Bar Harbor lobsterperson, up before dawn
26 June 2022
30 May 2022
The alarm goes off at 4:40. I get ready for sunrise as quietly as I can and slip out onto the balcony. I'm a little late today. The sun isn't coming up for another ten minutes or so, but the sky is already blue and the wisps of clouds pasing from pink into orange.
The tip of Sheep Porcupine Island always fascinates me. I want to crunch around on the shore and get a good look at the few trees that are slowly dying at the water's edge. I don't have a boat. I've never seen anyone with a boat jump out and crunch around. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, of course.
This is the farthest we've ever had a room from the harbor side of the hotel.
The sun is going to come up directly across the bay from our room. There's a line of light over the low clouds.
Every day but Sunday, there are lobster boats at dawn. Even without my hearing aids, I can hear their motors as they leave the harbor, minutes before they come into view. This gives me time to aim the camera and wait for them to cross my field of view.
Once there's some sunlight, I set the exposure time on my camera to a high shutter speed. I aim it away from the sunrise and get dark stuff.
Any minute now...
Sometimes I can hear the birds on land starting to chirp through my tinnitus. There are always gulls and cormorants hovering over the water.
Here it comes.
Zoom out.
It's too bright now. Back inside the room, I draw the curtains as tight as I can and climb back into bed.
Jack has already shaved and showered, and is sitting in the puffy armchair, reading, when I wake up again. Now that it's light out, I think another tree has bitten the dust over on Sheep Porcupine.
Burnt Porcupine Island is the only Porcupine that is privately owned. There's nothing built on it, but the owner isn't promising anything. The rest of the Porcupines are ours, part of Acadia National Park.
Burnt Porcupine has a long snout at low tide:
Bald Porcupine is always asleep.
Before we go down to breakfast, I brew a pot of coffee with the electric kettle and French press I always bring on vacation.
Today's forecast is near perfect, with the morning in the mid-60s, sunny, and not much in the way of wind. After breakfast, and some puttering around, I extract Miss Piggy from the car. We head south on Route 3 through town, towards Acadia's Sieur de Monts entrance.
It starts with a descent that loops under Route 3 and then throws the nastiest climb of the day right at the unsuspecting cyclist.
I've got the Fly12 camera rolling. I'm not sure if I'll ever bother to upload the video to Rouvy. The software they used to link to no longer works.
Park Loop Road passes a little pond shortly after the climb. I've never stopped for photos before. This time I will.
Trees in the water mean beavers.
I'm here too early to see the water lilies bloom.
There's another climb that curves to the right and opens up to a view. I've stopped here before and walked to the other side. Today I'll get a picture from this side of the road.
It's Memorial Day. Even though it's a holiday, most people are packing up and driving home today. There's not much traffic at Sand Beach and Thunder hole, and after I pass those, I feel as if I have the park to myself.
The Fabri Memorial, a small detour off Park Loop Road, overlooks Otter Cove from the eastern side.
I stop again on the causeway that crosses Ottter Creek. A little beach rose is at my feet.
There's a bee in it.
From what I've been reading in the Mount Desert Islander, the culvert is in a state of disrepair.
It's on the far side of the causeway and carries water between the creek and the ocean.
I take some pictures of the creek side:
Cadillac Mountain looms.
I zoom in to the cell tower at the summit.
There's not much in the way of an ocean view past Otter Creek. Park Loop Road will curve away from the water soon. I dismount for the last view:
What we haven't done in several trips is find a rock and just watch the waves crash into the granite for a while. I need to do this.
Miss Piggy rests on the other side of the road while I have my too-brief moment of zen.
Now the road winds through the forest, turning north then west. There is some climbing here. Day Mountain is to the left but I can't see it. Then Wildwood Stables comes into view. This means I'm getting close to Jordan Pond.
The road goes back to being two-way, and I brace myself for heavy traffic that never materializes. That means I get to enjoy the two swooping descents between the pond and Eagle Lake overlook without having to hit the brakes.
Eagle Lake overlook is where I stop to stretch.
Around the corner is the entrance to Cadillac Summit Road.
Timed passes are requried for cars climbing the mountain. Bikes are free. There are so few cars waiting in line that I sail on through an open lane. I drop into the granny gear because that's how I roll up this thing. It starts steep and levels out to an average of 6% over 3-ish miles.
This is my eighth time biking up Cadillac Mountain. Over the winter, I climbed the mountain on Rouvy three or four times. I should know every curve by now. I don't quite, but I should.
Once the initial steepness, which is in the woods, ends, the road curves right, out in the open. There's no more tree cover after this point. There are hairpin turns, which are steeper than the stretches in between. There are turnoffs for sightseeing. There are rows of granite blocks, "Rockefeller's teeth," between the edge of the road and the great beyond. On warm days, I can smell the balsam firs by the side of the road. Today isn't warm enough.
I don't pay attention to my speed when I climb Cadillac Mountain. I'm too focused on not feeling vertigo, and on keeping a steady pace. When I go around the outside edge of a hairpin turn, I look to the center of the road, not the edge.
