Day 11 - Saturday in Acadia NP

We set our alarm and woke up at 3:30 am and piled on our coats and headed to Cadillac Mountain to mark another thing off the bucket list.  Cadillac Mountain is, for most of the year, the first place the sun dawns on the United States.  So we went to watch it.  What a beautiful, cold, and windy start of the day!

Brett also took a time lapse sequence of pictures every 10 seconds as the Sun rose and then linked them together to make a movie.


It's been a while since we'd watched a sunrise and it was well worth the trip to the other side of the island to catch it.  The next thing we wanted to do was go on the walk to Bar Island.  There's a sandbar that's exposed 1.5 hours on either side of low tide, allowing you to walk across.  That happened at 8:30 or so, and we went out and strolled around.  The meadow on the island was full of blooming lupines, deer, and butterflies.

After that, we headed down to Jordan Pond Trail and made a detour up to the South Bubble.  The Bubbles are two rounded hills (Megan said they were much more deserving of the name Tetons than the actual Tetons, but hey... [look it up if you don't get the joke]).  The climb we took to the top was again "strenuous" and actually required a minimal knowledge of rock climbing and the use of a couple of iron rungs jammed into rock faces.

There were some families with children who had come up the other side of the mountain at the top.  They leaned over the edge of the mountain and said "how do you get down on this side?"  to which we replied "down the cliff face."  They all turned around and went back the other way except for a grandfather whose grandkids wouldn't let him turn around.  We did see them safely later at the bottom, but we did agree they should have a warning sign to let people know what they're in for.

But either way you come up the mountain, the view from the top is amazing!

At the top of the South Bubble is a boulder that was left by a glacier during the last ice age.  It's popular to try to push it off... much like the sword in the stone, except that if anyone actually did push it off it'd probably do a lot of damage smashing its way down into the valley.

We got back on the Jordan Pond Trail and made it back to our car for a picnic before driving down to Sand Beach to catch the trailhead to The Bowl, a quick walk out to a bowl shaped glacial pond.

From the first hike on Perpendicular and Mansell Mountain we started noticing a theme. Every single hike in Maine, except the Appalachian Trail, was blazed blue. The point of blazes is so you'll know that you're still on the right path. Not in Maine. The point of blazes is to mark that you're supposed to climb up a rock face or not get lost following down the middle of an active streamed (both things that, in our opinion aren't usually trails, so they DO require marking). We carried our trail map with us, but sometimes it was just nice to keep walking. The blue blazes failed us when we wandered off the short hike and onto a long mountain summiting hike, just following the string of blue blazes. 

But the views were beautiful and it turned out to be a nice detour.

After all our hikes, we turned back to camp to begin packing up to head into the wilds of the North Woods the next morning.

As usual a slideshow is below or you can see the full album here.