Hill Slug Chronicles: Maine Day 5: Sunrise Flat Eagle Day Sunset

Bar Harbor sunset

22 June 2024

At this point, I didn't even need the alarm. Despite the heavy curtains, enough predawn light got into the room to wake me up minutes before my phone would.

It was still dark enough that I could get a couple of freehand moon photos.

That little white smudge in the upper left is the moon.

Finally, some cloud action!

I decided to do a short ride on the carriage roads. I had 18 miles planned, from the Eagle Lake parking lot up to Paradise Hill, then over to Aunt Betty Pond and back up by Eagle Lake.

Witch Hole Pond is on the way to Paradise Hill. I stopped for a beaver dam.

When I started up again, my rear tire went flat.

I know how to fix a flat; let's get that out of the way first. However, Janice's rim-tire combination is a bitch. Given how little time I had, and how long it would take me to replace the tube out here (half an hour; I've timed it), I decided to walk back to the parking lot. I'd only gone about a mile anyway.

Although I was passed by a handful of bikers, nobody offered any help. I'd have turned it down anyway. Instead, I took my time and some pictures of Witch Hole Pond.

Back in the hotel room, Jack watched as I made hash of the tube change. It took me probably more than 10 minutes to get the tire off the rim, and another 20 to put the new tube in, fight with the rim, break a lever, switch to metal levers, and finally get the bead set, only to determine that I'd butchered the new tube in the process. I always put a little air in the tube before I seat it, which works fine for my other bikes. I probably shouldn't do that with this one. It makes everything too tight.

I gave up, got a shower, and we loaded Janice and the wheel into the car. There's an old-school shop, Bar Harbor Bike Shop, on Cottage Street. I'd poked my head in before and once had a long conversation about steel frames with the then-owner. The shop was sold earlier this year to another old soul, so I figured I'd be safe coming in looking like a fool.

A young mechanic fixed the flat, mostly with his bare hands. This is when I figured out that putting even a little air into the tube doesn't work on these rims. He showed me his trick for difficult setups, but even he had to use the Kool Stop lever for the final step. I told him, "I broke one of those." He didn't have any for sale, unfortunately. (I do have one here at home. I'll have to remember to pack it next time.)

While this was happening, the owner was chatting with a middle-aged fellow in biking clothes. They were talking about riding up Cadillac Mountain. It only took a few of their exchanges for me to realize who the biker was. "Are you the one who Everested Cadillac?" That's 31 times up and down the mountain in a day. (Knowng about this is a perk of subscribing to the Mount Desert Islander.)

"Yes," he said.

He'd gone up 5 or 6 times a day one month in 2016, matching some Tour de France miles. He climbs the mountain several times each day. "I go up in the morning and text my wife at the top," he explained. "If I need to be at any of my properties, I can be at any of them in 15 minutes. If nothing is going on, I go down and back up again."

He's one of the regulars who climbs Cadillac in the winter, when Park Loop Road is closed to car traffic. "We had to get Strava to remove those," he said, "because we go the wrong way on the one-way road."

The shop owner described one climb he did where a cold front came in as he was on his way up. "There was this mist settling on the trees," he said. "I turned around at the top, and there was black ice. I walked down."

I asked the other guy how many times he'd been up.

"About eight thousand," he said.

"And here I am all proud that I did my tenth two days ago."

By now I had Janice back in one piece. I grabbed a Sharpie that was sitting on the counter and wrote on the back of my little Cadillac benchmark keychain, "10 5-29-24."

They were looking Janice over. They hadn't seen an electronic Cannondale Synapse in the wild, apparently. I showed them the integrated light and radar with the chunky battery. Jack heard another asistant whisper to someone, "It's an electric bike," to which the other person replied, "Electronic."

Whatever. I'm glad I couldn't fix that flat.

After lunch, I suited up again and drove back to Eagle Lake. This time, I wasn't going to follow the route I'd mapped. I didn't want to be out that long. I had a paper map with me, one I'd found in the middle of one of the carriage roads many years back. I decided to follow one of the named loops on the map, the "Tri Lake Loop," that would take me past Eagle Lake, Bubble Pond, and Jordan Pond. I folded the map so that I could see a few cues at a time. The cues are trail signs with numbers at every intersection. It's not always obvious which direction the number corresponds with, so one has to read the signs as well. I always screw up at some point.

I started by going clockwise around Eagle Lake from the northern end.

This is a typical carriage road:

Bubble Pond:

I was rounding the southeastern edge of the Eagle Lake road when I saw the sign for Day Mountain. That wasn't in the plan, but, well, I was there, so up I went. It's not much of a climb compared to Cadillac. It's only difficult because this section isn't as well maintained as the other roads (depending on which map you're looking at, the ascent is either within or outside of the park). I had flat-tire paranoia too, looking down every few minutes to make sure that there was still air in the tube.

Rockefeller's teeth are also on the carriage roads:

I think that's Route 3 down there:

Janice at the top of Day Mountain:

The road does a loop at the summit.

I retraced my path back to the Eagle Lake carriage road. Soon I was at Jordan Pond.

The Bubbles:

Janice at Jordan Pond:

There's a section of road above Jordan Pond where there's a rockfall on the high side.

It wasn't long before I was back at the parking lot. Someone leaving noticed my Princeton Free Wheelers ride leader jersey as he was driving out. He stopped to chat because he was a Princeton alum.

I'd parked next to a little pond. As I took pictures, the frogs were going "Gunk!"