Somewhere in the second mile, there are two hairpins and then the road pitches steeper. This is where I start to lose faith that I'll finish the climb, so I have to concentrate on getting from here to the next hairpin.
That's the final mile, where the mountain is on my left, the road is nearly straight, and if I look to my right I will get dizzy for sure. Maybe the road is banked a little, but the sight of the incline, the sky, and the teeth disorient me every time. So I've learned to keep my eyes on the double yellow line in the center of the road. Being a safe cyclist and also hearing impaired, I often check my mirror for oncoming cars. Without fail, I do this once on this stretch an immediately regret it.
So I put some James Brown on the mental stereo, and that gets me to the final curve, where the road flattens out and turns away from the edge. A half a mile or so and I'll be at the summit.
Somebody shouts, "Woo hoo!" at me as I pedal through the parking lot to the edge of the paved summit path.
I stay with Miss Piggy and snap a few pictures.
It's high tide. Bar Island's sand bar is underwater.
The top of the mountain is accessible to anyone, not just Real Hikers. I've seen people with walkers and canes up here. This is what I like so much about Acadia National Park: it's accessible. Not all of it, of course. I ain't climing that hand-over-hand metal rung Precipice Trail that leads to a ledge narrower than my reach. I've seen the photos. But here, the highest Atlantic Ocean summit on the east coast, anyone can get to.
That's Sheep Porcupine Island, with the town of Bar Harbor in front of it.
To the left is the tip of Burnt Porcupine Island, and little Rum Key. Bald Porcupine is in the center.
On my way down the mountain, I turn into the Blue Hill Overlook, which has now been relabeled as a second Cadillac Mountain Summit parking lot.
Piggy waits.
I turn out of the lot and stop again before the road curves downward.
For me, the descent is worse than the climb. I'm fine as long as I'm on the mountain side of the road. I still get a wave of heebie-jeebies when the hairpins put me on the outside curve at the bottom of the steepest stretch. I put myself in the middle of the road and feather the brakes. When I see the waterfall on the left, I know that's the end of the scary part. I shift into the big ring and fly down the rest of the mountain, past the entrance, and to the right, through the woods, continuing downhill.
The descent stops at the Great Meadow. I've taken pictures of the stream here, with the mountains in the background. This time I roll past that and stop next to a field of lupines. They're on both sides of the road.
Park Loop Road rolls back on towards Sand Beach, but I take the Sieur de Monts exit and turn south on Route 3. There's more activity in town now. I go down to the harbor and pedal through the parking lot, then turn back to the hotel. I end all my Park Loop Road rides this way.
After I clean up, we take the back way into town, through the Grant Park parking lot and up a narrow lane with a high-end hotel, in a gigantic "cottage" on one side and gigantic private houses on the other. Jack notices some good fungus action on an old tree stump.
Farther up are two little houses on either side, one that looks like someone's disorderly studio, and the other a collection of random stuff that might be for sale or might be just decoration.
Every Cadillac climb is followed by a late lunch at Bar Harbor Beerworks, where we sit outside, this time at ground level, and share a gigantic soft pretzel with whatever else we're ordering. Across the street is Cool As A Moose, a tourist trap full of branded moose paraphernalia. I have to go into every time, even though I rarely end up buying anything there. Jack goes into Sherman's, the only bookstore on the island that's open, while I poke my head into a few other shops to gather up chocolate covered blueberries and gummy lobsters to bring home to the people doing my work for me while we're away. If I see any moose socks or moose keychains that I don't already have, I'll get them too.
There are too many clouds around for a good sunset. We hang around the hotel room, Jack listening to music inside, me uploading photos and today's ride video, then sitting on the balcony zoning out into the bay.
When it's time for dinner at Havana, Jack's absolute favorite restaurant in Bar Harbor, he suggests we take the Shore Path instead of Main Street.
The Shore Path is crushed stone. It starts in the harbor, passes by our hotel (we can hear the crunch from our balcony), winds past Grant Park, and then runs alongside a few massive private homes. I have my camera, so...
Bald Porcupine sleeps.
Sheep, Burnt.
At low tide, people can climb down and play on the rocks. They make cairns.
The breakwater between Bald Porcupine and Mount Desert protects the harbor from storm surges. It's in need of repair too, apparently.
Bald and the breakwater:
The path ends here, abruptly, with a chain-link fence that keeps rabble like us out of the landed gentry's land.
I can zoom in through the fence though.
The evening light is turning everything yellow now. I turn around to take pictures of the other Porcupines.
We get out in time for cones down at Ben and Bill's Chocolate Emporium, proudly serving lobster ice cream since the 1980s. We steer clear and stay boring. They make candy there too. I get another box of chocolate-covered blueberries. One can never have too many.
This trip is moonless, meaning that all my nighttime balcony attention is on the spiders, the few that there are.
I have another go at one of the impossible webs from last night. This time I manage a good picture. It looks like a Ziggy!*
(*Zygiella x-notata, the silver-sided missing sector orb weaver. This one's a juvenile. I've never seen one anywhere else but on the balconies of the Bar Harbor Inn. I misposted this as having been from the night before. Here it is, corrected, because one must keep one's spiders properly organized.)
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