repairs. It's open now. I stop for photos at the northern tip of the lake.
From Park Loop Road's Eagle Lake Overlook, which is where I always stop before climbing Cadillac Mountain, I can see a spot on the lake where I think the carriage road is. Now I try to zoom in on the hillside to see if I can find the road.
There it is, and people are parked there, looking back this way.
I follow the road around the south end of the lake. It loops north, up a rude hill, and then I turn south along the west side of Jordan Pond.
There's a spot on the trail that looks as if it has interrupted a landslide. I wonder how often this scree chucks a boulder onto the carriage road. There's no warning sign about falling rocks.
At Jordan Pond, I lean Miss Piggy against a tree and wander over to the water's edge.
Everybody takes this picture.
I come close to a wrong turn as I move south from the pond. My cue sheet saves me, and I cross Park Loop Road towards Day Mountain.
According to ridewithgps, the entirety of the Day Mountain Loop is not inside the park. But other maps have it in. Whatever the case may be, as soon as I start up that loop, the trail grooming drops off. Instead of a consistent layer of finely-crushed gravel, I'm faced with a bumpy situation with bald spots of pure packed dirt. It's rough going around the perimeter. The road up the mountain itself is a little better.
Day Mountain is on the southern end of the eastern lobe of Mount Desert Island. I've been on all the carriage roads, and from what I can remember, this is the only place where I've been able to see Route 3, or any non-park road, from a carriage road.
But it's only for a second. Around the corner, we're back to wildnerness.
Piggy gets a portrait at the top of Day Mountain.
I'm on 25 mm tires. I'm feathering the brakes through the gravel on my way down. Two people on mountain bikes fly past me in full-on descent. Have at it, kids. I'll be up here trying not to die.
I've got about ten miles left, and I didn't eat at the top of the mountain. I'm feeling wiped. In a few miles I have to do that annoying Eagle Lake hill again. I need to stop for a snack. Half a bar and a back stretch later, I'm crunching along again.
Miraculously, I make it all the way back to the Duck Brook Road bridge without a wrong turn. As I dismount for pictures, a guy on an ancient aluminum road bike says, "You must have had a long ride."
"26 miles," I explain, "30 total from town."
I guess I look confused. "I saw you back at Eagle Lake this morning," he says. I'm still confused, but whatever.
Because the bike he's riding is not carbon, and because he's in toe cages (mercy!), I have to ask him about his bike. And, as bikers do, we end up swapping tales of places we've been and bikes we've ridden. He gets around to telling me that he runs the Lulu lobster boat tour, and says I should come along. I'm not really interested in lobsters as food, and the cruel fate of being caught in a trap doesn't thrill me either, but I play along. Then he says that the boat passes Egg Rock Lighthouse and that the seals there "are pupping now," and that changes the equation. "I talk to people. That's what I do," he says. His name is Galen. He's got this bike out for the first time in years. "I used to ride the carriage roads with this all the time," he says. "Then I stopped." I think he's about to remember why.
I take a picture of his bike and the toe cages, and a few of the view off the bridge, before hitting the road, a long descent into town.
Jack's anke is sore. He agrees to a short walk from Sieur de Monts, the other side of the Jesup Path that leads to the Kane Path and the Tarn. It's flat. We go slowly.
We come upon a felled tree with the most phallic fungus ever growing from it.
I mean...
To be internet-safe:
The others along the trunk are still somehow somewhat suggestive.
The Tarn is a pond that sits between Route 3 on its east and Dorr Mountain on its west. We're on the Dorr side, looking east to Champlain Mountain. On the other side of Champlain is the coast.
Dorr, right, and Champlain, left:
The Kane Path looks like it's going to get uneven, so we turn around.
Leading up the side of Dorr is Kurt Diederich's Climb, a hundred-year-old trail made of stone steps. The top intersects with trails that lead to the summit of Dorr Mountain. I wonder if I'm strong enough to climb this. I'm not experienced enough to go by myself even if I have the legs for it. I am Not A Hiker. But something about it intrigues me.
We continue on, back to Sieur de Monts.
Jack goes back to the car while I stay on the Jesup Path, back to the boardwalk over the swamp. Every time I stop for a picture, I'm swarmed by mosquitoes.
I make it all the way to the end in no time. We'd been so close to Sieur de Monts yesterday.
On my way back, a birder is scouting out a good spot. "How are the bugs in there?" he asks me as I pass. I tell him they're all over. He nods. "They always are."
There's one more place I want to go while we have the car. I head back towards town and turn off on Schooner Head Road. I want to spend a few minutes at Schooner Head. I need a moment of ocean-on-the-rocks zen.
The path down to the shore is root-broken asphalt. Jack waits in the car.
I give myself 30 seconds of wave time.
The lighthouse is clear from here.
There's a mansion on the point north of Schooner Head. Could I live there? It's too far from town to walk, I think.
I wonder if this is the same family of three eider ducks who were in front of the hotel the other day. It's a shorter float than it is a walk.
It's cloudy when we get back to the hotel. My camera, still confused by light, apparently, turns the sky yellow when I zoom in to the wind farm on the Schoodic peninsula.
Is there a sunset, though? The Bar Harbor Cam is down, so I can't check remotely. We're heading up to Project Social Kitchen for dinner. Halfway up, I tell Jack that I might be missing the sunset. I walk across the street to the little hill on Village Green, where I can see the western sky a little better. It doesn't look promising, so I turn around. Jack is annoyed with me at this point. I'm in do-all-the-things mode, while he's sore and hungry.
If I had watched the sunset, we might not have made it to dinner before the kitchen closed. The food is pretty good, and we go for dessert at Mount Desert Ice Cream across Village Green.
The path lights at the hotel have spider webs under them.
Back on the balcony, the little not-Ziggy orb weavers are hanging out.
And there are a few maybe-Ziggys with their missing sectors and drag lines.
I'm mostly befuddled about these youngsters. In some light they look so much alike. It's only their webs and daytime habits that make me sure they're different. If I lived here I could watch them all season.
Really, though, I don't want to live on an island like this. If I lived in town, sure, I could walk everywhere. But I'd need a car for anything more than groceries, and it's a half hour to the mainland from here. What are the winters like? And the roads: I'm surrounded by biking territory in New Jersey. Here, Park Loop Road is closed in the winter, and the other roads are narrow, with little or no shoulders, and pavement that rivals New Jersey's roughest stuff. What about my other hobbies? Where could I blow glass witthout having to drive an hour? Bar Harbor is blue, but everywhere around it is MAGA. And white. So white. Too white.
No, I can't live here, no matter how much I love it when I am here. What makes it special is that my time is limited and the view expensive. There's not much here to keep Jack entertained either. "I'll folow you as far north as Boston," he says. Hey, that's still New England.
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